Your clubs and classes need your help in helping people become race officials, and Australian Sailing needs your help to mentor and train them.

The role of a race official is often a difficult one. Giving up your time to enable other people to have their fun. Luckily being on protest committees late at night at a redress hearing listening to protracted debates over an alleged dodgy OCS call is an exceptionally rewarding experience. It will be fun they said.

In short sailing needs more people involved to help run races, and the only people the sport can turn to are people like you. Can you tap someone on the shoulder, can you introduce them into the club’s race committee, can you convince your club they should train their volunteers? Can you help Australian Sailing run that training?

Probably the biggest driver for training race officers is to make sure your club runs a great event. But there is some self interest here too. Well run races protect the club from reputational risk. There is also the safety component. A well drilled team who know what they’re doing understand when to postpone or abandon races, how to have a safety plan and what to do if things go wrong.

Umpiring is a major challenge nationally. Team Racing for school aged youth is a major nurturing ground for competitive sailors, and Match Racing is an area that many big clubs invest heavily in by way of club owned boats and graded events. Yet many have trouble filling in trained umpire teams, an essential part of giving the competitors accurate and fast calls.

Looking around Australia at the moment New South Wales and Queensland are stand out leaders for the careful dance between Australian Sailing’s Club Services & Operations teams led by the state or territory’s respective Regional Manager, and the volunteer Race Officials Committees that provide the muscle behind what they need. These states have courses for 2020 mapped out and set up. If they don’t get the numbers they’ll simply call the course off, and that’s fine. But they have a plan and it is communicated. There’s no shortage of great people chipping in to run the courses.

In Tasmania with a much smaller constituency spread between what are really only two zones; North and South (note, the author might get in trouble for this geographic opinion), the 2019 courses were set up and run the same. The whole system is scalable and follows more or less the same model no matter where in Australia we are looking at.

Some courses are delivered by State level officials, some by National level. Not all courses need an International Race Official to deliver the training, but the role of these highly skilled people is clear – leadership, mentoring and sharing their expertise. The Rules Specialist Group play this role well. The RSG handles appeals and everyone on the Group makes sure they bring a couple of people in to be part of it and learn. Is this, bringing people in, something you can do?

Most states in Australia have a Race Officials Committee to help drive this area of sailing forward. Their role in all of this is to support Regional Managers to:

• Drive recruitment of new Race Officials
• Deliver Race Officials training
• Provide clubs, classes and boats technical support
• Support local events with appointment of officials

If you want to help, please see who you can bring into the team. Help your club or class get organised. Help by contacting your state or territory’s Race Officials Committee and Club Services & Operations Regional Manager and see how you can get involved. https://www.sailing.org.au/about/ourstaff/