[NSRCA-dist7] Fwd: Season Championship Thoughts

Fri Feb 13 13:15:46 AKST 2015

Chris - As I indicated in my post, the data shows that Sean's change is
primarily symbolic. That being said, it is important symbolism in my mind.
First, it reinforces the fact that this is a "Season"- "Championship"; the
pilot's participation in the "season" is important. Second, there were a few
pilots (in FAI) who only attended three contests last year and the season
championship! Perhaps under Sean's new system we will get to see their
smiling, happy faces at four contests! This has the direct potential to
increase local contest attendance. Now you might argue that they will ignore
the fame, honor and chicks that come along with being the D7 season champion
due to this new requirement. I sure hope not but if they do, we will miss
them. :-(

Having two out of district contests able to count really makes it easier for
our more remote located pilots to accumulate the four contests required. Now
they only need two regular in district contests and they can fill the other
two with, hopefully, closer out of district contests.

Now, if you want me to add Gross Yearly Income. :-)

Jon Carter

  _____  

From: Chris Fitzsimmons [mailto:kfactoreditor at gmail.com] 
Sent: Friday, February 13, 2015 12:28 PM
To: joncarter60; CA, AZ, HI, NV, UT
Subject: Re: [NSRCA-dist7] Fwd: Season Championship Thoughts

Did you break those down by Gross Yearly Income? lol I'm guessing the
contests are attended more by people who earn more. 

>From those numbers, it's a wash you are saying from both view points. Sean's
idea makes 0 difference and will not make any difference on getting more
people to attend more contests because people already attend more than that
many contests. Matter of fact, twice as many currently. On the other side,
it also has no difference on who will win the district Champion because more
contests are already attended than 3 by twice as much. The ratio actually
goes down by adding the 4th contest. 

As I stated before, adding a 4th win needed (per say), negates the need for
the 2nd out of district contest needed. They still need 2 in district so it
makes 0 difference. Am I missing something there? 

Thanks for doing the great numbers and write up on this Jon!  

C

On Fri, Feb 13, 2015 at 11:01 AM, joncarter60 via NSRCA-dist7
<nsrca-dist7 at lists.nsrca.org> wrote:

Sent via the Samsung GALAXY SR4, an AT&T 4G LTE smartphone

-------- Original message --------

From: Jon Carter <jon.x.carter at oracle.com> 

Date:02/13/2015 10:57 AM (GMT-08:00) 

To: "Jonathan Carter (joncarter60 at comcast.net)" <joncarter60 at comcast.net> 

Cc: 

Subject: Season Championship Thoughts 

NSRCA District 7 Season Championship Thoughts

There has been some discussion on the D7 list lately regarding the changes
that Sean is implementing this year for the NSRCA season championship award.
I think we need to mention what it is that the season championship should
represent. In my opinion, it's more than just picking the best pilot on a
given day. It should represent a "season" of competition with all that goes
along with that. You know the stuff that makes our sport great. (Flying,
BS'ing, Saturday night dinners, helping out other pilots, calling, teasing
other pilots, etc. etc.!) Now, given our format for the season champion I
think we have a good balance between picking the best season competitor and
picking the best pilot. We generally have the top two, three or four pilots
all going into the season championship essentially tied on points so it
often does come down to who has the "stuff" for that one big contest! Sean's
initial proposal discussed at the AMA Expo was to increase the number of
contests that had points counted from 3 to 5. There was much discussion with
a slight majority thinking that 5 contests were too many to count. There was
more discussion and a number of 4 was proposed. Most people present seemed
to think this was a good number. Sean also is allowing 2 "out of district
contests" to count towards a D7 pilot's total. This is aimed to assist some
of our D7 pilots who live farther away from most of the D7 contests but are
closer to some adjacent district contests. I support both of these
modifications.

Just for grins, I went and looked at how many contests the pilots in
different classes attended last year. This is for all district pilots in all
classes. Here is the data.

Class

Average # of contests attended in 2015 by D7 pilots

Sportsman

4.8

Intermediate

6.2

Advanced

5.1

Masters

5.2

FAI "Silver"

6.8

FAI-F3A

3.8

I think this shows that FAI pilots need to come out and fly at some more D7
contests!!! Except for them, everyone already attends at least 4 contests a
year anyway! I then looked at "how many contests did the pilots who actually
attended the season championship go to during the year"

Class

Average # of contests attended in 2015 by D7 pilots who attended the season
championship

Sportsman

6.6

Intermediate

6.8

Advanced

7.0

Masters

6.2

FAI "Silver"

6.7

FAI-F3A

4.0

Interesting! Again, FAI is the outlier but all of the other classes go to at
least 6 contests per year! I didn't crunch the data for other years but I
looked them over and they appear pretty similar to 2015.

Now, expense has been mentioned and that certainly is a factor in these
difficult economic times. As you can see from the data though people are
already going to enough contests! With the addition of allowing two out of
D7 contests to assist those pilots who are less centrally located I really
do not think this will have a negative economic impact on our pilots. I
really think that the relatively slight modification that Sean has made to
our season championship scoring system is a positive step towards
reinforcing attendance at local contests albeit, mostly symbolic according
to the data.

Another item that has been mentioned is where to have the District
Championship? When I first started flying in the District it moved around
quite a bit. I remember one in Las Vegas where it was freezing cold and
blowing a gale for the 14 pilots who attended! (We got in one day of
flying!) I also was at a championship contest in Prado that had a good
turnout but it snowed on Saturday night! (Also a 1 day!) It seems that a
central location with, as much as possible, reliable weather in the late
October timeframe would be ideal. Arvin has certainly fit that bill very
well recently as has Fresno. My personal opinion is that if we want to move
it around some that is great! Maybe a little further south some years, maybe
a little further north, maybe we even go crazy and have Gary or John arrange
something in AZ!!! The point being that it really seems Sean is open to
moving it around to places that make sense. When he first published the
preliminary season schedule for 2015 in November of 2014 there was a
question mark on the location of the district championship. That is the time
to approach Sean and your club to formulate plans. As far as I know the only
clubs/people that offered to host it were Fresno and Arvin. Since we had
done Fresno last year Sean chose Arvin. I think that is a great field with
(usually) great weather and an active group of pattern flyers! Sounds good
to me!

In summation I want to thank and congratulate Sean for doing a great job as
District VP! He has reached out to pilots and solicited input from all and
made reasoned, considerate decisions. Just like we elected him to do! Our
district is the envy of many others for our weather, our contests, our fun
and our great people! Let's keep it that way.

Jon Carter

Ex District 7 VP!

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-- 

Chris Fitzsimmons
Team F3A Unlimited
Team BJ Aircraft
Team Airtronics
08/12 D7 Masters Champion

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