How to make my life easier!

General slalom chatter...rant about the bad, rave about the good
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carealto
Posts: 56
Joined: Wed Jul 14, 2010 8:17 pm
Location: Northumberland
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How to make my life easier!

Post by carealto » Mon Apr 01, 2019 2:53 pm

I have organised two events per year for the last few years - but it seems that for the last year or so that doesn't warrant sending me a yearbook. I want to pay my levies and get the paperwork sorted for one of these events but....
I have to fill in multiple identical fields in the spreadsheet - one for each class (anyone heard of linking fields - it would save most organisers a few minutes
There is no email or postal address for the (CE) treasurer on the sheet - our club don't use online banking so I need to give the treasurer a postal address
The levy sheet in the 2019 organisers pack is labelled 2018 - does it have the right rates, should I use it

Oh, and while i am ranting, is there any support for a limit to a competitors number of results challenges? Perhaps over a season (they do it in other sports) - it feels as though some people have a "challenge everything" approach to results

FlipFlopFly
Posts: 3
Joined: Thu Nov 05, 2015 5:18 pm

Re: How to make my life easier!

Post by FlipFlopFly » Tue Apr 02, 2019 11:02 am

I agree that there certainly seems to be a culture to protest everything, especially at prem and div 1 events, but this does seem to be working into the lower division events as well.
I think that rather than this being an issue on its own, it's the culture of the current performance driven direction of the sport that is the cause. Rather than people coming to a race to have fun and paddling because they enjoy it, they are there to get good results and move through the divisions as fast as possible at the direction of their coaches, with the end goal to get on the GB team. Whilst this culture may be a good way of strengthening the GB team in the short term, it may not be so good for competitor retention or the long term future of the sport.
Whilst I would support limiting the number of protests per competitor per season, I am not sure it would be that effective at combating the current 'results at any cost' culture.

JimW
Posts: 570
Joined: Thu Oct 08, 2015 2:17 pm
Location: Pinkston

Re: How to make my life easier!

Post by JimW » Tue Apr 02, 2019 3:03 pm

carealto wrote:
Mon Apr 01, 2019 2:53 pm
Oh, and while i am ranting, is there any support for a limit to a competitors number of results challenges? Perhaps over a season (they do it in other sports) - it feels as though some people have a "challenge everything" approach to results
In the vast majority of cases the paddler putting in a protest firmly beleives that they are right.

If it were the case that most protests are from paddlers fairly sure the penalty is valid but just testing the system to see if they can get away with it then I would agree that we have a serious culture problem that needs to be tackled, but I actually think this is pretty rare, based on the emotion I see from paddlers when they find out they have a penalty that they subsequently protest.

Racing is quite psychological, and the psychology can affect the paddlers, parents and coaches making it difficult for anyone to take an unemotional view.
I have known paddlers and parents protest a penalty out of a sense of righteousness even though having it struck off would not have changed the placings at all, they only have a few minutes to decide whether or not to protest and sometimes it isn't long enough to unemotionally consider the bigger picture.

Sometimes paddlers and parents do not completely understand all the rules. One of our div 3s told me at the weekend that she had been given a 50 on a gate she thought she was in and only touched because the pole brushed her cheek, so I explained that half head is anything less than a whole head from the neck up, and then she was happy that it was really a 50 (no protest).

Of the other penalties I saw people discussing at the weekend I think only about 50% were protested in the end. I'm sure there were many others that were simply accepted.

So no, I don't think we need to mess around with the rules about protests.

Possibly we need to educate parents (and some coaches) to emotionally support paddlers better and help them make objective reviews of their runs.

If anything the thing that is probably leading to more protests than previously is the amount of parental video feedback. Some parents run down the side filming, others film from a fixed position, but it is extremely rare that a parental video will capture a similar viewing angle to the one the judge had, and a lot of times telephoto compression makes it impossible to tell whereabouts the paddler is upstream or downstream relative to the position of the gate. That is why at div 1 and prem there always 2 or more judges on each gate with different viewing angles.

I was amazed that at a different event recently a paddler had a protest upheld who had talked to me about it first and showed me the parental video. The video taken from maybe 100m downstream at high zoom did clearly show that the paddlers head had been in left to right, but I had been perched a few metres upstream shooting stills of other paddlers and recalled that I hadn't been sure if the chin had actually been downstream of the gate when the head went to the right, in fact I thought at the time that if it were me, I would have spun around for a second attempt to make sure. I knew the section judge had a clearer view of that than I did being almost directly in line with the gate line so I advised that the 50 was probably right.
Clearly one of the judges thought the same as me, I can only assume the section judge was happy that the chin was in, but the video that paddler and parent used to convince themselves was from an inappropriate angle for the way the paddler negotiated the gate. I know this is not an isolated incident, it is simply a recent one that I remember clearly.
My main concern was that having what to me was a marginal protest rejected would have brought the paddler down, in fact because it was upheld the paddler went into second runs in a more positive frame of mind and probably paddled better as a result. So was the paddler wrong to protest? I still can't decide, I do think they were wrong to base the decision on the video even though it worked out.

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