VDWS Managing Director Dirk Muschenich: "The pulse has to go up" - this could revolutionise windsurfing training

The VDWS (Association of German Watersport Schools) celebrated its 50th birthday last year. It was founded in 1974 as the Association of German Windsurfing Schools, but today it also organises training in the kite, wing, SUP, dinghy and cat sectors and is now also active internationally. In total, more than 540 watersports centres in over 35 countries are affiliated to the VDWS. The association sets the standards for teacher training, the quality of the affiliated schools and the further development of the basic licence system for the various sports and offers its member schools numerous services. Even though new sports have been added to the programme over the years, windsurfing remains by far the association's largest division. Dirk Muschenich has been Managing Director of the VDWS since 2019. Dirk himself has a successful regatta career behind him and has organised windsurfing and kitesurfing camps with his own company for many years.

• 50 years VDWS: Ernstfried Prade on the beginnings
• 50 years VDWS: La Chiappa on Corsica was the first VDWS surf school
• 50 years of VDWS: "It's up to us to keep the enthusiasm alive" - Interview with Dirk Muschenich

There is always the impression that windsurfing is in crisis and that people are no longer interested in windsurfing and learning to windsurf. Can you confirm this from the perspective of the largest surf school association?

Windsurfing has always been and still is by far the largest division in the VDWS. At its peak, windsurfing had 40,000 to 42,000 basic licences. At the moment we are at 35,000 to 37,000. This has developed slowly over the last ten years and did not happen overnight. However, we assume that there is a high number of unreported cases of surfing students who do a course but do not complete it with a licence. Schools abroad in particular do not focus so much on the basic licence. Based on our experience, we assume that only a third of surf students actually obtain a basic licence at the end of the course.

Even if these are still very high figures from my point of view, why do you think things are slowly going downhill?

We also ask the schools about this and get very different answers. In the last three years, the feedback from the hotspots has been significant, where there are many schools next to each other, a lot of competition, a lot of comparison. There, the length of stay, i.e. the time that customers take to try out a new sport, no matter what it is, has simply become shorter and shorter. Windsurfing is just one of many sports. Ten years ago, you would take ten hours for a beginner's course, but nowadays many people only take between two and four hours. This means that you have to do something within those four hours to make people realise that they are on the right track and that they are not looking for salvation in mountain biking or an alternative sport. With this realisation, we have put the topic back on the agenda and are trying to tackle it from several angles. We also want to encourage teachers to perhaps think in a different direction and actually tackle it. This means that we are currently putting the curricula for beginner training to the test and have recently been in a trial phase.

If you take the number of basic licences and the number of unreported cases together, then over 100,000 people come into contact with windsurfing in a surf school every year. So why do only a fraction of them stick with this fantastic sport?

I think there are several reasons for this. I always tend to put my own house in order before I start pointing the finger at other people. One of the reasons, as far as the VDWS is concerned, is certainly the fact that the quantity, i.e. the overall demand in the beginner sector, was so high for many years and decades that the entrepreneur water sports school operator asked himself, why should I concentrate on other areas that might promote and create customer loyalty? So topics that are actually classic for a service provider tended to fall by the wayside because there were so many interested parties at the door that you could always go back to the start and have a full house again. Retaining customers in the long term would have meant that I needed more qualified teachers and more specialised material. I might also have to think about other concepts. I might also no longer be able to operate in an economically ideal way because I would have to create smaller groups in order to be able to organise it. Accordingly, the easiest way for many is actually to go back to the start. That's certainly the criticism you have to level at yourself. In the areas of industry and media image, the trend has increasingly been towards higher, faster, further. This is a factor that either motivates newcomers in particular or scares them terribly. The gap is widening because fewer and fewer feel really motivated and more and more feel frightened when they see a monster wave or a giant leap.

Do you see any other reasons?

Compared to competing sports such as kitesurfing or stand-up paddling, windsurfing simply requires more stamina. Kitesurfing simply has the advantage that various intermediate steps that take time to achieve in windsurfing - standing in the straps, wearing a harness, being hooked into the harness and then experiencing a certain dynamic - happen right from the start in kitesurfing. And with windsurfing, you simply need your 20 or 30 hours to get to that point and you need stamina, which many people have less of these days. Another reason is that the material we use for boarding, which is good and right to use, is too unattractive to keep people on board. The leap to the next more attractive material is far too big. There is a lack of transfer, which you as a magazine make an extreme effort to achieve with the "Stay tuned!" booklet for the surf schooland with this special issue.

Compared to the material for advanced windsurfers, it feels like nothing has changed on the training boards for 25 years. Is there nothing better or why is that?

As I said, they are well suited as training boards to start with. But they are also slowly dying out because they are no longer being produced and school operators are getting nervous because there are no good new replacements. Anyone who is free to orientate themselves in the market, i.e. whose school is not tied to a particular brand, will find compromises, but they are simply not satisfactory. And when a manufacturer proudly presents two new beginner boards or beginner concepts, I ask provocatively, what's new about the boards you've made? I'm looking at a 30 to 40 year old concept. And nothing has changed, except perhaps the colour or maybe the material. Visually, it's an ancient concept that you have there. Where is the novelty for windsurfing? My counterpart's eyes widened at first. This discussion goes on and on in detail and the key point is that no matter which manufacturer you talk to, the answer is always: "But we have a solution. We have this 170-litre board!" But unfortunately they have no idea what the requirements of a beginner really are. They don't know that beginners stand centred on a board and are delighted that they have found the right spot. He won't move from there for the next ten hours. You can't get that out of the beginner's head. In other words, the music has to play where the customer is. And I don't have to continue to blindly assume that the customer has to do something to perhaps get to the area where the music plays better. And all the concepts on the market at the moment are based on the customer having to adjust their position to the centre of effort further back on the board. But that takes 30 to 40 hours. That means there is a huge gap: From lesson one to ten, he is supervised in the beginner's course with the beginner's board. If he enjoys it, he should then continue somehow. He buys a fancy beginner's board, regardless of the manufacturer, but is then given equipment that he can't actually manage. He simply needs another 20 or 30 hours to get to the playing field further back on the board. Nobody has the patience. The manufacturers don't understand this across the board. You can talk to shapers, you can talk to marketing people, you can talk to people who even have something to do with training - their thinking takes place somewhere at the back of the board, in the last third of the total length of the board. But that's not where our beginner spends the first 30 hours, he can't do that.

What would be your approach to keeping people on board?

You just have to ask yourself: when did you get your first kick, when did your own fever start while windsurfing, when did your children or friends and acquaintances get a fever? When was the point at which you say, now I'm breathing faster, now my heart is racing, adrenalin is pumping through my veins and so on? And in windsurfing, that's traditionally the planing and the planing threshold. We have to somehow convey a feeling that is close to it or ideally the glide itself. And we have to do that as early as possible, then once we've infected people, everyone wants to get back on this trip.

I think we can all agree on this: once you're planing, you're hooked on windsurfing. But what do you think the equipment should look like to convey this feeling right from the beginner's stage?

I don't really care and I'm not a technician or shaper. When I used to surf and test professionally, my manufacturer always said, don't tell me why something happens, tell me what happens. As a technician, sailmaker, board designer, profile expert or whatever, I am responsible for the why. I can explain the why and incorporate it accordingly. You have to tell me what is happening and then I think about what I can do to improve the situation. Today, I can transfer this to where the music plays for the beginner. It doesn't matter what type of board it is, wide, short, long or whatever, in the middle of the overall length of the board, that's where the music plays, that's where you are in the centre of volume of the material and that's where this effect must be achievable.

More and more beginners feel frightened by a monster wave or a huge jump."

Now you have to admit that you can't outwit physics with normal windsurfing equipment. No matter what you try, the planing threshold is a good three wind forces.

The only option is to bring the foil into play. That's also the idea. But you have to move away from the performance-orientated idea of a foil and think in terms of aspects that are beneficial for beginners. Physically, we are talking about thin and thick profiles, lateral forces and whatnot. Everything that is negative for the top athlete or the performance-orientated athlete would be positive for the beginner. A high lateral force, low pressure point stability and so on, these are all aspects that help the beginner, that encourage him, but which the advanced athlete would absolutely not want. We really have to approach the matter from a completely different angle. You say that ten knots or twelve knots is the planing limit for classic material. Yes, it is. But if I put a sail on the board that has a huge belly, that is soft without end, perhaps not battened at all and so on, then surprisingly this threshold is quicker to crack than with a sail that is very stable and perhaps still works at 20 knots. I can't expect the material to work at all in higher wind ranges at higher speeds.

If the beginner were gently lifted out of the water, they would realise that something cool is happening."

Many experienced windsurfers find foiling totally unfamiliar at first and getting on the board doesn't feel "right". How is a beginner supposed to cope with this?

The beginner doesn't even know that yet, it doesn't scare them. If they were gently lifted out of the water, they would realise that something cool was happening and perhaps have a big question mark. It would certainly get the pulse racing and produce adrenaline, but it doesn't have to be the pure gliding, flying experience that we know. That's why the idea was to say - I painted a bit of a black and white picture when addressing the manufacturers - think of a profile that is really fat. Think of a profile that has an aspect ratio that is small, round and so on, because that is more effective for planing. Why shouldn't the wing have a span of one and a half metres? Think of a profile that is possibly covered with a very thick layer of foam so that you can't injure yourself on it. Or the whole foil is soft. I don't need stability, I don't want performance. I just want to convey a gliding sensation. If that kick comes right at the beginning of the course and people's eyes light up, then we unscrew the thing again, put a daggerboard back in and can get back to our original basic topics - where does the wind come from, where can I go, how do I turn the thing at some point? All aspects that would theoretically also be possible on the foil, but are not the focus at all. The focus is only on one aspect. And it has to work with the identical material in which I can mount a foil system and a classic daggerboard in the centreboard box. It's important that the stations don't have to buy anything extra. Because then they immediately play it safe again and prefer to take out their old treasures and spruce them up a bit. Most surf school operators are not very brave or keen to experiment.

We have to seriously ask ourselves how we can make windsurfing sexy again."

Many still work according to the principle of "never change a running system" and continue to do well economically.

We realised a few years ago - of course, if we had taken a closer look we would have noticed it earlier - that the surf school operators are getting older and older. These are the old names that you've always known and somehow you hardly hear anything about new names. Looking at the dates of birth of the individual candidates, we were pretty much in agreement that this cannot and will not go on forever.

But what does a succession plan actually look like? For two years now, for example, we have also been showing different model variants in the management seminar on how succession can be organised, how to take care of it at an early stage and how to manage your business in such a way that it is comprehensible. So that someone looking at it from the outside can get a realistic impression and is not just dependent on gut feeling. This generational change is now gradually taking place and suddenly there are young people in the management seminar who have just taken over Windsurfing Hamburg or Windsurfing Wulfen. They approach the story from a completely different perspective and literally say: "You, now we have to seriously ask ourselves how we can make surfing sexy again, because the other sports are sexy - they all look kind of cool. But I don't feel any spontaneous excitement when I'm windsurfing." This is the new generation and we have a certain chance to get out of the old ways of doing things and perhaps keep something other than the old HiFly Primo alive as a beginner board. I think we can and should seize this opportunity now.

If I may be allowed to add a few words: The windsurfing industry is not doing very well at the moment, but there is a field of work and a target group that no single manufacturer is looking after or working on - not with full commitment. Everyone is doing a bit of something, but it's always just waste products that end up in the segment. If one of them had the courage to say, I'm going to really step on the gas. What kind of playground would he have in front of him? He would have an enormous head start if he dared. But they all stick to their old ways and keep doing exactly the same thing they've been doing for decades. That's my personal impression. There would be opportunities for something new and successful.