Mike Wash asked a question about a field on the Event screen: the Scoring – Standard/ Combined/ Average drop-down. This is a common question, so here is the response I sent to Mike.
You can normally ignore the Scoring field (leave as Standard). But here is what it does…
Standard is as you would expect: Appendix A scoring for a single event
Average was inspired by a New Zealand club – the Tauranga Radio Sailing Club. They recognize that, on club days, not everyone can sail every race. They may need to do something else, they may not be physically capable, or they may want to sit out a race or two to sort their boat out. So “Average” scoring gives an average for every race they start. DNS does not hurt their average. If you were interested you could take any club day, change the scoring type to average and see what happens. (You can change it back again)
Combined is something we used for a while in the Wellington Radio Yacht Club. Our annual Murray Rountree Memorial regatta (IOM) is an open event that attracts sailors from around the country. This was a bit daunting for beginner sailors, or those who could not manage 2 days of full on sailing. But we wanted to encourage those people to enter. So we allowed people to enter the Commodore’s Challenge. If you entered the Commodore’s Challenge you raced with everyone else, but you could sit out a few races without hurting your average. We made a rule that you had to sail 7 races, or a full day’s worth of races, whichever was the lesser. Scoring is divided into the two categories – the full regatta and the secondary regatta. You can try this out on a new event or an existing event:
– change Scoring to Combined
– pick a few entries and change their entry type from “Full Regatta” to “Average Scoring”
– Name the secondary event
– check the Score and see what happens