Contest Class Development for Future Success - The Case fordeveloping the Handicapped Classes

Daniel -

Great stuff! I agree with almost all of your points, including some of the attitudes from _some_ senior members of the community as "youngin" (I started at age 28). Ironically, the most attitude I received was from local club pilots/members... The folks in the contest scene have been far more supportive, in my experience. In terms of more getting people into the sport, I think you're echoing sentiments that Chris and I agree with: The sport isn't cheap, and the club environment doesn't promote rapid training or a strong push from solo through becoming an accomplished XC pilot. However, these topics are tangential to the contest scene itself.

Regarding your thoughts on changes to contest formats: I agree with almost all of your ideas, excepting the promotion of AT/ASTs over TATs. I think TATs are misused; but AT/ASTs have some big problems that most people don't think about or realize (I've been noodling on a SOARING article for 2 years about this topic). I also think that MATs can be used to emulate something like the "OLC tasks" you are discussing - again the problem may lie with the way MATs are being called.

BTW, Chris and I both had a chat this morning on the phone about ways to call "distance-type" tasks that reward pilots for making it back to the home airport... Glad to see others are thinking along the same lines and that some other scoring models already exist for this!

Also, rules-simplification is a good goal. I think a lot of the rules we have were invented to cover corner-cases and niche situations... There's an argument to having the rules there; but it _does_ contribute to the perception that the rules are overly-complicated or hard to learn. If people stick to the fundamentals of the rules, its actually quite simple - but that's not the perception non-contest people seem to have. Personally, I know that some Regionals I've been to flat-out ignore some rules or at least treat them as an honor-system, in order to keep it all simple and easy-to-manage. And if that's the way we're going to run contests and fly them, then maybe we should consider eliminating some rules - at *least* down at the Regional level. Get more folks hooked on contests in general, and then reserve the more-complicated rules for Nationals since its a higher-stakes game... You're never going to have as many folks at Nationals as you have at Regionals.

Looking forward to meeting you (hopefully at a contest) some day!

--Noel

On Wednesday, July 16, 2014 10:36:39 AM UTC-7, Kevin Brooker wrote:
One reason contests are dying is the contest is all about the pilot at
the expense of everyone else. If my family has two weeks of vacation

Kevin - I agree with your sentiments 100%. However, keep in mind that this thread is supposedly oriented around the National Championships.

I would argue that - at some level - these are always going to be "focused"/"specialty" events. When you're trying to find The Best Pilot In The Country, you can't make a whole bunch of concessions to families that may impact the quality of the flying or the opportunities to have challenging days that serve to differentiate the field of contestants.

Having said that, I agree Regionals would benefit from more family-friendly options and organization. But it seems hard enough to get the basic volunteer work-force to put on an event... Its easy to say "we need more _X_"; but figuring out how to motivate people to provide that is tough. In this case, getting extra helpers for social events may be tough for many clubs or contest hosts. Any thoughts or ideas on how to make that happen or ease the burden on organizers is very much welcome!

--Noel

On Wednesday, 16 July 2014 11:36:39 UTC-6, Kevin Brooker wrote:
One reason contests are dying is the contest is all about the pilot at

the expense of everyone else. If my family has two weeks of vacation

time to spend and it is spent at a contest I have no more time to spend

with the family doing something they might enjoy. Contests suck and are

extremely boring unless you are the pilot or an enthusiast.



How often do the majority of contest pilots bring the family? I'll bet

most have done it once and the amount of crap the pilot receives from

the rest of the family is huge and detracts from the fun of contest

flying. If more contests had a social director to find stuff for the

family's of pilots to do while the flying was going on more would be

willing to attend. Dinners don't count; pilots sit around, ignore the

family and tell stories about the day.



How many contests pilots have young families? Most pilots are FOGs with

time and cash. I'm not sure of this but I'll guess many contest pilots

aged 25-45 are divorced or single and thus responsible only for

themselves.



Contest flying is incredibly selfish and does not mesh well families.

Change all the rules, classes, run experiments, and anything else

related to the flying and the growth of contests will remain as it is

now. In decline. Run a few contests where a pilot can bring his family

and they have a great time and contests will grow.









--

Kevin Brooker

Kevin I agree with you about contests being tough for anyone other than the pilot. However I strongly disagree that a contest organizer should also be a social and activity director. If the pilot and/or the family of the pilot cannot find their own activities to do while the pilot is flying then they should just stay home.

Yup just keep piling on the responsibilities for the contest organizers. Brilliant!

Absolutely. Been there done that and yes it was a strain on the family. This is all part and parcel of the *time* problem. I agree we do need some new thinking on contest formats - perhaps you have a few ideas.

We are to some extent dictated by world contest formats - at least for championships. Unfortunately in Europe where contests are very popular, gliding sites are not all hell-holes like western desert sites , and there are many local attractions close by - the family scene is much much easier.

Split weekend regionals, fun 2 day weekend contests or GP events all fall into the options we have for integrating more into family life.

2T

On Wednesday, July 16, 2014 10:36:39 AM UTC-7, Kevin Brooker wrote:
One reason contests are dying is the contest is all about the pilot at

the expense of everyone else. If my family has two weeks of vacation

time to spend and it is spent at a contest I have no more time to spend

with the family doing something they might enjoy. Contests suck and are

extremely boring unless you are the pilot or an enthusiast.



How often do the majority of contest pilots bring the family? I'll bet

most have done it once and the amount of crap the pilot receives from

the rest of the family is huge and detracts from the fun of contest

flying. If more contests had a social director to find stuff for the

family's of pilots to do while the flying was going on more would be

willing to attend. Dinners don't count; pilots sit around, ignore the

family and tell stories about the day.



How many contests pilots have young families? Most pilots are FOGs with

time and cash. I'm not sure of this but I'll guess many contest pilots

aged 25-45 are divorced or single and thus responsible only for

themselves.



Contest flying is incredibly selfish and does not mesh well families.

Change all the rules, classes, run experiments, and anything else

related to the flying and the growth of contests will remain as it is

now. In decline. Run a few contests where a pilot can bring his family

and they have a great time and contests will grow.









--

Kevin Brooker

Interesting stuff Daniel. Well said.

On Wednesday, July 16, 2014 11:40:36 AM UTC-4, wrote:
I mostly agree with Chris Young. It seems to me that most of the solutions do not address the elephant in the room, which is there is no replacement population in the sport of soaring. Moving the nationals closer, making some classes handicapped, gently adjusting tasking one way or the other could generate some minimal effects, but it does not stop the fact that if this continues, soaring as a competitive sport will no longer exist once most of the people on this thread will no longer be able to fly.



As far as I have observed in my own progression in soaring, those around me and the juniors that I have been in close contact with, it seems to me that there are two major issues that beset the soaring scene in the USA today.



1) Most of the population is simply unaware of what soaring is. We need to get the message of soaring across through various means in order to attract new membership, plain and simple. This will not be focused on this thread...



2) Once a potential pilot does get hooked enough to get their license, their ability to progress in the sport, unless they are financially well equipped is very difficult. After getting rated, most pilots will fly in a club.. Many clubs, especially when it comes to juniors are not very inclined to allow their equipment to be used over prolonged flights, such as the five hour, let alone cross country. The social scene is not very conducive either.. A sizeable enough of a contingent of the older folk thinks it is unreasonable and unfair that the juniors "have it easy" or are doing things differently than they had. In general, it is not easy for new people to enter into this sort of cliquish environment with a lot of existing politics. Furthermore, for juniors, when the next youngest person is 45 years old, the interactions are already highly demanding and it doesn't help when you have people hostile to their presence in the first place.



Aside from the club environment, simply bridging the gap between private pilot and cross country is a very difficult one, even if all the prerequisites line up. We fly in a very mentally demanding sport that is very hard. This period in a pilot's soaring career is one that is least rewarding and most demanding. It is necessary to significantly assist and motivate new pilots going through this period.



Once a pilot starts flying cross country, they might start getting interested in the prospect of flying contests. However, on the outset, they see a bloated set of rules, complicated tasks, and a huge amount of commitment in time and money to participate in this. Frankly, the vast majority prefer OLC because of this. Nephi is an excellent example! They were fully booked for the Nephi OLC event, but the regional to be done in August, which has a relatively very large number of pilots signed up, is significantly less than the OLC event! Contests are becoming too difficult and too burdensome to justify the event for many people.



One possible solution and one that would minimize an obstacle to racing is to greatly simplify the format. I think it would be beneficial to get rid of the TAT and the MAT, and have two racing formats: Assigned Task and an OLC style distance task, with some additions to make it work for a grid and a become more of a race. There are several reasons



1) If you get rid of the MAT/TAT, you greatly simplify the rules and the concept of racing. If you have a pure distance task, it is simple: You go as far as you can within the OLC format and come home. This is something that pilots can easily learn at their home field and something that easily registers for even a layman.



2) We keep the AST for pure racing tasks as they are also very simple and easy to practice. I would advise that the task would potentially target a shorter time for the winner, such as two hours on what would be a three hour TAT task, with a reasonable opportunity for the rest of the finishers to file in between 2-3:30 hours.



3) This seems to me to be a better compromise for the different kinds of flying that most of do already, rather than the TAT/MAT. We have distance pilots and racing pilots.



The contest admin and the pilots flying in such a meet have a lot of discretion over how they would like to task such a contest. It could be entirely one kind of task or the other. They could save the ASTs for the stronger days for better "pure" racing or they could instead use the OLC tasks on those days so that pilots can really stretch out far.



For some specific ways that the race would be executed:



1) I would keep the starts/finishes with a five mile and a 1 mile sector with a minimum finish altitude.



2) The OLC tasks would also have a start and a finish, with a LST style start, with a standard 30 minute start window. This way everyone has a fair chance to start and embark on their distance journey.



3) Unless someone has a better idea, we would keep the 1000 point system. For OLC tasks, it would be good to have a major bonus for coming back to the finish. I would have a say scoring formula that basically takes the winner's handicapped distance plus 250 points as the basis for the rest of the scoring.



4) I would eliminate devaluations. Every day is a 1000 point day. The 1-26ers use a very nice scoring formula: the speed of the slowest finisher determines the distance points for the day. This is to reward he who comes back, no matter how slow. I think this would work well with the proposed format and would simplify understanding the scoring significantly.



5) I would eliminate any leeway in the scoring formula. While it seems nice that busting the minimum finish by 50 ft still garners a score, all of those policies are very complicated to understand for any entering the racing scene. At this point, loggers display altitudes. Even the ancient Colibri does this. No one says that you have to turn a turnpoint at exactly one mile or come in exactly at minimum finish, or exit the start sector at exactly 2 minutes or the like. Pilots should build in their own margins, rather than the scoring formula.



6) The only potential problem I could see in the execution of an OLC style distance day is that it would inherently reward flying very large durations. I think that this is actually okay, but if it is considered a problem, that could be fixed by having a maximum time. The way this would work is you go as far as you can in a given time span, and then your distance ends there and you get your 250 point bonus if you get back to the airport. I don't like adding a maximum time for it complicates the scoring process and the task, though it is a solution if this is considered a problem.



7) This format works for both limited handicapped racing and pure classes.. The format as is now is not conducive for low performance anyway with so much weight being put on speed points, rendering them uncompetitive.



Some of my humble thoughts,

Daniel Sazhin

--

Kevin Brooker[/i][/color]

Kevin I agree with you about contests being tough for anyone other than the pilot. However I strongly disagree that a contest organizer should also be a social and activity director. If the pilot and/or the family of the pilot cannot find their own activities to do while the pilot is flying then they should just stay home.

Yup just keep piling on the responsibilities for the contest organizers. Brilliant![/quote]

I didn't say it was going to make contest organization easier. If having social activities for the non- pilot who is visiting, as Sean put it, western hell holes, be more attractive then you might get the best pilots showing up. If having a social director means contests are full or wait listed the social director is a no brainer investment. The contests which are well attended and have longevity have things to do besides sit around the airport and wait on the pilot. You can change formats, tasks, rules, and whatever you like for the pilots but if contests are to grow there needs to be a way to attract the younger pilots with families and limited vacation time to fly. If the pilot must choose between flying and domestic tranquility; contests will lose and attendance will continue to fall off.

Even if families are taken out of the picture how many of us have friends to bring along for crew? Maybe once and then most likely, if they don't fly themselves, never again. For the most part crewing is thankless, sedentary, and awfully dull. Crewing requires a certain amount of adventurous spirit to drive around unfamiliar parts of the country with an unfamiliar rig for hours to scoop up a friend. I enjoy retrieves but many do not. Why not have a trailer backing contest; lock picking competition; something else to do while the pilots are flying. At least they'd have something to do and might become the National Champion Retrieve Crew.

Yes, doing something besides the status quo will require work. For decades the rule changes; class changes; task changes and flight regime changes have been taking place in various forms and contest attendance is still falling. The lack of attendance has very little to do with the actual flying. Attendance is down for all of the non-flying reasons. What is the risk in trying something different to improve the contest experience?

Andy - Standard Class gliders have always had the ability to race in 15
m class contests.

Mike I Green

On 7/16/2014 9:17 AM, wrote:
I need to go crunch some numbers but one thing is like to see is greater depth of the competitive field at nationals. One way to do this (a more radical pivot I know and maybe people don't want to think this differently) is to have the handicaps overlap so that the large numbers of gliders in the middle handicap ranges have more than one place to go. Allowing standard class gliders into both 15m and Club would significantly expand the depth of the field in both. I don't see much point in trying to include ultra low performance gliders in Club. They are better suited for Sean's idea of OLC where you could make tasking much more flexible.

The BIG problem this solves is giving pilots on either coast a real competitive contest for their glider without driving 3 days. Fewer classes ensures that you can sustain an east/west strategy. Handicapped classes and east/west pairing need to go together - without some handicap overlap you are likely to drive participation down rather than up.

I think the idea of making the OLC camp a fun and friendly entry into course racing is a very interesting, but at the risk of sounding too beholding to the preferences of pilots, I would suggest we figure out what changes would really represent an enhancement to the pilot enjoyment of what is a very popular and enjoyable format before inflicting a new vision on them. It is quite possible that Nephi OLC camp caters to people with very different competitive juices. I personally interviewed a number of pilots from last year's event and it was clear that for many head-to-head, multi-day cumulative scoring racing events were not appealing - at least not at the time.



n

Hi Mike - I'm just back from Montague and I'm 100% sure that the standard class gliders in the contest did not get handicapped. That's the topic we are discussing - should they and are the current handicaps appropriate for water ballast.

9B

On Wednesday, July 16, 2014 7:10:58 PM UTC-7, Kevin Brooker wrote:


Even if families are taken out of the picture how many of us have friends
to bring along for crew? Maybe once and then most likely, if they don't
fly themselves, never again. For the most part crewing is thankless,
sedentary, and awfully dull. Crewing requires a certain amount of
adventurous spirit to drive around unfamiliar parts of the country with an
unfamiliar rig for hours to scoop up a friend. I enjoy retrieves but many
do not. Why not have a trailer backing contest; lock picking competition;
something else to do while the pilots are flying. At least they'd have
something to do and might become the National Champion Retrieve Crew.

Yes, doing something besides the status quo will require work. For decades
the rule changes; class changes; task changes and flight regime changes
have been taking place in various forms and contest attendance is still
falling. The lack of attendance has very little to do with the actual
flying. Attendance is down for all of the non-flying reasons. What is the
risk in trying something different to improve the contest experience?

--

Kevin Brooker

It's a noble sentiment. I don't know how realistic it is.

As someone who grew up in the social soaring scene of the 70s and who brought my two daughters to a bunch of Soaring contests more recently (almost all at Parowan, UT), I'd make a couple of observations.

1) Many more families are much busier now with a lot more structured time for kids and a lot more two-income (or single parent) households. The idea of one parent being a competitive glider pilot and the other dutifully minding the kids and crewing duties is so rare today as to be nonexistent. I don't think entertainment will bring it back - it's a secular shift in the structure of the family over the past three decades.

2) My kids came with me because they wanted to be with me - even if I was gone flying for 5 hours in the middle of the day. They found things to do during the days, but mostly this was gong to WalMart, reading books, surfing the Internet, hitting the Dairy Freeze. I think organized activities would have neutral to negative rather than a positive. A pool would have been welcome, but not realistic. Soaring sites are not destination resorts and generally are not surrounded by points of interest within close proximity that would be on anyone's list if they weren't already trapped there. Sure, the petroglyphs at the Parowan gap are interesting, but no one's going to build a vacation around it so it's just a way to pass the time, not a reason to go.

I think the effort/return of having a social director for a contest just isn't there. Better for participants to do a little advanced planning and maybe even get together with other soaring families to try to make a more personal experience. Picking things to do gets personal very fast.

BTW - one of our best vacations was a National Parks tour following a Sports Class Nationals at Parowan - but that was in the week after the contest ant took us on a 1000 mile loop around southern Utah. My daughters also loved hitting Las Vegas for a couple of days after contests on the drive home. None of these things require the contest staff to do anything.

I'm sue other people have their own experiences.

9B

The great group of club class owners that recently pressed for the founding of a pure Club Class in the United States were only interested in internationally recognized Club Class rules which included the internationally recognized handicap list here -(http://www.fai.org/downloads/igc/IGC...bClassList_V2). Something else entirely was created in "US" Club Class essentially destroyed it before it began. Why?

It is foolish to me (at least) to consider a "task" with a D2 vs a Libelle to be fair sailplane racing or even interesting or worthwhile.

These elite, state if the art standard class gliders (LS8, D2, 28) fit only within a handicapped 15m class, period. Their performance is equal to or nearly equal to the flapped 15m gliders in most conditions. Unfortunately and for whatever the reasons, it appears that standard class is failing as a viable pure class in the US. Bummer but that doesn't mean they should not be allowed in a competitive and very important US Club Class "competing?" with a Libelle and an ASW-15.

Club Class is the only potential racing class choice for a large number of US soaring pilots. It was created because these pilots wanted a competitive class for lower performance gliders. It should not become a "catch all." They don't need or want these very high performance gliders (or very low performance) in their new US Club Class. They wanted what the International Club Clas enjoys, GREAT SAILPLANE RACING in affordable gliders!

Heck, a LS8 won a 15m Pre Worlds contest day at Uvalde (2012) without a handicap. Give me a break! These very high performance gliders should be included in US Club Class "racing?" a bunch of Libelle's and ASW-15s! Come on guys (and gals)! Seriously? What is the point of that?

Finally, what is the likelihood of 50% assigned tasking happening at US Club Nationals with D2s and Libelle's? Not a chance! This was a big goal of the US Club class. Just look at the tasking in the Club/Modern Nationals going on right now (http://www.ssa.org/Contests?cid=2255&display=results).

Bring out the massive 25 mile turn area tasks again. Yeah!!!!

Sean