Club Racing Formats

At Oxford (http://www.oxfordsailingclub.com/sailing/club-racing/racing-rules) we have a 55% count-rate of the races actually started, no 'qualification' threshold, and those doing race/rescue duty get Average Points of the races they ranked in as a starter:

I love the fact that some people still refer to fellow sailors as a 'helmsman'... on a dinghy, on a pond, 100 miles away from the sea.  How quaint.  

Originally posted by MattHarris I agree getting more people feeling involved must surely be the aim.  The only danger is if you remove qualification you could have a situation where someone races in two different boats in a series and comes first and second.  Our current method of qualification is half the number of races + 1 (rounding down) which just stops this happening.

I agree the qualification thing is pointless. I've never seen a shred of evidence that it improves turnouts. If someone manages to juggle two boats and come first and second in the series then they deserve the cheap glassware!

What I'm interested in is how we can make it possible for people to do more races in a series whilst juggling their attendance at a club. We have a couple of one race a month series, one pursuit, and one dual handicapped personal and standard, so that people who can't make races every weekend can at least target weekends and still be in with a fair chance of the prizes.

There's a little evidence that our turnout is a bit better for the dual handicap series, so it may be working.

At the moment we also extract results from the "special" weekend races for the main season long series, and I do wonder whether it would be better not to do that so people can also target two weekends a month for a prize at that level. I can't figure out a way to look at numbers to see if that would be useful.

The difficulty of course is that in general the best sailors are also the most active, so if you introduce more prizes it just means the same people get more cups, which is fairly pointless...

Now I'm writing this, I wonder if there could be any mileage in divisions within the classes... Should we have say age categories or weight categories in single class races, or best two hander, best singlehander, best asymettric, best pole kite in handicap racing... That would certainly encourage competition between boats of similar types, and its maybe something that class racing could grow out of... I dunno, what do people think?

Yes, yes and yes. Lots of good ideas there Jim.