Sailing club
The Southport School Sailing Club
About
The Southport School Sailing Club at a glance
Sailing at The Southport School starts where the school gates meet the water. The Anglican boys' college occupies a riverside campus on the Nerang River at Southport, its senior school on Winchester Street and its preparatory school on Lupus Street, and the co-curricular program runs from early learning through to Year 12. Within that program sits a sailing club unlike most others in this book: entry is not open to the general public, because participation is tied to enrolment. Boys from Year 5 upward may join, and more than a hundred take part each year, making it one of the larger school sailing operations in Queensland. The school competes within the Greater Public Schools Association of Queensland — the GPS — and its sailors carry the TSS colours into that fiercely contested schoolboy arena. By the program page's own reckoning, sailing has held a place in the school's sporting life for forty years, though boys were mucking about in improvised boats on the river as far back as the early 1900s. The stated aims reach beyond results: the school frames the sport around fitness, resilience, persistence and teamwork, qualities it regards as transferable to every other part of school l
Service area: Southport, QLD
- Club type
- Dinghy
- Australian Sailing
- Affiliated · 2025-26
- Primary classes
- Dinghy
- Kids learn to sail
- Available
About The Southport School Sailing Club
Sailing at The Southport School starts where the school gates meet the water. The Anglican boys' college occupies a riverside campus on the Nerang River at Southport, its senior school on Winchester Street and its preparatory school on Lupus Street, and the co-curricular program runs from early learning through to Year 12. Within that program sits a sailing club unlike most others in this book: entry is not open to the general public, because participation is tied to enrolment. Boys from Year 5 upward may join, and more than a hundred take part each year, making it one of the larger school sailing operations in Queensland. The school competes within the Greater Public Schools Association of Queensland — the GPS — and its sailors carry the TSS colours into that fiercely contested schoolboy arena. By the program page's own reckoning, sailing has held a place in the school's sporting life for forty years, though boys were mucking about in improvised boats on the river as far back as the early 1900s. The stated aims reach beyond results: the school frames the sport around fitness, resilience, persistence and teamwork, qualities it regards as transferable to every other part of school life. It is an approach that has produced one of Australia's most decorated Olympic sailors — a point the school is understandably happy to raise — along with a steady stream of schoolboy crews contesting state and national dinghy titles each season. For families outside the school, the honest summary is that this club's doors open only to enrolled TSS boys; what happens behind them, on the river and the nearby Broadwater, is set out in the sections below.
Training and sailing programs
What distinguishes coaching here is who delivers it: many of the coaches are Old Boys of the school, and every coach has completed an Australian Sailing coaching or instructor course, so current students are frequently taught by men who learned the same stretch of river themselves. TSS operates as an approved Discover Sailing Centre under the Australian Sailing scheme, meaning its courses carry national accreditation; the Tackers learn-to-sail stream, pitched at the youngest participants, is noted by the school as especially popular with preparatory school boys. The fleet mirrors the pathway. Beginners start in the Tackers training boats, then progress through Pico Lasers and into Pacers, all of it housed in the waterfront Boat Shed on the Nerang River. The sailing calendar is concentrated into Terms 4 and 1, fitting around the school's other sporting commitments. Competition is layered. At the individual level, students race regularly at state and national championships, with the Optimist and Laser classes the school's strongest suits. At the team level, TSS contests secondary schools teams racing — Pacers sailed without spinnakers, three boats against three — at the national secondary schools teams championship, where the school placed 13th in 2024 and 14th at the 2025 edition held at Goolwa in South Australia. Above both sits the GPS contest. Sailing joined the GPS competition in 2000, and the school has taken the title nine times, including a run of seven consecutive premierships from 2014 to 2021. When the GPS Foundation Cup replaced the original competition, TSS simply kept winning, collecting the 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026 editions according to its program page.
Sailing waters
The club's home water is a working city river. The senior campus looks out over the Nerang River at Southport, and the sailing program operates from the school's own waterfront Boat Shed, with rowing and sailing counted among the facilities spread across a campus known for extensive sporting infrastructure. For a school program this matters practically: boats, rigging space and classrooms sit within the same grounds, so an afternoon's training session begins minutes after the last period ends. The Nerang offers protected, enclosed water well suited to the training-boat end of the fleet — the Tackers boats and Pacers that carry the youngest sailors — and it has served as the program's daily classroom throughout its modern existence. Just beyond the river mouth lies the Gold Coast Broadwater, the wide, sheltered stretch of estuary between the mainland and the northern beach islands, and it holds a longer place in the school's sailing story: in the early twentieth century the school's annual regatta was a popular fixture on the Broadwater, drawing competitors and spectators well before the modern program took shape. General local knowledge supports the choice of venue — the Broadwater's enclosed reaches are widely regarded among Gold Coast boaters as forgiving territory for small dinghies, sheltered from ocean swell yet open enough for a decent beat. Between the river at the doorstep and the Broadwater a short sail away, the program has two distinct training environments without ever trailing a boat, an arrangement few school clubs anywhere in the country can match. The setting also explains the character of the sailing taught here: practical, fleet-based dinghy work rather than offshore keelboat cruising.
Club history
Long before sailing carried any formal status at the school, boys were getting afloat on the Nerang River in improvised, makeshift craft — informal sailing that school histories date to the earliest days of the early 1900s. By the early twentieth century the school regatta had become a well-attended annual event on the Broadwater, one of the fixtures of Gold Coast sailing in that era. The modern program is more recent. The current program page states that sailing has been part of the school's sporting offering for forty years, and the sport sat among a group — basketball, football, gymnastics, tennis, golf, chess and debating among them — introduced or expanded under Director of Sport Bryan Hain, who has held that role since 1998. The competitive record since then is substantial. GPS schools began contesting sailing in 2000; the school has won that competition nine times, and between 2014 and 2021 it strung together seven premierships in a row. The successor trophy, the GPS Foundation Cup, has gone to TSS in 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026, per the school's own account. The program's most famous product is Mathew Belcher, whose record the school lists with understandable pride: three Olympic Games, gold at London 2012 and again in Tokyo, silver in Rio, eight world championships in the 470 class, and the 2013 World Sailor of the Year title. Belcher retired from Olympic competition at the end of 2022 and, by the school's account, still drops in on training sessions. More recent graduates Xavier Doerr and Blake Wilson took on the 2022 Sydney to Hobart, extending the program's reach well beyond schoolboy fleets.