Henry L. Menin
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Oct 27, 2009, 9:23 AM
Post #2 of 7
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Re: [Jake Doyle] Switching College Sloop Nationals to match racing
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I am excited that Jake Doyle, and presumably a number of other college sailors, would like to see match racing in the College Sloop Nationals. That is great news. I am guessing that Taylor Canfield, winning Skipper of this year’s event, will be one of them since he spent this past summer doing 5 or 6 (maybe more) ISAF graded match racing events. The timing of Jake’s letter is impeccable because the development of college match racing is a work in progress in North America.
But I just want to clear up a few points Jake made about umpires and wings at match races.
If you have 10 boats, you can run 5 matches in a flight. That requires 10 umpires (2 per match) and possibly a couple of umpires in a single wing boat…not one for every match. That only happens in the America’s Cup.
We often umpire without a dedicated wing boat, so that would reduce the number of umpires by 2. What we do is have the second umpire team doing the “wing” for the first match, 3rd umpire team “wings for the 2nd match, etc. The 5th match does not get a pre-start umpire, but the first umpire team is often finished its match as the 5th match goes into the pre-start, so they end up “winging” for that last match.
But 10 boats is a lot. Many events only use 8 boats. Then you just need 8 umpires for the 4 matches. If you have a wing boat, that is great. If not, you just do what was described above.
Wings are valuable to be sure, but not critical to an event. Umpires are used to doing their jobs without wings if the budget does not allow for them. So you can do an 8, 10, 12 or 16 team event with 8 competing boats, 4 umpire boats and 8 umpires. Of course there will be boat swapping, but that is normal.
By the way, The US Sailing Center at Sail Sheboyan just hosted the first Midwest Collegiate Sailing Association Invitational match racing clinic and regatta on October 16. Seven teams participated. Look for more of the same from Sail Sheboygan…and look for much more college match racing in the USA in the near future.
And, a little informal survey by me this summer shows that match racing is exploding in the USA. There were somewhere around 35-40 ISAF graded match racing events in North America this year. What’s more, there were about 125-150 additional ungraded match racing events. Those were mostly informal weekday evening or weekend series held in San Francisco Bay, Chicago, Toronto and Detroit during just about every week from May through September (I apologize to any area that I left out…as I said, this was a very informal survey).
If the ISAF Match Racing Committee can help get college match racing rolling in North America, just let us know.
Henry L. Menin, IU
Chairman, ISAF Match Racing Committee
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