@ sps3172,

You raise some good points. It also raises the question, for just whose benefit is it to recruit more competitors? Nearly every club member's seen me fly and had a look at my plane if they're interested enough, I'm not sure I'd be doing them a favour trying to convince them to blow 1/3rd the cost of a new YS engine to travel to a comp for a weekend just so there's one more name on the competitors entry list.

I'm not so sure I agree 100% with people disliking being "beaten", but the discipline aspect of any competitive endevour does take away from the recreational aspect.

I accept that some still receive genuine enjoyment from just getting a plane into the air and getting it back down in one piece, a not so simple task sometimes given the state of some of the planes I've seen people try to fly :-) I almost eny them for that while I'm cursing a trim issue that only rears it's head during one part of one maneuver that I can't mix/trim out.