Jake,
There is no definition, and there are two or three different theories about how to handle junior/youth sailing (and it also gets complicated because some people have different definitions for "junior" and "youth", but I just use them interchangeably).

In my opinion, all kids should be in junior sailing programs on prams (Optimist dinghies) from ages 8-12. At that point most kids start moving onto Lasers and Club 420's and a couple of other popular classes, and they usually sail those until they are 18 years old.

I think the idea is that we need a catamaran as another option for kids during those years from 12-18. And now there is going to be a Youth Development Class or something like that for kids age 19-22, and that would involve training them on actual Olympic class boats.

Now, some people in the multihull group think one cat can work for that whole age range from 12-18. Other people think we need two cats, one for ages 12-16 and another for 16-18. Since the Hobie 16 has been sort of considered the default youth boat for a long time, some think we need something like the Hobie Wave or Dragoon or Mystere 4.3 for the younger kids and the Hobie 16 for the 16-18-year-olds.

I am one who thinks we should use the same boat for ages 12-18. The Mystere 4.3, the Dragoon and the Hobie Wave all have the ability to be an extremely versatile platform that can go from very simple and basic to as complex as you want to make it. All have the ability to be sailed with either one or two people, and with a variety of sail combinations. (And they can be used to teach adults as well as children.) By the time kids are 15 or 16 years old, they will probably be at a fairly complex level with the boat. It does not make sense to me to, at that point, move them onto a Hobie 16, which is a much more basic boat, for two years, and then put them onto a Tornado.

In addition, it will be hard enough to convince yacht clubs and other sailing programs to add a multihull to their fleet, without telling them, "By the way, you will have to have two different boats." One 420 is a lot cheaper than two cats -- and takes up a lot less space. Same thing goes for parents who want to buy one for their kids.

Isn't NAMSA supposed to be working with the Multihull Council on getting all this sorted out? It would be nice if a committee could get together and say, "This is how it is going to be," so we can move forward and make it work. We're never going to get anywhere until we have a plan.There are probably parents out there who would be willing to buy a boat for their kids if they just knew what boat to buy.

And as I have said before, it doesn't have to be the same boat everywhere -- there is already a big fleet of 4.3's in Ohio, and there are a lot of Waves in Florida, and maybe somebody will start a fleet of Dragoons somewhere. But there should be some guidelines for existing organized sailing programs that want to add catamarans. One boat or two different sizes? When we get admitted to Junior Olympic Festivals, what type(s) of cats are going to be used? What type/size of cats are going to be used at the annual U.S. Youth Multihull Championships? Are Hobie 16's going to continue to be used for the ISAF Youth World Championships?

Talk, talk, talk. Lots of questions and no answers. This has been going on for years.

The only successful junior catamaran sailing program I know of is Larry Hale's Boy Scout Camp at St. George's Island in the Florida Panhandle. What we need to do is clone Larry and set up camps like that around the country.

I should add there is another theory, like Mindy's, about starting kids out on 14's and moving up to 16's. And it sounds logical if we are working strictly within the catamaran community. However, NAHCA has worked for years to get youth programs going on Hobie 16's, and it has not been very successful, mostly because beach-cat sailors do not have much infrastructure for ongoing programs. And that is why the Multihull Council is now taking a whole different approach in trying to get catamarans accepted into the mainstream sailing world, where the infrastructures do exist. I do not know how to say this without having the Hobie 14 and 16 people think I am bashing their boats, because I am not; however, I think that if we are going to make any progress with the establishment that is dominated by monohull sailors, we need a boat that is more high tech and that looks more like what they will think of as a "real boat" and that we can reasonably argue is providing an "Olympic path" for our multihull sailors. If the Hobie 16 had been accepted as our Olympic catamaran, it would be a different story. Although catamaran kids might prefer the Hobie 14 and Hobie 16, I think the problem is that we do not have enough catamaran kids, so we are now trying to attract the monohull kids.

To do that, we have to deal with a lot of politics and elitist attitudes. It is not about trying to push kids into SERIOUS racing. It is just that we have to jump through all these hoops just to get to the point of being included at all in the huge world of youth sailing so we can at least show other kids how much fun cats are, regardless of whether they want to race them. Right now monohulls and multihulls are in parallel worlds that do not mingle much.