Well, we had a chat about this at the varsities talk, to sum up...
We've done our best to pick the strongest teams we can, weighing up:
- suitable proficiency
- experience
- fitness
- training
- performance in other kayaking competitions this year (where applicable)
Obviously that's not at all black and white, but our motivation was always to pick the strongest team, so that everyone in the club would benefit from a good result.
It's very much out of character of the ethos of the club to refuse anyone a go, but the nature of varsities means we had to come up with some way of picking small teams for some events (four or seven people out of the 220 members who signed up this year is obviously difficult).
There's not much experience in the club at the strategy or tactics of entering competitions, so we've done our best to pick teams who'll give each event their all.
We've been running varsity training on as many club trips as possible since Christmas in an effort to get everyone prepared for long distance, which should give anyone who's invested time with us a chance to represent UCD at Varsities.
Anyone who won't be competing in whitewater at varsities but would like to try something similar (maybe even better, since far more of us can enter...and UCD are guaranteed to win) should look into the
35th anniversary ball boatercross.Anyone interested in freestyle should keep an eye on the Saturday trip sign ups as we hope to begin introducing more freestyle into trips as the weather warms up.
