Veering? Well Mr. Roberts, your definition appeared to be pretty exclusive--and certainly excluded any shoots in this part of the country. Stan's definition was less exclusive: what holds true "at almost every big shoot of 300 participants or more." He didn't say: "Larry, don't look at shoots with 300 participants or more in Wisconsin, because they're an exception to the rule." And Mr. Jankowski made no attempt whatsoever to define a "major shoot", other than to say that there's a huge difference from other shoots. But either couldn't or wouldn't explain what the "huge difference" is.
Kinda hard to have an intelligent discussion if we can't come up with a common definition of what we're talking about. Failing that, in this case, I went back to Stan's criteria (the only one with a quantifiable element: number of participants) and applied it to shoots of that size in WI. Went back and picked up 3 more years' worth of state shoots. Out of 4 of those, in just 1 year did the number of M and AA participants exceed all other classes combined. If I really wanted to load the results, I could have looked at the Iron Man (meets the size criteria) for the last umpteen years, and I'm confident that the lower class numbers would ALWAYS exceed M + AA--by a significant margin. But I thought that wouldn't be fair, so I didn't include that.
But hey . . . if it makes you guys feel better to move the goal posts and tell me that WI shoots are an exception to the rule (even though they meet Stan's size criteria), then I have nothing else to add . . . being unwilling to research shoots of 300+ participants in other states to see if the results are any different.
Last edited by L. Brown; 02/22/19 01:42 PM.
