SUP Mag UK lo-res free to readers July 2014 lo-res - free to read | Page 30

Cotton-wool pandering
approach

along with a higher price tag for the service.
In doing so, you must delve into the past
sporting history of the individual and create
a structured approach which sets out to
spark their imagination and interest. One
way to achieve this, is to avoid making
learning overly easy and to ensure that
stabilising muscles are indeed being fired to
induce a reaction of the core muscles.
The net result can be electric; in so much as their body will be charged with
chemicals and electrical impulses in trying to stay connected with the board
and maintaining balance while swinging the paddle. Your student at session
end should, in short, be knackered and red-faced, their body surging with feelgood endorphins after their first experience – not so unstimulated as to be
bordering on an outbreak of narcolepsy. A soporific experience it must not be.
As SUP sport matures, so too should our
interpretation and approach to how it
should be promoted to those not yet
converted. This is especially important
when considering those who are already
talented watersports enthusiasts; or
snowboarders, mountain bikers and their
kind. As instructors gain in confidence, they
need to adjust their strategies for teaching
and hence for learning, so as to elevate the
first time experience and seek new ways to
not only create novel and captivating
strategies to hook their students, but
strategies that ensure students do not leave
with a casual indifference to the sport, but
feel fired up, challenged, elated and stoked
to want to come back for more.

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At the beginning of the evolution of
windsurfing, it was by default hard to learn.
Despite the level of physicality required
and more especially the skills required to
master it, where falling and retrieval went
hand in hand with the learning experience,
the sport flourished. Not because it was
easy; far from it. And there was not much
that instructors could do to make the
learning process much easier – it was hard,
period. When compared to the average SUP
sport first time experience today, you have
to question if the cotton-wool, pandering
approach, supported often in turn by the
industry’s obsession with making barndoor
stable boards, is in fact somewhat counterproductive, if not certainly counterintuitive, to what should in fact be a wetter,
harder, tougher, first time experience.
Much of this stems from the windsurfing
industry (now SUP converts) paranoia in
wanting to avoid taking SUP sport to its
extremes in nullifying the elderly, the
young and the women as it did with its
original core business of windsurfing.
However, in respect of the end-users actual
experience and even of intermediate
paddlers, the obsession with stability and
not falling off could well be hindering the
appeal and attracting the lower end of the
socio-athletic gene pool, whilst ignoring all
others – to the detriment of the sport.
What’s needed is broader appeal through a
broader approach to instruction; you could
even go so far as to run differing entry-level
courses based on pre-existing skills, easily
offered with a vivid imagination.

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