Interview by Joe Cooper
Coop: Betsy, when we left off you were coaching, in your first adaptive sailing gig, the first and second place sailors in the Para Worlds.
BA: That opportunity was purely by chance, and coaching is coaching. It was my first time coaching at that level, and once you’re in it it’s hard to get out. And the more coaching you do, the more you see nuances of how to make improvements. Looking at the boats’ set ups was fascinating too; thinking of ways to make it easier for sailors to operate their boats.
Coop: What happened after this very successful event?
BA: Disabled sailing morphed into Paralympic Sailing. I kept coaching in this field on top of my sailmaking day job. Eventually it became a full-time job for me through the 2016 Games, then when Para Sailing was removed from the Para Games, I looked at other opportunities. That resulted in my present position as Director of Adult Programs here at US SAILING. Yes, opportunities popped up at the right time but I always kept my hand in and I still coach some events.
Coop: I have seen you down at Clagett…
BA: It’s a fun event, and even after my own conversion into a disabled sailor I still coach at The Clagett. I enjoy helping people improve and get more out of their sailing.
Coop: Right, coaching is “go and help people get better.”
BA: Right. I’ve watched thousands of races, jeez, sailed thousands of races, and wondered, ‘If I never sailed another race in my life, would that be OK?’ I think I can honestly say yes. I still enjoy the game, but I don’t need to prove anything to anybody. I find myself in a pretty nice spot in that sense. Sailboat racing has never been a job for me. I don’t get paid to sail. I sail because I enjoy it, so for me that’s motivation enough.
Even when I was coaching Para Sailing, I was still coaching Sears Cup and Leiter Trophy, youth events, which was really fun too because you can impact these high school sailors. In some respects sailing has become intensified, so coaching-heavy, that I worry sometimes that kids are not learning, being taught, how to self-analyze. When they go to a regatta on their own, are they able to dissect performance and figure out what their mistakes are without getting frustrated? Can they realize, for instance, they are gybing better from one side to the other, and why is that? And how to look at this and see where the error is. I sincerely hope that kids are being taught those skills, because that critical, analytic thinking and evaluating skills are the ones that will stay with them. How to fix stuff, like your vang explodes. How can you fix it so you can keep racing and not retire?
Coop: Tiller extension universals are a big casualty in high school sailing.
BA: Right. So many kids will say, ‘Oh, my tiller extension broke. I cannot sail,’ and I am thinking why is this? At one regatta a girl came to me with broken hiking stick and the ‘I cannot sail’ thing. I showed her how to MacGyver it with some light line and tape. She was like, ‘Oh my gosh!’ We had coaches who trained us in Chaos drills… ‘This is what just happened. How are YOU going to solve it? You have to be able to analyze problems, break them down into component parts, and it worries me sometimes that…(pauses to choose right phrase; supplied by Coop).
Coop: Herded into winning…
BA: Yes, simply told what to do, and not being taught about problem solving, or how to accept a mistake and move on rather than dwell on the mistake. You can’t change what you did, but you can look forward and keep sailing. That’s why I like watching other sports. In golf, the Masters, you see a player make a massive mistake, an awful shot, and give up a pile of points. Then they move onto the next hole, compose themselves, and make it all up. If your brain is stuck on the double bogey you just had, you’ll never move on. Teaching that discipline, fostering that mindset within junior sailors, is super-important.
If someone asked me, ‘Have you ever sailed the perfect race?’ I’d say no, it’s just not possible. OK, some races are pretty good, maybe almost perfect. You would not change a thing, even though you made mistakes. That was a close as you could get to perfect. That is the race you want to do next time. I tell folks, ‘Remember the things you are doing well and commit those to the toolbox. The things you need to practice are the things you’re not good at.’ Most people love to practice things they’re good at because it feels good, but that’s not where the biggest differences are.
Coop: You OK to talk about this whole cancer thing?
BA: Sure. I did not get a choice in the matter (wry chuckle).
Coop: OK, you were getting a sore hip and went to doctors but not much happened, and it kept getting worse.
BA: Doctors sent me to physical therapy, but no improvement. Finally, six and a half months after my first complaint to my GP, I had an MRI, not of my hip but my lower spine. This showed a large mass off to the left and I was told it was likely malignant. I learned I had skin cancer by reading a report of an MRI online.
Coop: So, this was skin cancer…?
BA: I didn’t know that at the time. I knew I had a mass in my hip, and I’d read the MRI report before a doctor called me to discuss the report. Subsequently, two biopsies were done. The first was done in Rhode Island. The results from the first indicated I had squamous-cell carcinoma, a skin cancer. I went to Mass General and Dana Farber and was talking with teams up there and they said, ‘We don’t believe the diagnosis. We want to do our own biopsy.’ Basically, they said there was no indication on the skin surface of an entry into skin cancer. There was no freckle, mole, pimple…nothing on the surface indicating cancer.
Coop: How would you get sun exposure sufficient for skin cancer on your hip?
BA: Well, they did another biopsy and that came back as squamous-cell carcinoma, which they told me that was very unusual. To this day they know the primary site was my hip and the cancer was in bone and muscle, but they didn’t know where or how I got it, but it was pretty full blown. They did not know the extent of it until they went in for the surgery.
I had front-loaded chemo and radiation, with treatments five days a week in August and September. Then they sent me home for a month to rebuild my system. When I went in for surgery in November, I had no idea if I would come out missing a leg. I had no clear picture of what would be the outcome.
There were two surgical teams working on me, front and back. After eight hours on the table, they had removed the ilium, the big wing bone, a lot of bone and muscle structure, glute muscles, abductors, the outer part of my femur. Then plastic surgeons took my quad, detached it from my knee, flipped it over and re-attached it to fill in some of the voids left by the removal of all this stuff. Then I was stitched up from my knee to my ribcage.
Coop: Yikes!
BA: The good news is they did not amputate my leg, and that’s because I had a great oncologist and an amazing surgeon and radiologist. And I was experimental protocol…they have not found another case of what I had in the world. ■
We will continue our conversation with Betsy in the August edition.
