The SNRC regatta has officially opened and the coaches will be making the race entries over the weekend. This is a one-day regatta with a limited set of events but a set of events that will give all of you multiple chanches to race.

It is extremely important that you indicate to both coaches your availability for this regatta, or your lack of availabity. The coaches need to know this by Sunday evening.

Why is this important? The reason is many fold and here are some of them.

Entering a race costs money. This ranges from $45 for a single to $65 for an eight. Seeing as we are going to top heavy with quads/fours/eights our entry fees will nudge upwards of about $800.

Once we commit the entry to the system there is no turning back. We cannot recoup that money if we have to make changes. There is a means of changing the name of an athlete in a boat but that also costs money. This is provided that we can substitute in an athlete. This may not be possible if the timing of the races do not allow us to make changes. Pulling an athlete from one crew to build out another crew penalizes the crew that is present and ready to compete. Coaches will not do that.

The result of you deciding not to race after entries are made is a very big impact on your fellow athletes. They will be denied an opportunity to race and hopefully this is known before we all show up next Saturday. Having a partial crew show up to race is not a fun experience and one that your crew mates will remember.

The cost impact does not end. Scratching a crew from a race also means that a scratch fee is applied. In previous years this was $50. So the cost of making an entry to a race and then scratching means yet more financial cost. For an eight this comes to a total of $115 of entry fee and scratch fee.

In previous years, scratch fees and name changes have impacted the program to roughly $150 to $300 for this regatta. That represents 4-5 races that could have been entered.

The additional aspect of this is that these fees are paid up front by the coaches who then get reimbursed from funds generated through fund raising efforts. We have not done any fund raising and the cupboard is bare. The coaches are discussing how best for us to fund the current racing programming. More to follow on this.

So not wanting to race is fine by the coaches. Indicating that you will race and then not race is definitely not fine with the coaches and it is downright annoying to your crew mates.

Plan on being a good crew mate and follow what is being indicated above.