Ken Read, current President of North Sails, multiple-time World Champion, and BU Alum, has a long history of excellence. In college, Ken Read joined the team from a small sailing community in Rhode Island and quickly captured a starting role on the BU Sailing Team. Through college, Read's drive for winning propelled him to the sport's top level. Exiting college, Read entered the sail-making business and quickly joined high-performance sailing programs for America's Cup and Volvo Ocean Races. Today, Read still sails on many of the top sailing programs in the world while also leading North Sails.
Sophomore skipper Noah Robitshek catches up with Read to talk about his introduction to sailing, his winning process, and his leadership in the sailing industry. Read's success story shows the result of his drive to win and his voracious work ethic.
The following commentary is a highlight of the interview and has been adapted for the ease of readability. Please enjoy!
Noah: What was your introduction to sailing?
Ken: The bottom line for me is if it weren't for BU Sailing, I don't know what I'd be doing with my life quite frankly. It was a complete game changer for me so to take a step back I grew up in a sailing household on Narragansett Bay. My dad was the sailor and my brother Brad, who also obviously went to BU, he and I played hockey in the winter and we'd sail in the summer. We’d sailed out of Barrington Yacht Club on Narragansett Bay and when I first started sailing, I hated it. When I say hate, I mean I detested it. My father convinced me at a very young age just to give it one more shot. I met a couple of friends, and before you know it, I went from hating it to loving it. Like all of us, every good sailor at BU, for some reason, God blessed us with the ability to make the boat go fast.
Noah: What was your first impression when you joined the team?
Ken: So it was kind of meeting all these kids I've been reading about forever. And you had a choice, I remember at the time, freshman year, either to be in awe of these kids that you've been reading about, that have been going to the Youth Worlds and going to do this big youth thing and that big youth thing, or go try to kick their ass. So my crew and I decided let's go try to kick their ass. We won the Freshman New Englands down at Yale in 420’s and even our own team was shocked like who the hell is this guy? It just kept snowballing from there. As you kept winning, there were more opportunities. From just sailing freshman to then doing some varsity events and then being an All American sophomore year, it just kept snowballing and if I ever tell kids anything, just keep winning. You have to win on every level. There's no skipping levels, there's no skipping out on any step. It's like anything in life, you’ve got to work your ass off to get to the next step.
Noah: During your freshman year, what was the culture like as you joined the team? Who did you sail with and how did you develop as a team?
Ken: Yeah, so at the time, I was big for flying juniors, and I was big for 420s especially. I was 6’1” and like 165 or something, but that's big even in today's day and age. I was always in search of tiny crews. I ended up with this kid, Joel, and he was little. He was probably a 125 pound guy. Little, but strong. And if it was a windy regatta, wherever we were, it wasn't even close. We would just dominate. We'd have to work a little harder in the light. Day one of practice, Skip White put our captain, Brad White, who recently passed, which is a shocker in its own right. He crewed for me that first day of practice and he said, just go see what this kid is all about. So Brad White got in and we won. I tell the story as we won two races in a row, and then Skip took him out and put in Joel, this other kid, again. And as he got out, he said, “you know what, you're not half bad. If you really work your ass off, you could be an All American by the time you're a senior, I think you got some talent.” I was like screw this guy. I'm going to beat that timeline. But everything served as motivation. That was motivation in its own right, and it was welcoming. We used to have Tuesday night sailing team meetings. So you would digest what everybody did that following weekend, and you talk about the schedule ahead for the week. We didn't practice on Monday, so Tuesday through Friday, we would practice, and then Tuesday meetings were a big deal. When you did a regatta, you had to stand up in front of the group and tell everybody what happened, who did what, who did where, what you learned, stuff like that. I stood up after that New England Championship win and had to tell my story. And I think still, the crowd was amazed. It's like, who the hell is this kid? I just decided to work harder, I think, than everybody else. That's all.
Noah: During your time at BU what was Skip White like as a coach?
Ken: Skip at the time he was more of a mentor than a coach. We didn't do drills. We went out and raced every day. We would race out to the race course. We'd race back from the race course, and we just race and race and race and race. He'd talk in between races. He'd come over and say, what did you think about this and this and this? We had an assistant coach named Ron Sandstrom and Ron was the nuts and bolts guy. He traveled with the freshman class, and he was the guy kind of from a tactical standpoint. He really focused on the water and what you saw and what you were looking for and what was working and what wasn't working. Skip was maybe a little more of a boat speed guy. So the two of them had really good yin and yang, they worked really well together. And Skip kept putting me in positions to succeed or fail, and he kind of left it up to me.
Noah: When you joined the team, did anything about the team shock you? Was the team intimidating to you at all?
Ken: No, not really, because I guess I had lived in a kind of a team atmosphere. Being a hockey player, I was always in the locker room, and It's a good question because I think a lot of young kids come out of opties or come out of 420’s or whatever they're sailing 29ers or 49ers, and it's like one or two person teams all the time. I think because of hockey, I was used to having a big locker room full of people. I didn't find it intimidating. In fact, pretty quickly you realize that the sailing team is going to become your best friends anyway. That's your little click. That's your home. You know you’ve got a problem, somebody on the sailing team is going to help you out. The sailing team just became family. We did everything together. I mean, literally everything. Especially when you had a really good captain like Brad White. Brad White, not only was he a great guy, but he was kind of a father figure to a lot of the younger folks, and he would just make sure that if you had problems, he'd help you find solutions.
Noah: As Brad White graduated, who filled his place and how did you become a leader on the team?
Ken: Well, I was probably kind of a reluctant leader at the time. I think as I look back, I wasn't a very good captain, not in a way Brad was, because I was just so focused on myself and winning every single weekend. I probably could have done a much better job at being captain. I think the captain has to make the racing side just a part of the experience for a captain. I couldn't separate, I couldn’t do that. The racing side was everything for me. Somebody like Brad, he did a lot of actually crewing, heavy air crewing. He wasn't the front line guy, so he could spend time kind of making sure everybody else was in line and that the team was doing what the team is supposed to do. The team was doing what Skip wanted. He was, in a way, an assistant coach to Skip. Yeah, I guess any sort of my leadership was just through trying to be dominant on the water, and that probably wasn't good enough, frankly. I think I was having too much fun and kind of working harder at sailboat racing than I was at being a good captain.
Noah: How did you balance school and sailing? Did one take over the other?
Ken: Yeah, for sure. You read about this a lot with student athletes. My college roommate, my junior and senior year was Pete Melvin, and he was a great sailor in his own right, and he went on to be a great yacht designer, and he was going to engineering school, so he actually studied hard. You could see where that took away from his sailing because he couldn't go to practice every day. He had to study. My focus was sailing. It was 100% sailing. So I set up my schedule around trying to become a better sailor and Pete didn't have an option. You could see in his middle couple of years, he [Pete] probably had more talent than anybody on the team, but he just couldn't spend the time. There's no question in my mind where my priority was: that was sailing.
Noah: After you were selected as an All American, what was the next step from there?
Ken: It just opened up doors. Even in sailing today, I helped run North Sales and our North Technology Group. But I'll tell you, if somebody comes to us and they're an All American sailor coming out of college, for some reason, that says to me it's a different pedigree. It's a different sort of person and we love having smart people that work for us that also have racing pedigrees because we're a performance company and smart people think of new things. If you got through engineering and were an All American at the same time and you can work for a company like ours, it says something to me.
….So I became an All American and then it's like, okay, this isn't good enough. Then all of a sudden, J 24 was the hot class at the time, a brand new class, four years old. And all of a sudden this company gives me their J 24 for the summer and they give me an expense account. Like holy crap, somebody's going to pay for gas to do this. It was a different world. So here we are, traveling all over the place, teaching, sailing in Barrington every weekend, somewhere on the J 24. I mean, we sailed seven days a week. When you do that, you just get better. You don't even know you're getting better, but you just keep getting better. That J 24 program that taught me how to kind of run a team. It was a five person team, but you got to deal with all the logistics and how to separate responsibilities on the boat, who's in charge of the hull, who's in charge of the sails, who's in charge of organization, all that kind of stuff. Again, I keep using the phrase “snowballing”, but it keeps snowballing. I just want more. That's how I was tuned. You can't stop it at your laurel, there's another level to go.
Noah: When you were directing this J 24 program what lessons did you learn? Any hard lessons?
Ken: Yeah, well, I definitely learned that I was better at running a sailboat program than I was at teaching. Again, I was probably too selfish for teaching. Even today, if I fall back on running a program, I just feel at home, it feels natural. I'm of the adage that I just want to be the dumbest person in the room. I want to surround myself with really smart, really good people. And you have to have confidence to do that. I think a lot of people surround themselves with people they can kind of put their thumb on, but I don't know, I just try to get the best people possible. So running programs, you get the best people possible and you put them in the positions where they can thrive, and before you know it, you're going to have a good program. Teaching sailing was different. It was another organizational level and trying to keep track of a bunch of kids. I did it for a long time, but I probably wasn't great at it now that I think back. But definitely those, J 24 lessons of how to run a winning campaign, how to win a regatta, how to run a campaign like that, and how to finally win a world championship. You can win at all kinds of different levels, but then to win at the highest level, it took something different, and it took a while to learn what that difference was. It’s a process and a fun process.
Noah: When you were on the water, what did you learn about preparation? What changed to make you a World Champion rather than just a J 24 sailor?
Ken: Learning how to win at that level is a different pressure. It's a different mentality. It's a different level of organization. It's a different preparation. It's learning how to manage your regatta and when to take chances and when to not take chances, when to go for it on the starting line, when not to, when to attack the people around you, and when to let the situation breathe. It was a process, and it meant losing a couple of really painful World Championships where we were the dominant boat, but just figured out how to lose. You had to figure out how to win. You had to take those spots that did you in and turn them into positives and rather than negatives. So I started going into those types of events with an absolute strategy of how hard we were going to push each race, where we were going to take chances, how to stay out of the protest room, how to just keep your head clear. Yeah, it was a process, and it doesn't happen overnight. And again, you got to fail. You have to learn from your failures long before you gain successes. It was also the division of responsibilities, not trying to do it all. At the beginning, I tried to do everything, because that's what you do when you're a kid.
Noah: So one last question. We talked about goals at the beginning. What are your goals now? End of the year and five years out?
Ken: Well, probably goals right now are probably a little more commercial than what makes for an exciting story and making sure that North Sales and North Technology Group, we have Southern Spars and Hull Spars and Future Fibers and we have an action sports group with kites and foils and winging and we have an apparel company. My detail in all those companies go from almost every day in North Sails and most days in Southern Spars, Hall Spars, Future Fibers, to very little in the other parts but it's still part of our group. My goals are probably a little more commercial than they used to be; make sure that company's humming that we're selling stuff and we got stuff to build. There's usually decisions that have to be made at upper levels to make sure that everything's moving as one in the right direction. Then when you [I] do do a race from time to time, don't forget that you're [I’m] a sailboat racer and that's what got you [me] here. So doing this transit. I'm doing a race from the Royal Ocean Racing Club. The RORC does what they call a transatlantic race from the Canary Islands down to Grenada. So that starts on the 4th of January.
Noah: That's really exciting. Thank you so much for sitting down and talking. It was great to hear about the whole story.
Ken: Well, good luck and everything is tied to BU in my life in some form or fashion. It's good to talk to you. Thanks for the time. It's fun.
This transcripted interview is just a small part in a larger interview. To hear the full audio interview and learn about Read’s experience in the America’s Cup, Volvo Ocean Races, and Offshore Sailing, feel free to visit the link here.
If you enjoyed this article and are interested in talking with the team? Please reach out to our Alumni Director, Noah at noahro@bu.edu!