RYA youth awareness campaign

What could the UKLA do that would make you join the class association ???

(I am especially interested if this is related to training!)

What does the Blaze association do that is really good???

Thats kind of the point, the RYA seems happy to fund the cost of coaches for junior squads but not for adults.  Now if the RYA took little or no money from these adults then that would be fair enough.  However they encourage us all to join the RYA then focus seemingly all their racing coaching attention on acheiving Olympic gold through the youth and team GBR schemes.  Those people outside these schemes are left pretty much to fend for themselves as far as improving their racing skills go.  Hence why the successes of some classes are in no small part down to the associations filling this void. One disadvantage of this is it draws people away from thier home club to fuffil their training desires further erodeing the UK sailing base. 

 Now if the regional coaches in the RYA could come to clubs and if provided with the facilities run day long courses in between running the larger zone squad weekend etc I think that would engender an improvement in skills at grass roots level which will natually trickle down to the juniors at that club when their not at these RYA squad weekends or if they can't afford to attend!  It migh also go some way toward tackling the problems that are deeemed to exist in rules adherence at club level.

The RYA supplied a coach to Whitefriars a couple of years ago to get 10 of us through our club racing coach course, so meaning we can do the coaching at the club. I can't remember the cost of this, but it certainly wasn't a huge amount.

I assume this scheme still runs, and as it gives clubs an asset (coaches) I would think that most clubs would be willing to pay for a large amount of the cost.

It has to be said that the majority of the coaching is for juniors, but not through any set policy, just because they are the ones who are keen to learn.

Paul,

Thanks for the reply. I am obviously very dissappointed that the UKLA has a bad reputation. I will be at Sailboat if people want to come and have a moan and groan and hopefully we can make things better.

Without getting into the past I am now the UKLA Training Officer and if you write to me you will definitely get a quick response and it would be no problem getting an excellent coach to come to your club.

The laser class does have a forum (www.laser.org.uk) which is members only and perhaps not as well used as it could be.

Thank you for your obsersations, I am quite concerned at how many members the UKLA is losing each year but we are trying to make things better! For example we have the club sailor championships, just for club sailors at Weymouth in June this year.

Jon

PS Blaze 665 please do not eat any more Lasers!

I think this "members only" culture is part of the problem for many organisations.

It's a difficult issue to deal with but generally I think if you offer ALL your resources to ALL then generally a good proportion of the ALL will become paying members.

Others look at it with the cup half empty outlook that by holding back some resources then that will forec people to join for the things they want.

Carrot and stick ... with the MPSCA we make everything available to everyone; you don't even need to be a member of the CA to join the training events; we work on the premis that people will want to support the CA once they have seen what it does. The only thing that requires the CA membership is to race at a MPSCA event.

This approch works well for us with forum activity and newsletter subscribers well beyond the numbers of boats ...

regards,

Rick