FatSebastian wrote:I would be interested to hear from Stan since this is in his backyard too, and knowing that Stan advocates for district races being "
selective but not too selective".
gman247 wrote:Oh it doesn't matter if you do your best or not and it doesn't matter if you're lazy and didn't race at your pack.. Just come on down and pay your money and you can race a square block against the best cars in the area!
FWIW, some other districts run their races this way. As noted
elsewhere, we observed that what naturally happens is that kids do well at the Pack level will enter the District race, while those who do poorly at Pack level tend to not bother with the District race, so it tends to work out to about the same level of participation. It also provides a racing opportunity for a small minority that did not have the chance to compete at the Pack level (e.g., the Pack did not have a derby, the boy missed his derby because he was traveling to his grandmother's funeral, etc.).
Aside from being "traditional", i.e. inherited from past organizers (pre-1985), the 4 qualifiers per rank per pack was justified by a more-or-less national survey of methods and participation that I conducted ca 1990. From that approximately 50 district/council survey, I concluded that participation in the event peaked when between 3 and 4 racers qualified per rank per pack.
The rationale (my interpretation) was that qualification criteria encouraged packs to actually hold races, and, having qualified, most qualifiers would actually participate.
Since event participation is one of the measures of success (i.e. by which the unit serving professional is evaluated), I concluded that participation rate (# participating divided by total pool of Cub Scouts in the district/council) was an important measure.
The down-side of qualification, aside from other factors already mentioned, is that registration comes in by pack, and start to come in only after the pack has held its races and the pack leadership has put its entry together. This means that registrations don't come in early! (My grandson's race was last night, 11 days prior to the district race and another to which I loaned some equipment held their race last Saturday, 14 days prior.) Such a "late registration" peak risks causing panic! And Wotamalo, the smallest district in our Council, almost always has unit serving professionals who are encountering their first district Pinewood Derby!
This is a recipe for PANIC!
"PANIC" is my best guess based on hearing of this notification last night.
While I don't expect to see any meaningful difference in this year's participation rate, I would expect it to reduce the participation rate in the future district PWD events.
If I were to recommend any relaxation of the qualification rule, it would be to automatically qualify children of adults who give a half day (at least) to the event operation! In a sense, this would be sometimes allowing parents to "buy their son's way" with service, but it would alleviate one of the main difficulties in recruiting event staff, i.e. not wanting to commit until they knew their son(s) would be participating. That would make the event chairman feel a lot less stressed!
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p.s. The event rules do not tell packs how to select their representatives. Unless it changed recently, the packs are not required to hold races in order to select representatives. They could even ask for interested volunteers and, if too many, draw straws! I don't recommend this, but it is an "out" for those leaders who are too unable to even borrow a track and hold an event!
