On Wednesday, August 19, 2015 at 7:18:45 AM UTC-4, Martin Gregorie wrote:
On Tue, 18 Aug 2015 18:39:42 -0700, Dan Daly wrote:

Martin, the 100 km Diploma is not recognized in North America.

Thanks for the clarification. I think its a useful sized task for a
fledging XC pilot, so its something that a club might want to use.

My club has a 109km triangle with easily recognised TPs and a 200km O/R
which both have annually awarded cups. Both are into the prevailing wind
from our field and both are commonly used by early XC pilots.


--
martin@ | Martin Gregorie
gregorie. | Essex, UK
org |

For a few airports/groups in Eastern PA, North NJ & southern NY, we have:

http://gcup.tophatsoaring.org/GCUP/gc_home.php
Basic rules.... http://gcup.tophatsoaring.org/GCUP/gc_rules.php
North flights... http://gcup.tophatsoaring.org/scorin...scoresheet.xml
South flights.... http://gcup.tophatsoaring.org/scorin...scoresheet.xml
Flight comments..... http://gcup.tophatsoaring.org/GCUP/gc_flights.php .... use the arrow button to see comments from previous days...

This is good, lots of places to land, tend to fly in groups, add's a "bit of competition" between different groups/airports (we fly for individual points as well as group points).

As to "competition training", years ago in our region, we had a "little guys meet". It was divided into "silver" & "gold" based on experience of the pilot & sailplane performance.
It was 2 weekends in a row, had a briefing in the morning, turnpoints, cameras (yes, a long time ago), landing cards, etc., just like a real contest.
The difference was that it was mostly for fun (no national ranking points) but had everything a real contest did.

The other "training" was to crew for a number of contests. You did everything a pilot did (except fly) so you went to meetings/briefs, rigged, loaded cameras, discussed the days potential, gridded, launched, kept tabs on "your pilot", info submittal at the end of the day or retrieves.
This meant you had some exposure to the "contest workings" before having to fly the course.

Yes, I crewed for ~7 years (regionals & nationals) with 2+ contests/year and also flew the "little guys" contest a few times.