awk wrote:The Loofa wrote:In a similiar vein and referring to the UK Cup thread, this is the first time that the UKC and the FCC have gone on into the autumn (they used to be confined to the competition season). I thought the turn-out in the finals of both to be really pathetic, and show that the year-round schedule for them is a bad one.
This was, I gather, exacerbated by the fact that the FCC final was not a mass start event. I was reasonably reliably told that quite a few juniors had intended to run until they discovered it was a standard format. A standard event, with no real motivation to run, outside the competition season and in a part of the world that isn't super attractive (cf Scotland or Lakes) wasn't an attractive proposition. I can see why. It certainly broke every rule that we tried to observe in setting the competition up in the first place.
I wasn't aware that FCC finals had mass starts in the past. I thought the attraction in past years was that the final was linked to JWOC selection in the Spring.
Moving it to the Autumn has meant that some juniors have received very mixed messages. Some juniors were told that the reason a team wasn't sent to JEC in September was that it wasn't the right time of year to be peaking for a top competition, and those that went to JEC under their own steam to experience terrain similar to future JWOC areas were discouraged by BOF. Apparently juniors received emails encouraging them to attend FCC Final to support a prestigious Junior event! Seems to be a contradiction here.
