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In my opinion and a lot of others, getting new members and increase participation is our number one issue. Does new equipment fix that? Tim will tell. But don’t compare what happened in 1980 with the OMC with today. What worked 30 years ago most likely won’t work today in our sport.
I mentioned this in a previous post, I’m tired of watching 4 boat races. I’m tired of having to call around to see if there are going to be enough people for our classes at the next race. So, we have to do something or we won’t be racing the way we do today. Which is maybe ok with some of you.
We can’t agree as a group if a strong local schedule is important. We talk new prospective racers and they look at you as if you are nuts when you say, we’ll you might have to travel 6 – 8 hours if you want to race more than 4/5 weekends. Then when we mention it to our groups at our meetings and they don’t want to believe it.
Have a strong local schedule and you can’t get more than 60 entries to show up.
I don’t have the answer but we have to figure out what it is we want and how are we going to get there. Ask 10 people what the answer is and you will get 10 different opinions. I don’t know how we fix it.
I’m just being honest and I know I will take some heat for it but let just say the sidewinder is as dominant in the A class as some are saying. We do nothing to slow them down and we loose 5 racers because of it because they can’t compete with their OMC. We want to sell engines so we have to make the new engine the engine of choice. How long can a club survive if they only have 50 entries at a race? We all know that getting new members is a struggle. Think of all the drivers’ schools we conducted over the entire country this year. We probably had over 100 people try us out. If we can get 10 of those we will be doing well. 10 over the entire county? Won’t make an impact on our races short term. How do you keep them enthused if they show up and there are 4 other boats to race and they just dropped 10,000.00. Oh wait I forgot they got 7 minutes of water time on Saturday and 7 on Sunday.
Richard how much seat time for one of those midgets a weekend? That’s not a slam or a threat of, I’m leaving. It’s a legit question. I’m guessing more than 7 minutes a day? Same thing you hear when talking to people at races about our sport, I race karts and it’s way more expensive than that $5000.00 yamato rig you just pitched to them. And they say we get a lot more track time and it’s 1.5 hours away. I’m home early enough on cut my lawn Sunday night…Or the personal water craft they ride for hours…
Bottom line until we lock ourselves in a room and come up with a plan that we all buy into we are fight a loosing battle. (BTW I don’t think we will ever all agree) Think of this as a business, if you had a problem at work you would meet until it was solved it would not go on for years like this has. How much time is spent working on this issue/opportunity? I know it’s a hobby but unless we give our time to fixing it, it will be gone.
Talk about an issue at any boat racing meeting. How long before someone says let’s move on and nothing is resolved?
I mentioned this in a previous post, I’m tired of watching 4 boat races. I’m tired of having to call around to see if there are going to be enough people for our classes at the next race. So, we have to do something or we won’t be racing the way we do today. Which is maybe ok with some of you.
We can’t agree as a group if a strong local schedule is important. We talk new prospective racers and they look at you as if you are nuts when you say, we’ll you might have to travel 6 – 8 hours if you want to race more than 4/5 weekends. Then when we mention it to our groups at our meetings and they don’t want to believe it.
Have a strong local schedule and you can’t get more than 60 entries to show up.
I don’t have the answer but we have to figure out what it is we want and how are we going to get there. Ask 10 people what the answer is and you will get 10 different opinions. I don’t know how we fix it.
I’m just being honest and I know I will take some heat for it but let just say the sidewinder is as dominant in the A class as some are saying. We do nothing to slow them down and we loose 5 racers because of it because they can’t compete with their OMC. We want to sell engines so we have to make the new engine the engine of choice. How long can a club survive if they only have 50 entries at a race? We all know that getting new members is a struggle. Think of all the drivers’ schools we conducted over the entire country this year. We probably had over 100 people try us out. If we can get 10 of those we will be doing well. 10 over the entire county? Won’t make an impact on our races short term. How do you keep them enthused if they show up and there are 4 other boats to race and they just dropped 10,000.00. Oh wait I forgot they got 7 minutes of water time on Saturday and 7 on Sunday.
Richard how much seat time for one of those midgets a weekend? That’s not a slam or a threat of, I’m leaving. It’s a legit question. I’m guessing more than 7 minutes a day? Same thing you hear when talking to people at races about our sport, I race karts and it’s way more expensive than that $5000.00 yamato rig you just pitched to them. And they say we get a lot more track time and it’s 1.5 hours away. I’m home early enough on cut my lawn Sunday night…Or the personal water craft they ride for hours…
Bottom line until we lock ourselves in a room and come up with a plan that we all buy into we are fight a loosing battle. (BTW I don’t think we will ever all agree) Think of this as a business, if you had a problem at work you would meet until it was solved it would not go on for years like this has. How much time is spent working on this issue/opportunity? I know it’s a hobby but unless we give our time to fixing it, it will be gone.
Talk about an issue at any boat racing meeting. How long before someone says let’s move on and nothing is resolved?
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