Even with several throw-outs, attendance is an important factor in Series and Season results.
We could let this reward for good attendance remain for the Spring Summer and Fall Series, but use an average result to compute places for the overall Season, if we wanted to.
USSailing has such an alternate system, mentioned in their presciptions: scoring a long series at their website.
The scoring systems in Appendix A may be inappropriate for a long series, such as a club’s season championship held over several weeks or months, in which some boats do not compete in all of the races and in which more boats compete in some races than in others. See ‘Scoring a Long Series’ at www.ussailing.org/rules/longseries for an explanation of the scoring problems that occur in such series, alternative scoring systems, and language for sailing instructions to implement them.
A short description is: Add up over all the races you attended the number of boats who raced in your fleet; this is N. Add up all the boats you beat, plus one for yourself, for every race you finished cleanly (no DSQs, etc.); this is m. You need to attend a minimum number of races (say, half) to qualify for a season score. If you qualify, your season score is m/N.
Here is how a couple of past years results would have worked under this sytem. I left off the names and sail numbers, to avoid the distraction, but left the results in the order of how our current scoring system placed these results.
See also: related article in March 2010 Newsletter
The default scoring system in Appendix A of the Racing Rules of Sailing scores DNF and DNS the same way: each gets points equal to the nubmer of boats who came to the starting area, plus one (RRS A9). This would require the start-line committee to record how many boats came to the starting area for each race.
FSC treats DNF better than DNS. DNF gets you points equal to the number of boats who actually finished, plus one. This only makes a difference when several boats sit out a race. This would requires the start-line committee to record which boats start each race, Instead, at FSC, in theory, we ask each sailor to note his own DNF on the sign-up sheet (lest he be scored DNS). In practice, the finish-line committee figures it out, asking questions when needed.
FSC also treats DNC differently than in default RRS scoring. Instead of counting the boats 'entered' in the series, we use the number of boats at the best attended race of the series. I know of no problem with the way we treat DNCs.
We could, if we want to, eliminate the DNS versus DNF distinction,
and score simply according to Appendix A.
The implementation of Appendix A would be:
(1) all boats on the sign-in sheet are considered to have
“come to the starting area” for each race
unless they tell the RC otherwise, and
(2) in place of "number of boats entered in the series" we use
the number of boats in a fleet at the best-attended race for that fleet.
The tables at the links below highlight the few places where this change would have affected our scoring over the past two years.