Congratulations to everybody

We had a successful weekend
Nobody got injured
Everybody had fun
We learned lots about dragonboating
We will be on world wide TV, in french
We got to know people better
We watched lots of good races and entertainment
We are still talking to each other
People bought drinks for each other in the Beer garden

Yes – the last race was disappointing, but then, so
was the first and third of yesterday too.  It's good
that we can be disappointed and want to improve.

I am very happy happy with our overall performance.
Bob, Dave, Kristine and myself can see the wonderful
potential in this group of people that paddled
together as Gung Haggis Fat Choy for the ADBF.  Of the
144 teams in Mixed adult Division – the Rec D Finals
put us with the 81st to 88th ranked teams with 80 above us, and 54 teams below us.

Of the teams in Pool B.  There were only 16 teams that
raced for medals.  48 teams did not race for medals
including HEX (Karen's Brother's team) which ended up
in Rec D consolation – one division below us – because they finished 4th in their semi-final race.  So Karen gets bragging rights over her brother.

We were clearly in the top half of Pool B.  And this
is the equivalent of being a Rec C team in last year's divisions. This marks a big improvement from Gung Haggis's
performance of making it to the Rec D consolation last
year.

I take full responsibility in making the coaching
decisions that contributed to the timing breakdowns in
our race for medals.  Issues involved are timing vs
power + upsetting team chemistry by changing seats.  These are the chances I take when I want to push the team and help
it achieve its potential. 

Sometimes it works (people are happy) sometimes it
doesn't (people are unhappy).  Looking at the overall
results of other teams in the Rec D final – two teams
had dropped down from Pool A – and many had overall
better times than us.  Some teams we had beat before,
or they bettered our times in similar heats.

I made a bid for more power in our boat – instead of
emphasizing timing.  We know very much how important
timing is – it really is everything.  But I had felt
that our timing had been pretty good in each of our
previous races and that we could handle the
adjustments. 

I have made similar coaching decisions for the Rec B and Comp B teams I have coached previously in ADBF.  On both those teams we medalled.  In fact in 2001, I placed 9 women and 11 men on the Comp Boat instead of 8 women and 12 men – in order to emphasize timing over power (we had one male paddler who would usually go out of time during each race).

More analysis later…

See most of you next Sunday – June 27th 1pm.
We will take this Wednesday off from paddling to let
people recover – meanwhile we will look at which
evenings work best for people.  Obviously the 6pm
Wednesday was too early.  I will check out 7:30 to 9pm
slot times on the water.  This means we all meet by
7pm.  Or we might be able to meet at 6:30pm and go out
in a teak boat from 7 to 8:30pm.

Paddles Up, Todd