I have a hard time agreeing with what has been stated. I have seen a number of pilots forego basic and start in higher classes and be perfectly successful. And I have seen other pilots more through the classes and fail to develop the most basic skills like centering rolls or remembering to pause on point rolls. moreover, imac does not recognize basic as a competitive class, so why start there? the worst scenario in starting in sp is tanking an unknown, and anyone can recover from that. aside from that, the sequences are not sufficiently different that one has to fly B to get to S. and as far as Intermediate...rollers are such low K that they do not affect contest outcomes. Contests are won on the vertical and thats what can make Sp interesting. the guys that i know that burned out from trophy chasing did so because most of them practiced so much that they perfected the same mistakes and come contest time they could never improve.