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U32 Feature Article in Sailing World Spring 2025 Issue

Laura Jeffers | Published on 4/22/2025

Lightning Class Empowers Its Young Members to Recruit
The International Lightning Class U-32 initiative lays the groundwork for its next generation of owners and crews.
As seen in Sailing World Spring 2025 Issue
Author Dave Reed

A one-design class fades away when either the building stops or the diehards and old-timers move on. Without sustained and creative efforts to replenish members, the outcome is always inevitable. That’s not the case for the International Lightning Class, however, which is unique because of its generational continuum and the efforts of its faithful to hatch schemes that freshen the bloodlines and get new faces into the slab-sided dinghy designed in 1938 by the late and great Olin Stephens. The class’s perpetual youth boat-grant program, which puts a competitive loaner into the hands of a young team for a season, is successful, but its impact is granular. To shore up another generation, in 2024, the class has cast a wider net with the creation of an “Under 32” movement.

The new endeavor is aimed at recruiting wayward postcollegiate sailors—and who better to do so than the class’s young adult members with all the right connections? Build it, invite them, and they will come, they said, and thus the U32 Lightning Invitational was born.... Read the full article click on the link below.

https://www.sailingworld.com/racing/lightning-class-empowers-its-young-members-to-recruit/

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