OG SUP said...

I just read Alicats post and realised that the Women yet again only have 8 spots at the National SUP Surfing Titles.

Well that's just my assumption, but considering the allocations for both NSW and Victoria are the same as last year, I'm pretty confident they wont be adding extra sports for any other state either (they could prove me wrong!)

If they are moving to a stand-alone Sup National Titles Event, I would have liked them to encouraging some more growth in the womens divisions, rather than just bulking up the allocations for the masters men and adding an extra age division for them.

I understand that the demographic of our sport is such that there are a lot of older competitors who want to be competitive in their respective age divisions rather than competing in an open title against all the young guns, however with the absence of junior divisions (and numbers of potential competitors) in the majority of events, the Open divisions become the future of the sport and IMO should be expanded to encourage growth of the sport a a high performance level, rather than being sacrificed to cater for older age groups.

Well it was an assumption, but just had a look at the info package for the NSW titles.
Here's the allocations across all division - racing and surfing.

Ock makes a good point - Surfing Australia follows the gold in a lot of ways and Angie just made it pretty hard to ignore the contribution she brought to the overall result of the team. Take away her medals and those of Jordan Mercer in prone, and Australia looks decidedly shaky.

Just on the women's successes, in SUP Emmas 1st 2010, 2nd 2011, Kristi 5th 2011 and 4th 2012. Not bad for a state with as few as 3 or 4 competitors.

Phill