On Saturday, 25 May 2019 16:57:04 UTC-6, Andy Blackburn wrote:
On Friday, May 24, 2019 at 12:43:49 PM UTC-7, JS wrote:
On Friday, May 24, 2019 at 11:16:16 AM UTC-7, Christopher Schrader wrote:
I support grouping them together where it makes sense so we have roughly 3-4 healthy, well-attended Nationals taking into consideration what I said about 20M being a training ground for pilot development be it prominent Juniors or other up-and-coming racers. Other "fun" Sports Class contests like the Seniors for example may be marketed as 2nd tier national-level contests called "Championships" where I'd expect the Top 10 pilots will still be in a close competitive battle for the podium.

- Chris Schrader

That suggests contests being hosted together that don't overlap classes..
But how?

Some complications:
JS1C can race in 18m and Open.
Ventus 2/3, JS3 or ASG29 can race in 18m or 15m.
Discus 2 or ASW28 can race in Standard or Club.
LS8 or Discus 2 can race in Standard or 15m.

Perhaps:
Club and Sports can be hosted together with no overlap.
Standard and 18m can be hosted together with little overlap.
15 and Open can be hosted together with little overlap.
1-26, 13.5m and 20m 2-seater can be hosted together with no overlap.

How likely would there be too few or too many entries in any of those?

If we were trying to bring more people into soaring and hope most get into XC and some end up racing, more fun meets should be hosted. Call them camps, pre-regionals or whatever you like. And invite two-seaters to all regionals, for reasons already stated.

To me the Juniors and Club Class are the most important, and both SSA and FAI seem to have lost the plot for Club Class. Young or otherwise new or limited funds pilots need a place to fly their (typically less than $20k) glider. It's hard enough for them to hang around with a bunch of old farts without the contests or handicaps messing with them.

Caveat:
Not a competition pilot. My involvement is limited to coaching XC, and contest crewing.
Jim

Not to speak for the site selection committee, but something like the above is generally the goal - host a couple of Nationals together for organizer economics - generally with a bigger class and a smaller one together (occasionally three classes, but that can lead to problems getting everyone launched in time - especially if you are talking out west with big gliders in the mix). The other goal is to make it so the folks with gliders that can reasonably fly in two different classes are eligible for at least one Nationals on their side of the country each year.
The other objective is to flip/flop east and west each year so that the Nationals for each class move around geographically year to year.

Of course this perfect world often gets confounded by which organizations are willing to host and preferences they might have for how to combine things that don't necessarily match with the above "system". The rest is subject to cajoling and negotiation.

I'm guessing the SSA would welcome energetic folks who are willing to volunteer to take on a portion of this important work.

I'm not sure how it would work to have two versions of each class' Nationals each year - at least without combining classes via handicapping. The expected size of each class would go down which could affect competitiveness. This is particularly problematic for Standard and 20M where the number of participants hovers around the minimum every year. 15M is not far behind. Open has gotten a boost from the JS1, but many of those might go to 18M if we had east and west Nationals. Splitting the folks who live in the middle of the country likely makes the competitiveness problem worse. Having a larger number of sparsely attended Nationals would give more advantage to pilots who can "double dip" by flying a lot of Nationals on both sides of the country in their specific class. Let the gamesmanship begin.

I have toyed with the idea of making PRL (and US Team selection) points a function of the average PRL points of the top 4-6 pilots in a contest and eliminating the distinction between Regionals and Nationals from a points perspective. 100 and 92 points maximum might be about right on average, but there are sparsely attended Nationals where a bit of luck counts a lot and some Regionals that are just as competitive as a Nationals - why not make the points awarded a function of the breadth and depth of the competitive field and relax some of the constraints around overweighting Nationals in a specific class?

Andy Blackburn
9B

Andy, I believe your direction of thinking is correct; why is there a distinction between regionals and nationals for rewarding points for PRL or team selection? Possibly many years or decades ago it made sense now the barriers to entry for a Nationals is so low it typically comes down to writing a check and flying in a regionals.

Another way to think about this is to add a another variable to the equation; quality of pilots participating. Currently the points awarded for a competition require a minimum number of participants and minimum number of days flown. Then each day has a number of parameters that affect scoring such as number of folks completing the task, minimum number of miles, minimum time etc.

With hang gliding and paragliding they refer to this as 'Participant Validity'. Their competition rulebook states

The more accomplished the field of competitors at a given competition, the more challenging the event becomes. Participant validity takes the skill of the participants (based on performance at previous sanctioned competitions) into consideration when determining how many ranking points are potentially available for a given competition.

You can see more details at https://www.ushpa.org/page/download.aspx?DocKey=531 and go to page 14.

Your other point was how to measure the quality of a given competition. Tough one and not one I have any ideas