On Wednesday, January 31, 2018 at 1:23:17 PM UTC-8, Papa3 wrote:
snip
My takeaway here is that there's not some silver bullet that would suddenly increase particpation. HOWEVER, it does suggest that rules/fairness/competition concerns that tend to occupy the minds of the hardcore racing pilot are (not surprisingly) not nearly as important to the fence sitters. IF we're serious about increasing participation (and if that's the charter of the Rules Committee or the SRA or some other interested group), the lessons seem to be:

- Test out more long-weekend races or other formats that minimize having to take long vacations.
- Create a structure that would allow newbies and folks with families to feel comfortable (e.g. the Mifflin beginner's contests, Caesar Creek XC and Racing Camp, etc.)
- Create a more structured marketing and awareness campaign targeted at the potential competitors. For instance, I think a list comprising pilots who ARE on the OLC list with some reasonable number of points (say 750 or more) and are NOT on the SSA Ranking List would be a great place to start using publicly available data.


A little data goes a long way.

Some additional food for thought.

Of the 450-odd pilots on the Pilot Ranking List (having flown at least one contest in the past three years):

- 40% flew only one contest in three years
- 20% flew two contests
- 20% flew an average of one contest per year
- 20% flew an average of 2.25 contests per year

That means 112 pilots represent 50% of the contest entries and 224 pilots represent three-quarters of the contest entries. That's pretty concentrated.

Over the past dozen years:
- The number of pilots on the PRL has fallen by an average of 2.6% per year, or twelve pilots per year
- The number of contest entries per year had fallen by 3.5% per year, or 15 entries

I'd guess that there are another couple hundred who are still active but haven't competed in the past three years. I'd be curious to compare that list to the active OLC list and de-dupe it to see who are the obvious candidates and whether there is a racing value proposition that might appeal.

A few years ago, the RC invited local OLC pilots gather one evening during the RC meeting. The anecdotal evidence is that the most active OLC pilots decline to race for reasons that seem quite different from Erik's survey, so I for one would be interested in learning more form a broader group of OLC (or other XC) pilots.

Another datapoint is that we saw pretty good uptake in pilots flying the daily racing task at the last Nephi OLC event. I think some of this is that there was only daily, rather than cumulative, scoring so pilots didn't feel pressure to fly every day (or submit their scores even if they did).

I'd also be very interested to see a mixed Regional/OLC event - more participants would certainly help organizer economics and it's a good opportunity for neophytes to "ride along" with racers.

Andy Blackburn
9B