Rio Grande Sailing Club: NMSU College sailing lessons cancelled, for the moment:

I am sorry to inform you that the NMSU student trip will be cancelled due to lack of students. I greatly appreciate your time and effort in making this trip run. I feel more advance notice would have given us a better chance to market this to our students. I feel this could be a success in future and would like to attempt this again next fall. We are working hard to get student involvement and educate them about different sports. Again, I appreciate everyone's generosity and helpfulness in sharing this great sport.

Ben _____ Assistant Director Intramurals


Hi Ben,
Not having been in on the beginning of planning the watersports education trip, I may have misunderstood what sort of trip it was. My mis-impression was that it was a class group and that the students would come to the lake to work on water safety and watersports education as part of a regular class. From your note below, it sounds more like it was planned as an enrichment or optional fun activity, which wasn't necessarily limited to a particular class or section or a class. My impression was that you had a captive audience and we in the sailing club didn't know you would need to market to your students. Had we known, we could perhaps have helped you better.

Of course, I'll do my best to get word out to all the members of our club so that they don't show up at the lake and find no students waiting for them. No doubt the families and skippers who had built their weekend plans around this event will be disappointed not to be able to meet the NMSU students and make a contribution to sailing education and water safety.

Since this event seems to have been intended as more of an "enrichment" activity and apparently is not tied to any class curriculum or requirements, maybe you could take advantage of other means of promoting water safety in conjunction with the RGSC, State Parks, and other organizations. For example, we would hugely enjoy having an opportunity to help launch a sailing club on the NMSU campus. (New Mexico Tech is organizing a club.) Also, NMSU students would be very welcome to show up at our pre-race skippers' meetings to crew on boats. Another possibility might be bringing RGSC, State Parks, or Coast Guard Auxiliary folks as guest presenters at an outdoor recreation class, or of perhaps serving in a station or booth during a campus fair that features outdoor recreation opportunities. What do you think might work? Who are the best people at NMSU to contact and what are the best channels or organizations for this purpose?

We could work with the outdoor recreation and other NMSU groups in many ways, if you and other educators at NMSU have an interest and commitment to promote water safety and safe recreation and prevent watersports-related deaths and injuries. Given the tragedies on our lakes and waterways, and the too-often unacknowledged vulnerability of college-age youth to these tragedies, the need is real and we would be highly negligent if we did not try to promote water safety. Please let us in the RGSC know what you think would be the best means of getting word out and working with you on campus.
Thanks,
Pat _____



Pat thank you very much for your input. I do greatly appreciate working with you and all of the people that were willing to help out. I do feel this program is something that will be a part of my program (OutdoorAdventure Program).
Ben _____