I spent a good part of yesterday phoning summer camps. You tournament
skiers are probably rolling your eyes at how the Executive Director
wastes his time, but summer camps are critical to the survival of the
OWSA. Like to know why?

First, our friends at the Ministry of Tourism, Recreation and Culture
(the folks who provide our grant support) have unveiled a new scheme to
ensure what they call "accountability". Part of it entails ranking
sports, primarily on size, to determine grant amount. Now, although our
grant has been cut over 30% in the last two years, the new MCTR system
has the potential to finish the job.  In its current form, most sport
organizations would receive massive cuts, and the little OWSA could be
all but wiped out. But, it turns out, we can count every summer camper
who receives help from one of our certified instructors as a
"participant" for Ministry purposes. Did you know Ontario summer camps
pass over 10,000 kids through their water ski programs each year? That
fact won't save our grant, but it might keep a trickle flowing in.

Just to give you an idea of what that ten thousand means, numerically
speaking, the OWSA has about 200 competitive members, 600 regular
members, and a further 300 associate members (associates are those who
take part in the Pro Clinics or other participation programs) - about
1100, all in. Yet, in 1994, we sold about 3900 Skill Award crests to
summer camps, meaning about one camper-skier in three received an OWSA
award, and at least 8000 received instruction from an OWSA-trained
instructor. Put another way, through our instructor and skills
programs, we have access to a group ten times our membership size.

So what? Well, preservation of our fast-shrinking grant aside, "ten
thousand" is a much more attractive number to a sponsor than "200",
which is why O'Brien sponsors our Skills Awards program and nobody
(yet) sponsors our Ontario Team program. And these ten thousand are
kids, which means each has the potential to be a water skier for the
rest of his/her life, to take up competition skiing, whatever. That
makes summer camps an obvious target for our programs. But as always,
there are barriers...

In 1994 we tried to incorporate summer camps into a talent
identification program. "Talent i.d." is just jargon for "only 20% of
our competitive skiers are between 10 and 20 years old, so we had
better find more quick." We planned to collect the names and addresses
from the top Skills Award winners, and invite them to a one-day
coaching clinic. But summer camps are busy places, and in the end only
3 camps out of about 25 actually sent in names. This year, we're
widening the net - we want the names of any young skier who has any
interest in attending a clinic...readers, help us out!

Send in those names!

But I digress. We need summer camps.  They're a terrific potential
source of keen water skiers.  That's why I need to spend a day every so
often calling them up. And if I'm on the phone when you call, we do
have voice mail now!