Vic Champs Update # 4

Published Sun 02 Mar 2025

Thank you for bearing with us during the changes as we reset the venue and operational aspects of this regatta.

We realise that the travel and accommodation aspects have an impact on clubs and paddlers and after being informed by the LNY responses, we have initially scheduled the races partly based on grouping racing for cohorts.

We are also designing the schedule to minimise the concentration of paddlers at the venue at the same time and reduce the load on resources and crowding in what is a mixed residential and active recreation area.

We’re starting with our Premiers. The predominant life stage of these younger adults means that they are often balancing more social, family and career commitments with their sport participation, so following the Australian Sports Commission’s guidance we are scheduling them first with the plan that we can organise their two days racing into the first part of Saturday and they can go attend to their other commitments should they wish.

Likewise, with BCS (and ACP) we are scheduling them around the middle of Saturday. This means that “on the day” travel from a regional area will be possible for many and that returning that day is possible.

Seniors are scheduled for the end of Saturday, and Sunday is all Senior racing.

This framework supports higher participation of volunteers who want to paddle as well because they can Volunteer outside their block of racing.

With schedules and draws – we run into a problem that we don’t know how many teams and races there are yet so can’t plan the timings.

Also, as was highlighted leading into LNY, when Clubs don’t know the schedule, they can’t enter the precise categories that work for them and we end up with changes to the draw. This goes on and on, the clubs don’t know what’s happening and this creates further uncertainty and changes and more rework for everyone

We really think this is a classic “chicken or the egg, which came first” issue that we don’t have the perfect solution for yet.

Accordingly, we’ve created this schedule and are sharing it with clubs, we’d like the clubs to have a look and come back with any comments or suggestions by midday Tuesday.

At this stage we have not scheduled 18U racing as anecdotally we have been informed that we don’t have enough Juniors to have meaningful racing.

We’d like to bring the team entries forward to this Sunday (9th March) at 10 am so that the people who work on the draw together can do their work collaboratively over a weekend window.

Based on this draw and feedback we get; we will open the categories on Tuesday night. Could you please plan to be entering your teams as soon as possible from Tuesday.

Here is the initial schedule. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vQOLFi2zRWdqbAAwJYn7mYL0FUh7-9UOElY9BD72mhmkPHg3Wd3SAlYQXuUq9SlJdP3o2ypsPWkRpsQ/pubhtml

Please send the comments from your Club to ben@dragonboatvictoria.com.au