On Sep 7, 12:07*pm, John Cochrane
wrote:
On Sep 6, 6:32*pm, RAS56 wrote:

As a relative newcomer to the sport, my 2 cents on why there's a general
decline in participation in contest soaring is that there is a general
lack of a structure and interest of "passing XC knowledge" along in the
soaring community to new guys. Folks just want to go to the gliderport
on Saturday, assemble and fly, and I can't necessarily blame them.
RS

--
RAS56

This is exactly what a *sports class regional is set up to accomplish!

I think there's a huge misunderstanding here about what it takes to
"be ready" to go to a sports class regional. No, you don't have to
profile the wings, install a new computer, and get a thousand hours of
cross country. You need one silver badge distance flight or its
equivalent on OLC. Period. That's not much!

Then, the whole point of sports class regionals is to bring new pilots
who are just getting going, and provide exactly the mentoring you're
looking for. Every regional provides a "mentoring" sytsem where you
will have your own personally assigned buddy. Many have explicit
"newbie" classes in the mornings.

The structure and interest for passing on knowledge is there! It's
called a sports class regionals.

John Cochrane

John is quite correct.
Sports Regionals are a training ground.
Entry requirements are not restrictive. Silver distance or OLC
documented equivalent.
I've been running "rookie schools" in the Regionals I attend for more
than 20 years. We do ground school and mentor
pilots every day.
WE also try to regonize the best rookie pilot flight in the daily
meetings. Commonly, these are more interesting than the ones by the
experienced pilots.
I have also done a ride program similar to KS to show what it is like.
We let it be known that we are doing this and get good participation.
Walt Rogers communicated with me about R12 and had planned to possibly
do such a school. In addition, his plan was to task the Sports and the
"BIg Guys" quite differently so that newbies would not be intimidated
and would have a good time.
I guess that message didn't get received or there really was no
interest. I thought he was on the right track.
The US rules committee is planning on adding a second poll this year,
in addition to the usual rules topic poll, to get feedback from the
pilot population on the topic of contest participation.
UH