Post by AP on Nov 15, 2013 14:03:09 GMT
Looking forward to next year, any ideas on how we can manage a coherent racing season with so many clubs at such different levels of development. With the promotion of new categories such as novice, intermediate etc along with our existing 40+, 50+, 60+ and open men's, women's and mixed, hosting a Regatta becomes a real balancing act. Should we adopt any of the following along with the current invitational ones:-
Regional Regattas
Category Regattas (Novice, intermediate, new club or some combination)
Rowing League, or divisional Regattas
I am also wondering if there is any way we can introduce handicap races at next year's Regattas. Having puzzled over it for a while the best I can come up with is a system where clubs wanting to take part in handicap races enter a valid time over say 1 Km taken in calm sea conditions at slack tide ( we need a bit of trust here ). They would then be started in a time band of say 5 to 10 seconds depending on this entered time. this would keep clubs who compete closely starting equally against their nearest rivals but getting some advantage against clubs they can not normally compete well against. You might have 4 different starts at 5 second intervals which could give starters a bit of a headache but could provide for close and interesting racing. This could be trialed in say mixed open and mixed 40+ races and probably over 1km sprints to prevent chaos at buoy turns. Obviously it would take time to sort out the handicaps and iron out any unforeseen problems but eventually we could have a viable system where anyone can race with a good chance of winning.
Regional Regattas
Category Regattas (Novice, intermediate, new club or some combination)
Rowing League, or divisional Regattas
I am also wondering if there is any way we can introduce handicap races at next year's Regattas. Having puzzled over it for a while the best I can come up with is a system where clubs wanting to take part in handicap races enter a valid time over say 1 Km taken in calm sea conditions at slack tide ( we need a bit of trust here ). They would then be started in a time band of say 5 to 10 seconds depending on this entered time. this would keep clubs who compete closely starting equally against their nearest rivals but getting some advantage against clubs they can not normally compete well against. You might have 4 different starts at 5 second intervals which could give starters a bit of a headache but could provide for close and interesting racing. This could be trialed in say mixed open and mixed 40+ races and probably over 1km sprints to prevent chaos at buoy turns. Obviously it would take time to sort out the handicaps and iron out any unforeseen problems but eventually we could have a viable system where anyone can race with a good chance of winning.