New agency - UTD International

[BDub]

Many of you know Jeanna and I just completed a crossover to Unified Team Diving (UTD) International in San Diego.

UTD is the brainchild of Andrew Georgitsis, former Training Director for Global Underwater Explorers (GUE).

The crossover was hands down the most intense and toughest training I’ve ever done. Andrew told me ahead of time that it'd be the hardest thing I've ever done in my diving career and it was. It quickly pushed all of us to our limits and beyond.

There were 9 instructors, and the crossover was by personal invite only, from Andrew. There were originally 10, but 1 was unable to make it. This ITC was a little different in that the 9 instructors in the crossover are the core group of UTD Instructors going forward. There is an ITC in the Red Sea in March and another in the Philippines in June. I don’t know the number yet, but there will be a cap on the number of instructors. Andrew is definitely looking for quality and not quantity.

However, this crossover was not all about us learning to become UTD Instructors. Since this is the core instructor group for UTD, we spent a lot of time discussing and developing and refining the standards and procedures, curriculum, operations manual, and playbook. Many discussions were had, and many changes were made. What I was very impressed with was the people who participated. They were all very experienced and well respected instructors, and all egos were checked at the door. Everyone worked together perfectly to achieve our goal, and some very good friendships were formed. I was also very impressed with Andrew. He really opened the floor to us and listened to our opinions and made many changes based on our feeback/suggestions.

Our days were typically 12 hours long each of the 9 days, and consisted of classroom discussions, pool, and ocean dives. The result was an extremely solid curriculum and a top notch set of instructors to teach it.

One of the main goals of UTD is to be inclusive. In other words, we want to make the training accessible to anyone who wants to take it. To do this, we’ve created a curriculum that allows a student to cross over at their equivalent level, rather than take a step down/back, in order to crossover.

I think the end result is a very solid recreational and technical curriculum with high quality instructors who want to produce safe, thinking divers who enjoy diving. I am really excited to be a part of this, especially from the ground floor and I think this will provide people interested in the UTD philosophy with some very high quality training.

The crossover was hosted by SDUA, who are a top notch dive shop in San Diego. They opened their facility up to us entirely and provided gas fills and anything else we needed. If you're ever diving in San Diego, I highly recommend them, http://www.sduadivers.com/.

For more details, check out http://unifiedteamdiving.com/

Brian

[Pez7378]

I'll read this later. Are you back? Let's go diving!

[spatman]

once again, congratulations, brian and jeanna! that is an awesome achievement. i wish you guys and UTD all the best.

[CaseyB449]

:smt038

[mattwave]

Congrats, Jeanna and you are the best option for UTD training in the PNW.

[Joshua Smith]

Congratulations, Brian and Jeanna! Pretty wild getting into a whole new training agency on the ground floor.....

[dsteding]

This is great news, and really a good thing for the whole dive community.

Congrats to you both!

[airsix]

Congratulations!
When the announcement was made a few days ago the first thing I did was run to the website and scan down the list for your name. I was very excited to see you on the list.

(email sent)

-Ben

[LCF]

It's great news that we are lucky enough to have two of the instructors for the new agency right in our back yard.

Having worked with Andrew, I can just imagine what doing an instructor-level class from him must have been like. You need a vacation to get over your vacation :-)

[BDub]

It's great news that we are lucky enough to have two of the instructors for the new agency right in our back yard.

Having worked with Andrew, I can just imagine what doing an instructor-level class from him must have been like. You need a vacation to get over your vacation :-)

I need a couple of years to recover from 9 days with Andrew

[Burntchef]

congrats, so what classes are you going to be teaching?

[Penopolypants]

Congratulations to you both! I can only imagine how grueling it must have been, but what an exciting thing to be a part of!

I'm looking forward to my next class, whatever it may be.

-P

[BDub]

Thanks everyone. We're really excited about this.

Howard, I'm putting the list together right now, with equivalencies, to eliminate confusion. I'll post them shortly

[Jim T.]

Congratulations Brian and Jeanna! Glad to see the UTD concept and practice continuing to grow
in our area, with such great ambassadors/instructors! Thanks for the report. It's interesting to see how these things develop and it's great that there's so much mutual cooperation with instructor/student feedback and application. Guess this "return to the ice age" will give you guys a bit of a rest!?
Happy Holidays!