2/3/4 slaloms not allowed

[Dee]

It will reduce the number of people entering the sport. Pushing them to the end of the day will not make it an attractive option.

Would it be possible to:
- run the div 4 S/C at the end of the day on Saturday and at the start of the day on Sunday OR
- run team events at the end of the day on Saturday in which each team must have a div 4 paddler and then a div 4 S/C on Sunday morning. The team event could be run on Sundays div 4 S/C and then be billed as giving the div 4s extra practice with more experience paddlers before their Sunday runs. Might take some thought in course design to avoid too much flaffing on Saturday.

[Flipper]

Vkcmikey says

by banning 2/3/4 races it doesn't then improve div1 races. It will reduce the number of people entering the sport

. I couldn't agree more.
It is harder now to get newcomers into the sport, we have to compete against other sports who have moved to make entry level competion easier and more fun. Slalom, on the other hand is in a vicious downward spiral of fewer events - fewer new entrants - fewer supportive parents - fewer events. Niel H's 2010 survey listed 60 - yes 60 - venues that have been lost from the calendar. The SW has pretty much gone (only Frome left), South (only Winchester), SE (soon only Sheppy events), London has nowt, for slalom LV is the white elephant some predicted. John Kent is absolutely right - for us the screaming priority right now is to have some sort of accessible calendar at the lower divisions. All the debates about the finer points of course complexity/ paddler competence/ points/ divisions are obviously valid, but they distract us from the real crisis and sometimes even make things worse (this whole D2/3/4 debate is an example).
Here are the maveric views of a duffer who stumbled into paddling in his 50's and never got anywhere...
1. The whole issue of trying to set minimum water levels for each division misses the point. There should be NO prescribed minimum water level at ANY division. Even on a mill pond, to get a 1000 points you have to beat the best of the rest. Fact. We're not competing against the river, we're trying to beat the other bastards over the same bit of water. Yup, some levels may favour some paddlers but man up, deal with it. Anyway, didn't I read that a D1 on Serpents Tail didn't raise any surprises? So, if a D1 is scheduled at Shepp, then on the day the water is disappointingly flat, hey-ho. Race anyway. Set the course as best you can and it's 1000 pts to the winner.
Just to be clear, I DO feel that the calendar should be set so that promotion can't be achieved without a high score on at least a couple of courses that promise to be a tad frisky, but if on the day they are not, DON'T CANCEL
2. On the other hand the MAXIMUM levels at each division should be set. No value in scaring the crap out of the parents at their precious kid's first D4. So I like the idea of giving guideline "expected" gradings to different venues (which will vary across the season so should be published with the details on the calendar). Forewarned is forearmed.
3. If newly promoted kids turn up at HPP or wherever and the water's obviously going to be too big for them, that's a matter for their coach, their parents, their club. It's not a matter for the race organsisers or the slalom committee. Go away, get some coaching and come back when you are ready. Go and do some judging at your previous division if you need more development. Go and buy some time on the Legacy course, or run some rivers somewhere. In the meantime just race at events in your division that have "expected" water gradings you can handle, knowing that you will progress but won't get enough points to be promoted. Next year, eh?
4. Bracketted events - 2/3/4 0r 2/3 or 3/4 - are essential. It was OK in the good ol' days to expect competitors to drive distances and camp. Nowadays most racers are under 17 and the parents are the taxi drivers. Parents have kids spanning all these divisions (sometimes more).I've had promising kids switch to golf (!!!) after half a season in D2, their parents couldn't hack the headaches of dragging younger siblings around the country without them also having a paddling opportunity.
5. For the same reasons as above, we need lots more local events. Right now there is only ONE D2 event south of London, even that nearly went in the 2010 kerfuffle.
I'd say we need to promote D3/4s,D2/3s, D1/2s and certainly embrace D2/3/4s as well. If there were more of them locally the travel prob would disappear. So the need for events to be doubles would also be much less - but that also means that only a smaller set-up effort is justified. My paradise would be coaching early Sat morning, a single D4 late Saturday morning, a single D3 Saturday afternoon (include promotees from the morning), then on Sunday a single D2/3 on a harder course using more of whatever water features we have.
6. Change the regs so D3/4 races are even easier and faster to set up. The max rigging effort should be 2 hours for one car-load of volunteers. Not a full Friday for two van-loads. Obviously don't change the regs for D2/3, these are a step up. For a Sunday D2/3 we can use lumps of the previous day's D3/4, there will be plenty of people around to upgrade the course during Saturday prizegiving.
7. I really don't see the probs in D4 courses missing gates from a D3 setting. Or use alternative gates. We've done it and the paddlers all remembered (with a few yells from the bank) that they didn't have to try that cross or this break-out. Dave Waine ran a brill D3/4 event this way at Sheppy with 4 sluices roaring. Nobody drowned.

Oh. I could go on and on. "You already have" I hear you say.

[Nick Penfold]

A thought, especially relevant where courses like Cardington and Llandysul are concerned:

In the difficulty of a competition there are three factors at work, not two:
- The difficulty of the water
- the difficulty of the course (the gates)
- who you're up against

It doesn't matter how easy the water and the course are, if you're up against the best of (say) Div 2. That's why, as Nicky said somewhere, there are no surprises when a race has to be run on flattish water. You can run a satisfactory Div 1 at Llandysul (though it helps when the water level is good, like this year) and a good Div 2 at Cardington. You don't get a different lot of winners.

[CeeBee]

In a perfect world we would have perfect slalom courses at exactly the right level.

However, given that we don't and never will, we need to make best use of the slalom courses we have in whatever area they are in. It is more important that a) slaloms run and b) there are a few races to choose from especially in areas where there is little choice of water.

Yes, some people will get promoted to a level they aren't yet comfortable on, but they can start with the easier races in the next division and progress to the harder races. This is particularly true of the jump from Div 2 to Div 1 but we have some Div 1 courses that they can race on to start with like Llandysul and Washburn.

What is more important is that there are competitions available for paddlers to race at in their local area so that they stay in the sport. This also increases participation figures and revenue to clubs and the BCU slalom committee which is to be encouraged.

Therefore, whilst not ideal, I think Div 2/3/4 races at Cardington and Fairnillee are fine. The course should be designed for Div 2 paddlers and the Div 4 paddlers could 'miss' selected gates to accommodate their level e.g. lets say there was a sequence of gates 1,2,3,4 that is quite tricky, Div 4 paddlers could miss gate 3 and do gates 1,2 and 4. Gate 3 could have an additional number board with a cross through it to indicate it is not to be negotiated. There could be 2-3 gates like this on the course and so long as Div 4 paddlers still did 18 gates, this would enable the race to be ranking

[Flipper]

Spot on

[John Sturgess]

Peter writes:

3. If newly promoted kids turn up at HPP or wherever and the water's obviously going to be too big for them, that's a matter for their coach, their parents, their club. It's not a matter for the race organsisers or the slalom committee. Go away, get some coaching and come back when you are ready.

Quite right: but it applies much more widely than that. All the contortions in this and other threads come back to the same basic misapprehensions: that a paddler's ranking in a particular division tells you what sort of water they can handle, and what level of challenge they 'need'. Therefore 'all' we have to do is to make races in each particular division match that, and Bob's your uncle.

As the first proposition is demonstrably untrue, the second part becomes unnecessary. From a coaching standpoint you only become ready to race on Grandtully, say, by racing on Grandtully.

Odd that none of the major slalom nations look at it our way - all have open entry at most or all of their ranking events.

Only problem that I can see: if we abandoned that proposition, established open entry, and left coaches, parents, and clubs to decide what races should be entered, any of the ACM's I have attended in the last twenty years would have been over by 12.00, if not 11.00!

[Flipper]

John, if you suffer ACM withdrawal symptoms perhaps we could have some interim ECMs (ExtraordinaryCMs) for you.

[alan1nckc]

When this was decided, we had to think about what to do at Nene. At the time, we had some big groups who brought a lot of Div 4 paddlers, and we thought that dropping the Div 4 would hurt our income. (Nene is expensive to run as we have to pay for the pumps by the hour, and slalom doesn't make productive use of water.) We ran a 2/3 + SC4.
The second year we ran this format we got 6 Div 4 entries for Saturday, and 5 for Sunday. We estimate that the extra pumping time (time lost while moving the start etc) and trophies for this cost us around £80 to £100 - nowhere near covered by the entry fees. We dropped Div 4 for the subsequent years.
To our surprise the entry income increased. The reason should have been obvious - we were replacing Div 4 entry fees with Div 2 fees.

I would love to run Div 3/4 at Nene, but we can't afford it. However this year we are running a flatwater 12-gate 4SC, on Sunday May 19th, in support of the East Midlands region. It is open to paddlers from any region however. See you there?

Alan, Northampton C&KC