You make one of my main points perfectly.

If we want to EDUCATE new, aspiring racing pilots, Sports Class is
terrific. Go ahead and hang your shingle out there - Even in an HP-14 -
which by the way was my first ship. You will learn more about flying
for performance and glider handling in one week of oragnized contest
flying than you will in many, many years of flying around the patch or
with friends, even if you are at the bottom of the score sheet.

If we want to teach new, aspiring racing pilots how to COMPETE and RACE
FOR A WIN, then Sports Class fails. You can only learn to compete and
race when you are in situations of rough equality - pilot skill and
equipment. Sports Class handicaps do not offer that rough equality to a
broad enough range of older gliders at present.

If aspiring Club Class pilots and those owning Club Class gliders think
the Sports Class handicaps are going to come to them are dreaming.
When the base-line Sports Class ship at your average Sports Nats
becomes a V2 - who do think will suffer when it comes time to "tweak"
the handicaps for better competition?

Keep the faith, if you really love to compete, take you HP to a sports
class contest and learn the skills for competing and soak in the
ambience; then, if you really are hooked on racing gliders to win, join
the bandwagon to get a class that encompasses the older, increasingly
dispossessed ships -we could use the support.

Tim McAllister "EY"
Std. Libelle