US Junior Soaring Team Camp, Elmira, NY at Harris Hill

On Wednesday, July 5, 2017 at 7:48:06 PM UTC-4, wrote:
Good instruction and US WGC Junior participation this week in Elmira. http://www.ssa.org/Contests?cid=2374&display=results

JP Stewart, Daniel Sahzin, and Noah Reitter are team flying in prep for their trip to Pocuinai, Lithuania in a few weeks. Today was contest day 3. JP had to leave to go back to work, but will be returning this weekend. Daniel won the day today; Noah 2nd and they are 1st and 2nd overall. For the new and uninitiated, there are mentors to enhance the learning curve: Karl Striedieck, Roy McMaster, Dave Welles, Sean Murphy, Andy Brayer and Hank Nixon-3 former national champs and 3 former US Team members, a combined competition and instruction experience of more than 200 years. The future of competition soaring! https://www.facebook.com/HarrisHillSoaring/ This camp is held simultaneously with the Region 3 contest.

The Junior camp was a great success. We had about 24 juniors participating.
During the event we had 7 pilots complete their first contest task.
We had 14 pilots in the 2 seat mentoring group. About 10 did their first cross country flights guided by mentors. These flights were set up like contest tasks with start, flight to turn points or areas, navigation by chart and eyeball,and final glides. Many got SeeYou flight analysis reports thanks to Roy McMaster.
On Monday we flew all 12 junors participating around the courses using 4 ASK-21's and 2 Duo's. Tasks were about 1-1/2 hours long and we did 2 or 3 per day per mentor.
Quite a number also got to ridge soar Harris Hill on the last day.
Almost all got a cross country flight in a Duo.
We added about 10 new pilots to the ranking list, between juniors and region 3 newbies.
It was a pretty good week to be a junior.
Thanks to Harris Hill Soaring Corp and all the volunteers that made it go well.
Thanks to JP and Daniel for initiating this event.
R3 expects to have a Junior class at future regional contests
Look for a Soaring magazine article about this amazing event in the future.

UH