University of Arkansas Price increase

[j-stroke]

My name is Jonathan Vogler and I am the Coordinator for the Outdoor Connection Center at the University of Arkansas. I wanted to address some of the issues that are being brought up on the discussion board. Hopefully I can clarify some of the reasons behind some of the changes going on with the Outdoor Connection Center (OCC).

Price increase: The practice sessions are now $10 (up from $5) for non-university affiliated individuals. The HPER building charges a $5 guest pass fee for entry by anyone who is not a HPER member. The OCC does not receive any of the money paid for HPER guest passes. We have to pay to staff the practice sessions and the money for that has to come from somewhere. When there are mostly students we can justify spending the money given to us from the university that was paid by students and HPER members. When there are mostly non-university affiliated individuals attending a program, we can no longer justify using money that comes from students to pay to run that program. I hope you will understand that we are not trying to sever ties with the paddling community. We just have to be responsible in how we spend the money given us by university students and HPER members. When we saw that mostly non-university participants were attending these sessions, we had to find another way to fund this program.

Kayak Clinics: The OCC will no longer be teaching kayak roll clinics. Most of those attending these clinics in the past have never been on a river and had never received instruction on basic paddling skills. We feel we could better serve our participants by focusing our instruction on paddling fundamentals (forward stroke, back stroke, sweep, braces, self-rescues, etc.) with the kayak roll being introduced but not the course focus. The idea being NOT, as one person posted on the discussion board “that if you have good solid strokes and concepts, you'll never need to roll”, but that a person will be much more prepared to paddle on moving water with these skills as opposed to having only been instructed on how to roll a boat in a pool. What good are we really doing teaching a kayak roll to someone who doesn’t know a proper forward stroke, sweep, or brace?
I will be the instructor for these clinics. I have taught paddling for about five years and am an ACA level 3 whitewater instructor. These clinics will occur a few times per semester and one of them will also include a portion of instruction on moving water (assuming we get some rain). We will also have practice sessions about one Thursday a month from 6:30pm-9:30pm.
I know that the Canoe Club has many opportunities in the area for paddling instruction and our goal is to funnel our participants into the local paddling community to advance their skills beyond the scope of what we offer.

I hope this may alleviate some of the questions many people have had. If anyone has any further questions or comments, please feel free to respond to this post or email me jwvogle@uark.edu.

-Jonathan Vogler

[mgood]

Quality post- glad to see some proper communication starting.

Maybe a deal could be had here? I'd like to know what can be done to keep roll classes, and for a reasonable price.
Just for the record, I'm both a student and a proper ACC member. Let's get to talking.

[Cowper]

Good post, thanks! And I like your "balanced" approach to teaching more than one skill.

Just to clarify, this discussion is about UA Fayetteville. UALR pool sessions are not impacted at this time.

Edit: After reading some of the other posts that were referred to, I realize there may be more to the "local" story than I am aware of. But I remain glad there seems to be an attempt to communicate on the issues and maintain a relationship with the boating community, and I thank everyone who has helped keep this discussion a civil one.