We're getting ready to have our 1-day meet on June 23rd and I have been trying to get some of my club members to try Sportsman. When I sit down with them to explain all the maneuvers in the Sportsman pattern, their 1st comment is, man that is a lot of stuff! I don't know how the Sportsman pattern got so long, but it used to be quite a bit shorter. It's really meant as a "get your feet wet" event just to give pattern a try. I think it's gotten to be much more then that.

Jamie is a fellow club member and a new friend. He came down to the Bakersfield event with a new model he bought from another club member on Wednesday. It isn't really a pattern model, it is a small Katana sport model. He flew some of the Sportsman maneuvers with it in practice late Friday, then flew the entire pattern flown at Bakersfield in the first round of the contest. He got hooked, bought a 2-meter Evolution from Jean Greear, and has been at the field nearly every day since Bakersfield flying. So I think, at least in his case, Chip's idea worked. Or maybe Jamie would have gotten hooked anyhow.

I can understand wanting to fly the entire pattern. Sportsman will fly the full pattern at my meet on the 23rd. But if you decided to skip Chip's contest because of a shortened Sportsman pattern you would have missed flying and participating in maybe the best pattern event D-7 has had in decades. It certainly had the biggest entry in Sportsman that I can remember in quite some time. I'm already looking forward to next year's event and have offered my assistance to the Bear Mountain club in any way to help it happen again.