Karen Lile and Rick Tittle interview Chris Childers about Rocking the Boat, a program in San Francisco where 8th and 9th graders build a 14 row boat from scratch. Rocking the Boat participants develop pride, purpose, and possibility by learning the unique and lifelong skills behind building and rowing wooden boats, sailing, and restoring the Bronx River and San Francisco Bay. We create community, teach through transformative experiences, and make nature available to everyone, inspiring young people to determine their own future against a backdrop of systemic inequity.
Rocking the Boat is committed to helping its participants:
Develop soft skills such as leadership, communication, teamwork, problem solving, and critical thinking
Stay in high school until they graduate or receive an equivalency diploma
Enroll in college or trade school and be prepared academically and emotionally to succeed there
Develop technical skills such as sailing, boat handling, navigating, chart reading, carpentry, sample collection and testing, scientific observation, and recording data, all of which reinforce STEM concepts and put them into a practical context
October 20, 2026
Chris Childers is now Director of the Treasure Island Sailing Center, in San Francisco Bay.
TISC creates opportunities for people to learn and grow through sailing by providing facilities, sailing instruction, and access to the water for people of all socio-economic backgrounds, abilities, and skill levels, from novices to Bay Area Olympians.
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March 26, 2024
Aug 10, 2021
Chris Childers talks about the Golden Gate Yacht Club Siebel Sailors program for middle school students in San Francisco.
Aug 3, 2021
Chris Childers talks with Karen Lile about the US Sailing Adaptive Sailing Instructors Course at South Beach Yacht Club.
Oct 1, 2019
For Chris Childers, sailing is a moving meditation, a refuge from an overstimulating world. Its low-impact but athletic, its academically stimulating but can done with cool beverage in hand, and it’s just about the fairest playing field of any competitive endeavor Chris has ever found.
Chris’s dad bought a boat the day after he was born, and he was told he was sailing a week or so after that. He learned on his own at age 8 in a Sunfish on the Barnegat Bay in coastal New Jersey. He’d wave goodbye in the morning and be out all day, meet up with the neighborhood kids on their own little boats, bomb around the bay in our little boat gang, and be back for dinner (hopefully). He says “It was such an amazing way to be a kid, back when kids were allowed to do such things”.
Chris started teaching sailing when he was 16 at a local sailing summer camp and the rest is history. “I’ve taught in coastal New Jersey, Lake Champlain in Vermont, Penobscot Bay in Downeast Maine, the southwest coast of Florida and now here in San Francisco. “
Chris has sailed the Panama Canal, the Newport-Bermuda Race, got 2nd in the Disabled National Championships in 2014, 4th in the Blind Sailing World Championships (as a sighted guide), and Herb Meyer Cup (BAADS Club Champs) wins in 2017 and 2019, and many, many more DFLs!
He has also taught sailing all over the San Francisco Bay and is beyond excited to be stepping up to the plate here as the Siebel Sailors Program Coach at US Sailing on Treasure island.
Siebel Sailors Program will Support Innovation and Provide Resources to Community Sailing in Five Major Markets Around the USA
BRISTOL, R.I. (April 22, 2019) – US Sailing is set to launch the Siebel Sailors Program, a landmark community sailing program made possible by a ground-breaking donation from the Thomas and Stacey Siebel Foundation, led by successful tech industry businessman, sailor, and philanthropist, Tom Siebel. The Program’s purpose is to increase opportunity and diversity in the sport of sailing by providing resources and support to youth sailors at public access sailing centers across the country.
The Siebel Sailors Program will support an important US Sailing objective of providing increased access to sailing for youth, regardless of socio-economic background. US Sailing, through the Siebel Sailors Program, will provide fleets of sail boats, equipment, and expert coaching at community sailing centers initially in five regions across the country. The Program will significantly enhance community sailing center programming, advanced skill development, and competitive opportunities for young sailors.
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