In my region, the Coaches' Council determines everything about a USRowing Youth Regional Championship, including race format and schedule. Maybe it's different for yours? If coaches wanted more side-by-side racing, they'd talk amongst themselves about race caps, entry allocations, etc.crewu wrote:Youth Councils? I know people who have been placed on these councils and never had a meeting and know less about what is going on than anyone else.fullmetal wrote: I don't want to feed into the tangent about USRA youth regionals, but I should point out that coaches' councils make a lot of the decisions about youth regionals. With uncertainty and variation of youth crew performance across a season, time trials is still the best way to select fairly for speed. Given time constraints of a single weekend and weather, it's near impossible to fit TTs in with heats+semis+finals. And given the increasing number of entries and boat classes at regionals, compromises have to be made to make it all work.
You can have time trials and B finals. Making kids and parents buy a plane ticket and two hotel nights to race a time trial and then be done for the weekend at 8am on a Saturday morning is just poor governing stewardship.
If the Olympics can hold D finals then USRowing youth regionals can get off their asses and hold B finals.
Many athletes are racing multiple events at youth regionals, so it's unlikely that a coach would send an athlete out to race once for the price of transportation and lodging. It's on the coach if an athlete is only being given once race.
Looking at the different USRowing youth regionals, there are anywhere between 300, ~500 (3), and ~640 (2) entries. Only the Northwest region had a schedule that included lower level finals, but they run time trials on 8min centers (everyone else is on 10 min centers, except for MW at 9min) and finals on 7min centers (only SE also runs 7min centers during finals, all others run longer), and the NW does not have semifinals, unlike everyone else (except centrals -- time trials to A finals only). Centrals (weather), NW (volume), and SW (volume) all ran over three days, and the other three were Sat/Sun only. Some of these regionals are run during school weeks; the last two seem like they are late enough to not be during school, which means Sunday afternoon racing is possible. There are a lot of factors that influence scheduling and capacity to run B finals.
I wonder how much of the local regatta push for time trials is related to "this is practice for youth regionals." But a six-entry event certainly doesn't warrant time trials, and I'd be at a loss to find an example of what you're describing. Some regattas that have to run time trials for much larger events might throw in a small event just to race for lanes, sure. Entry fees are also important for the survival of regattas, and you'll have to make your case to LOCs that reduced entry fee revenue is worth it to the athlete for more side-by-side racing.Mango wrote:Hijacking the thread a bit and then I will (hopefully) bow out. It isn't just regional qualifiers. It is also local small club regattas running TT for a 6 boat event with 3 boat finals and being done with racing at 3p. This is happening all over the country.
Also for some of the qualifiers the events are loaded up with 3, 4, 5 boats from the same program. Way more than they could even qualify. We could lessen entries for the sake of a quality racing experience, but then we would lose entry fees.
Standardizing TT to elimination has been terrible for the sport, and doing it at the penultimate event shouldn't be on the table. The pro TT people talk about it like the entire sport wasn't run with side by side elimination for 100 years and the TT is some great aberration that has "improved" the sport and quality of racing. (It hasn't).
Top
I love side-by-side racing, but if we want to grow this sport and increase the numbers, the nature of regatta management has to change accordingly.