Before the USHPA BOD meeting, I published an article on how we could choose the National Champion as the one who has the highest cumulative score from their best two or three of all our USHPA sanctioned meets. This is sort of the way we do it now for NTSS ranking, but under this plan restrict it to just the current year and just to US meets.

So assuming just the pilot's best two results, let's say that a pilot gets 550 points from the Big Spring meet and 575 points from the King Mountain Meet, and 300 points from the East Coast Championship and 450 points from the Santa Cruz Flats Race. Then their score would be 1125 points (the sum of their top two scores). If this sum was higher than any other pilot's sum of their top two scoring meets for that year, then they are the national champion, whether they won those two meets or not.

A pilot could only attend two meets and still be the national champion if they went to the meets with the highest value (and therefore toughest competition) and did well against that competition. So this would be more fair as this is a big country and not all pilots can attend all meets.

Now apparently a lot of pilots (hang glider and paraglider) liked this idea because many of the Regional Directors received emails about this after I published the article and told pilots to contact their regional Directors, but like a game of telephone the message got mangled by the time it got to the Competition Committee (isn't this just the way of the world?).

This idea got mashed up with the idea of who would have the Nationals. Of course, when one person comes to the Competition Committee with sponsorship hanging in the balance and needs the moniker, well, all consideration of the best way to choose the National Champion (and support all the USHPA sanctioned competitions) goes out the window.

The people meeting in the USHPA Competition Committee seemed to think that the idea was to designate two competitions as National competitions, when the original idea was to have all our competitions as part of the National series. Let the pilots choose which ones to go to. Let the meet organizers advertise their meets as National Competition Series meets.

These people seemed to think that the idea was to spilt proportionally the "value" of the meets, when the original idea was to let the quality of the pilots determine the value of the meets, just like we do it now with the NTSS ranking.

So hopefully, I've made what I think is a fairly simple idea (and it wasn't my idea to begin with) more understandable, so at least we can have an intelligent discussion about it.