posted Apr 4th, 2008 - The NSL News story on 2 April 2008 evaluated the situation of the FAI World Cup champion of 2007, Hayabusa Defence, after competing at the World Challenge 2008 last weekend. The story mentioned that the Belgian top contender had hired Airspeed Odyssey's Craig Girard as the coach for a training camp in Eloy in March.

Many people were asking the same question when those plans were made: why would one top contender for this year's medals at the World Championship of Formation Skydiving help another top contender with valuable information and insights? Hayabusa Defence member, Tail Roy Janssen, explained the thought process on both sides and talked about his team's coaching experiences.

Roy Janssen went back to the very beginning of the training with the current lineup when he reflected over the team's progression:

"We started with the new Center Inside, Luc Verstrepen, in February 2007. We made good progress during the 2007 season and kept training the way we were used to. However, we still felt there was something missing in our way of training after winning the European Championship and World Cup in Russia and becoming the new Military World Champions in India."

This Hayabusa lineup had never worked much with coaches. The previous lineup with Sven Ibens in the Center Inside slot had hired DeLand Majik/Fastrax member Doug Park for quite a while. Eventually, the new lineup also felt eager to go out and get some advice:

"We sat down and started talking about who we wanted as a coach and who could teach us the things we needed. The main thing that we wanted to learn was actually more the mental part and how to use our team dynamics better. That was more important than the technical skills, like blocks and exits for example."

Craig Girard became the top choice, as the Airspeed veteran has been in world-class teams for such a long time. Hayabusa Defence knew that the Airspeed members are famous for their exeriences in forwarding knowledge from one Airspeed generation to the next one, and Craig Girard is also one of the most experienced 4-way competitors at the moment.

However, the Airspeed veteran is also a member of the current US national team that will compete against Hayabusa Defence at the World Meet in France this August. The Belgian team members were fully aware of that interesting situation:

"We were not sure if it would be a good idea to ask him and if he would be willing to teach us. We needed an honest dialog with him to find out if it would be worth the effort."

Roy Janssen was assigned to make contact with Craig Girard and feel out the situation. The conversations with him turned out to be more than promising:

"It didn't take too long before both of us were enthusiastic about the idea. I knew many people who said that it wasn't a smart thing to do, and others were very surprised. However, the feeling was good, and finally we went to Eloy and worked with Craig for four days."

Roy Janssen remembered that his team was overloaded with information. The Hayabusa members realized that they had always trained the actual skydiving itself very hard and never thought much about the other aspects of comprehensive training:

"Not having enough efficiency with our training structure gave us internal problems at some times. We were not all going the same direction anymore and felt that we had come to a dead end. It was very important for us to realize that and find the reasons. Now we feel again that we can grow big time and become more mature as a top team."

The technical training will not change much for Hayabusa Defence since it has been successful, as the results of the past have shown. The focus on the group dynamics and mental training will have priority. Roy Janssen had already ordered a copy of John DeRosalia's "Mental Training for Skydiving and Life" before the NSL News trip to Bodyflight Bedford. The book is available in the NSL Shop and will be a starting point of literature for the world-class team from Belgium. Roy Janssen was grateful for the team's experiences with Craig Giard:

"It takes much more than just skydiving hard at our performance level, and actually at all levels. We practiced that part long and hard enough. Now we will focus on the mental part as well. It will require efforts by all of us, but we are more than happy to take on the new challenge."

Hayabusa Defence also worked with Joey Jones for four days during the same training camp in Eloy this year. This was more a technical training, as Roy Janssen explained:

"We worked mainly on exits and several blocks with Joey Jones. He also added some new tips and tricks to our continuity plan, which will result in faster skydiving. Craig Girard and Joey Jones both have their own and very different style of flying and teaching. We tried to learn from both of them, and we will work again with them in the future. There is still a lot of work ahead."

Finally, Roy Janssen provided feedback after competing at the World Challenge 2008 last weekend. Hayabusa Defence did not feel very well prepared for the windtunnel competition, and Luc Verstrepen's health problems in Bedford did not help much either:

"We had just a little bit more than a week between the end of our training camp in Eloy and the World Challenge and completed only one hour of tunnel training. We already realized at the end of our Eloy camp that this was not enough time to apply any of the things we learned at full speed."

Hayabusa Defence still traveled to Bedford and wanted to collect the additional meet experiences at the high-profile event. Some of the results were still surprising for the Belgian team:

"We were all really looking forward to go out and compete with so many strong teams. We expected that Airspeed, XL and Perris Fury would perform as strongly as they did. But it was a bit of a surprise to us that the Norwegians were so strong. They did a good job, and they deserve it after working so hard for many years, our compliments to their team."

Roy Janssen said that the competition at and the results of the World Challenge 2008 gave his team new energy and motivation to work even harder and push the team limits. The event in Bedford confirmed some of the conclusions of the training camp in Eloy:

"We had some ups and downs during the meet. We did as good as we could in some rounds and lost some points in other rounds, compared to what we are normally capable of. Round 6 was a bummer, brainlocks and an engineering problem costs us many points, and we lost the connection with Perris Fury and the Norwegians. Then we tried hard but couldn't close the gap during the last four rounds. However, this is the game of competition. Sometimes you win - sometimes you lose. We will evaluate our mistakes and become only stronger in the future!"