Nov 2011
Hey Guys
Thanks for your entries this month. Your rounds have been judged and the leader board is running. Check out your scores, judge feedback, coaching feedback and all things SASL on the site (log in for your jump feedback).
We plan to judge the rounds this week so keep an eye on the website to see where you placed in October.
Speaking of competition, congratulations to Andre van Heerden, our very own (temporary, we hope!) South African export to the US
who’s team came 2nd in the FS 4-way Advanced event at the US Nationals last week with a 13.6 average.
(The Advanced category jumps the same draw as the Open category).
For those of you at home in SA, until Nationals, you’ll have to scratch your competition itch with SASL.
November’s draws are out, so get cracking and take them to the skies! The draws are available (with pictures) for download
on the website
You may notice there are only FS draws this month. Sadly, due to lack of support, we have decided to remove the Freefly
event from SASL. Our sponsors contribute very generously towards amazing prizes and we feel that these should be fought
for through exciting and enthusiastic competition. The FS event is thriving and growing each year so we will be throwing
all our resources and efforts into this discipline.
Good luck with the new draws this weekend. Make it count!
Game ON!
The SASL Committee
May 2011
Hi Everyone
SASL Season II is done and dusted and what a fantastic season it has been. Thanks to
unbelievable support from our sponsors, the prizes put SASL onto a whole new level.
Even those who are "all about the competition" were freshly motivated by the loot.
Congratulations to the SASL Season II winners, Mohan Chudalayandy
(Formation Skydiving) and Tracey Delate (Freefly).
If you missed Nationals (shame on you – it was a superb event!) and managed to avoid our
newsletters and updates through the year, check out what our winners walked away with:
An Aerodyne sport canopy of their choice EACH!
- Aerodyne manufacture the Pilot, the Triathlon, the Mamba, the Sensei, the Solo and the
Smart reserve. They are also the Icon container manufacturers. Next time you’re in Durban,
swing past their factory there.
A Larsen & Brusgaard digital visual altimeter EACH!
A Larsen & Brusgaard audible altimeter EACH!
- Larsen & Brusgaard are the name behind so many of the alti’s on our DZ’s -
the ProTrack, Solo II, Optima II, Altitrack and Viso II. Not to mention the good ol’
DYTTER. My first audible was a DYTTER – I still have it and use it regularly and it
still works beautifully.
A Bev Suit of their choice EACH!
- Another amazing brand, Bev suit make formation and freefly suits. My only complaint
is that my Bev Suits have lasted so well, I’ve had to create justifications to get a
new one. I have 2 Bev Suits. The only difference is the purchase date and gripper
colour – I guess that sums up my opinion of the product.
We cannot thank our sponsors enough. It is because of your support and contribution that we
can run this league. We are so proud of the participation which continues to grow and hope you
are reaping rewards from your involvement. We are tremendously grateful.
In addition to the amazing prizes put up this season, the cash sponsorships from so many
people and companies enabled us to cover all our running costs and award a small prize to all
the leading teams too.
To the Judges, who haul themselves across the city (and sometimes between cities!) at night
after work to judge hours of SASL footage for nothing but a glass of wine, thank you!
Thanks too to the SASL Reps, who post the draws, guide novices into competition and push our
league and sponsor brands on the dropzones – we have seen a great word-of-mouth take-on of the
league this season and hope it has lessened your work.
Thanks to the SASL Committee – also hopefully less work than last year, but vital to the
running of the league, we appreciate your hard work. SAB thanks you too ;).
While they are also a sponsor, we would like to thank PASA and the SSA for their continued
support of the league. A truly symbiotic relationship exists between us and the SSA and we
believe that together we are making gains we could not have made independently. Nationals 2011
participation in AE and FS was up by almost 50% on last year! We have big plans for next year’s
Nationals numbers!
Thanks for your enthusiasm and support. We love seeing the near-obsessive strategising,
scheming and calculating going on at the DZ each weekend. We love to see teams using SASL as
part of their training plan. We love the random new-team-mate-each-month jumper who loves to
skydive but doesn’t have a regular team or jumping routine. We love to see jumpers who had run
out of ideas for what to do, going up with a plan and measuring their progress, motivated to
improve. And we love that senior skydivers can now have an additional, very worthwhile motivation
for jumping with novices.
While we appreciate your eager requests for the next draw, the new season will only start in
September. The running season is more fun for all of us but somewhere in between we need to
gather ourselves and prepare for the season. Please keep us foremost in your mind – we spend
this time gathering sponsorships, planning and preparing for the next season. If you or anyone
you know is interested in contributing toward SASL Season III, please contact us
on Game_ON@skyleague.co.za. We appreciate any support you can offer us – SASL reps, SASL
committee members, money, prizes, services or even an enthusiastic voice behind a loud haler –
it’s all part of an awesome, growing community project.
But don’t get too settled in for the winter! While Season III only starts in September, look
out for some random fun SASL events. Nothing is confirmed yet, but we hate the silence so we
might throw in a little something -something this winter to keep you busy and motivated.
Thanks for the feedback from this season – we have received some great ideas and will
implement whatever we can practically and financially to make the league valuable and fun.
Keep sending feedback – now is a great time while it's fresh in your mind and while we have
time to incorporate it into our systems and format before Season III starts.
See you on the DZ!
The SASL Committee
October 2010
Thanks and welcome to our new main sponsors for Season 2, Aerodyne Research and Larsen & Brusgaard. Thanks to them and all
our other sponsors and contributors, the individual winner of each discipline will win these great prizes, valued at
well over R20 000!
- A brand new Aerodyne main canopy of your choice (Choose a SENSEI, MAMBA, VISION, PILOT, or TRIATHLON Series!!) in your colours of choice!
- A brand new Larsen and Brusgaard digital visual alti and brand new audible alti
- A brand new Bev Suit.
Please visit all our sponsors' websites and support them. And be nice to your fellow jumpers - many of them have contributed significantly to this
league and they made it possible to start and make it possible for us to continue. The work, money, donations, word of mouth
time and effort that is so necessary for a project like this and has been so kindly donated by so many people is beyond belief.
The draws are out - you can download them by clicking on the Draws link for your discipline (at the top of this site, next to 'HOME').
Good luck and skydive safe!
Game ON!
September 2010
Thank you for the support, thank you for the non-stop pressure to launch the new season and thank you
to our generous sponsors for supporting our league! The new season is here at last, launching officially this weekend on 1 October.
Because the 1st is a Saturday, we will release the draws early so you are set to start jumping them on Saturday.
While last season's FS winner, Karen Fourie, packs her bags for Europe and her SASL Season 1 prize, make sure you get
on board from the very start of this season. The more you enter, the more points you can earn. If you miss a month,
you’re simply throwing possibilities away!
So what's in store for Season 2, besides just more of the fun stuff? We have made a couple of changes based on last
year's feedback, some fairly important ones I'll mention here and some smaller things you can find on the website.
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Only online footage submissions will be accepted.
-
Last season, our judges worked until wee hours of the night converting footage, copying DVDs and battling
with formats before they could even begin judging. In the name of sanity, we will only accept online submissions.
If your cameraman is unsure of how to do it, contact us for tips and help. Also remind them not to
reduce the quality too much or your footage becomes unjudgable.
- Freefly Novice Category!!
- The SSA AE committee has created a novice freefly category to participation at all levels. Please
give feedback on this by entering the category and letting them know how it works for you. We work closely with the
SSA committees and SASL is a great medium to test out changes and ideas in between Nationals. Remember that we
structure SASL around participation - if you like it, support it! Otherwise we assume nobody wants it and we remove it.
- Freefly Format Changes.
- The freefly competition format has changed to become much the same as the FS competition. Check out the Freefly Rules page for more details.
- Freefly will now consist of 1 free routine and 2 compulsory draws each month. This more closely resembles the
normal Frrefly format and exposes new freefliers to a more realistic competition format.
- December and January Merge.
- Because people are away and many DZs close over December, competitors have requested that we combine December
and January's competitions into a single competition. You will now have 2 months to complete the 'December' draw.
- Atmonauti Removed.
- Based on the participation in Atmonauti last season, we have decided to remove it from the league for now.
Atmo might be reintroduced in the future if demand returns, but for now we will focus on FS and Freefly and give
some time to gear their jumpers better for competition.
We're still completing the packages, but the prizes are already exciting! We have a bevy (flock? pod? clutch?) of returning
contributors from last Season and we're finalising some really cool new sponsors. We are chasing down a couple more
people who's only crime is developing great quality cool stuff, you'll have to be patient. When we have the complete
prizes, you'll be the first to know! In the meantime, direct that energy toward jumping the October draw, because we do know
enough to have confidence that the confirmed prizes are already worth fighting for.
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If you aren’t a registered user on this website, register now (the green button at the
top of this page!).
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Find some buddies – you don’t have to jump with them all season. You don’t need to jump exclusively with them
in any one month either. In the world of SASL, Polygamy reaps rewards!
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Read our newsletters, join our Facebook group and keep an eye on the PASA list serve for the announcement
of the October draw (this week!) or check back here. The draws are all published here (go to "Draws" at the top of this page).
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From 1 October, jump, jump jump! You can repeat the jumps as many times over as you like. Keep practicing and
improving your score. Just be sure to submit your best jump for each of the rounds drawn before the submission deadline.
Get help from seniors, contact the SASL committee members and learn how improve your scores -
we're nuts about competition and can't wait to help you.
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Keep checking back to the SASL site to see your score, track where you stand on the leader board, find advice
and feedback on your jumps from coaches and judges, read news and all sorts of other interesting stuff.
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Check out which companies count (i.e. our generous sponsors) and go shopping. It’s a symbiotic relationship –
if you support them, they keep supporting SASL and you get great prizes and an ever improving league.
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If all this is confusing and the website doesn’t answer your questions, give us a call – the SASL committee is
a friendly bunch and would love to help get you started.
April 2010
Hey everyone
Well we’re into the final month of the first SASL season and some of you have been wondering where the draw is. As the final competition of the season, the April competition will be SA Nationals 2010. All you need to do is enter Nationals and you’re automatically entered into SASL April. The various categories will be weighted and your usual competitor weighting will be applied to come to the results.
FS Nationals is being held at Skydive Xtreme from 27-30 April and entries close on 12 April, so get your entries in! It promises to be a bumper FS competition with 6 novice, 3 intermediate and 5 open teams expected so far. Remember that Nationals is not only for the serious teams who want to represent South Africa. SA Nationals is an invaluable learning opportunity and heaps of fun. There are serious teams who have trained all year for this one competition, there are new teams starting out and there groups of friends who want to go have fun together. However you like to skydive, Nationals offers a great format to do it in. Learn from others, meet jumpers from other regions and get your name on the SASL leader board.
Atmo has experienced some teething problems and has therefore been put on hold until these can be sorted out.
We’d like to thank all of you for your support. We have really enjoyed the first season. More competition is stil needed for our jumpers and judges and hopefully we have further exposed the participating disciplines. We’re gearing up for the next season, which is planned to start in September 2010. We hope to secure exciting prizes again and anyone who would like to contribute financially or otherwise to making Season 2 better than Season 1, please let us know.
Lastly, but not the least - March’s results have been posted and the leaderboards updated.
See you at Nationals!
Game ON!
February 2010
First up: Congratulations to Brendon Delate on winning the first SASL Freefly league!
Brendon has won free freefly coaching jumps with Jean-Philippe this weekend at JSC.
The PAC Partnership already sponsored Jean-Phillippe’s slot, but now Brendon will get his own slots for
free too! That is a really awesome prize.
For FS and Atmo, keep jumping - the freefly league was shortened due to the timing of Jean-Philippe's
visit, but the rest of SASL continues for a few more months still. That means you still have a chance to
knock the leaders off their rung on the ladder.. but get cracking, because each month in the lead gives them
a bigger advantage over the rest.
FS RACE TO ITALY
The FS league has really heated up recently, and shows interesting feedback on the weighting system.
Currently, Karen Fourie is leading with 40 points but Stuart Robinson and Pierre van den Berg are nipping
at her heels with 38 points each. Why is this interesting? Well, Karen has 145 jumps and no tunnel while
Stuart and Pierre are very experienced jumpers with over 1000 jumps and tunnel time behind their names.
Will the 2 seniors pick up some 2-ways in Feb and March to try and bump Karen?
Is Karen up for the challenge? This is the kind of race SASL was looking for.
February will certainly be interesting.
FEBRUARY ACTIVITY
After a quiet Christmas period, we’re expecting activity to pick up again this month.
With the upcoming FS skills camp at Robertson (next weekend) and the Robertson Rumble (27th-28th Feb)
we’re expecting to see some Cape action on the February leader board.
WE NEED EACH OTHER
Please keep the entries coming – even if your jump isn’t your proudest moment or you only
managed to get one round in. Not only can you get valuable feedback on your jumps from coaches and
judges (log onto the SASL website, go to MY STUFF (far right link), then go to MY JUMPS and click on
the speech bubble to the right of your month’s submissions), but it makes the competition fuller and
lets us know that you’re in support of the league. Even if you’re not top of the league, we still
see pockets of “sub-competitions” emerging with teams and people competing furiously with those at
a similar level.
We also encourage you to email us with feedback, questions and concerns about the league to help us
improve. We have had some really valuable feedback from you already and we hope it will improve the league
for you. Thank you.
Hit it hard this month!
Game ON!
December 2009
The November jumps have been judged and the leader boards have been updated.
If you log on and go to “My Jumps” you can see the scores and judges’ feedback from your jumps.
This feedback is valuable for improving your skydiving and for improving your score without necessarily
improving your skydiving.
Karen Fourie is still leading the individual pack in FS, and keeps strengthening her place there.
Brendon Delate is on top of the Freefly individual board, and we have our first Atmonauti entrants with
Marco Ciocca and Laurence Collard.
On the FS 4-way advanced side, November seemed to be a comedy of errors for all involved. Bad weather,
incorrect sequences (!!), lost footage and lost team members have made this category interesting this month.
December is no different from any of the other months in the SASL season – if you don’t enter you lose an opportunity to score points. With many DZs closing for the Christmas period, make sure you do
your SASL rounds early to grab a place on the leader board.
Cape Town, Durbs, EP? Where ARE you guys? Don’t let Gauteng show you up. Get out there and do some
jumps. We’d like to see more entries from the smaller DZs and the coastal DZs. If you’re not sure where
to begin or need help getting there, give your SASL rep or a SASL committee member a shout.
Let’s compete!
The South African Skydiving League
Game ON!
November 2009
Don’t forget you have only one weekend left in which to complete the November rounds for SASL.
Last month saw some interesting results (if you haven’t had a look yet, check out the leader boards.
These results prove that it’s worthwhile to enter no matter what your experience level.
A huge congratulations goes out to Karen Fourie, who is currently in the lead for FS after October’s
results. Karen is one of the least experienced jumpers in the league, and these results reflect
how she is excelling beyond her experience level. As proof that the formula is not unfairly
favouring the novice jumpers, we are seeing very experienced jumpers placing high in the league too.
Congratulations to Tracy Delate, who with only around 40 jumps, placed 7th in October’s results.
The game is certainly on for November. We also have some new sponsors on board (thanks to Nashua
and Simbalism) and continue in our quest to keep adding to the prizes and improving the league.
Please send us your feedback (positive or negative) to help us to deliver the league jumpers want.
If you’re looking for a break from freefall (what?! Never!), get yourself out to JSC this weekend
to witness the world’s greatest swoopers in action. Canopy pilots from all over the world have
already started arriving for training at JSC for the World Cup in Canopy Piloting and the competition
kicks off on Tuesday. The altitude and climate here in South Africa give this World Cup excellent
potential for world records to be broken and if you haven’t watched canopy piloting at this level,
you’re missing out! Take this rare opportunity while we have it and get out to watch this event live.
It’s spectacular!
Most importantly, come and support your country at a world event. Our talented and dedicated team
have trained hard and are making a great name for themselves in swooping . We’re very proud to have
them represent us.
Rob Kruger, Christopher Teague, Selwyn Johnson, Pierre Marais Badenhorst, Dian Kemp, Nicholas
Helfrich, Bertus de Beer, SASL wish you the best of luck, a fantastic meet and safe swoops next week.
We can’t wait!
The South African Skydiving League
Game ON!
October 2009
SASL has been up and running for almost a month now. We have kept the first results under wraps this
month but will publish them at the end of the month when we have all the October entries in. Next month we won't be so
mean and will publish results as they are judged.
After SASL's first 3 weeks, we thought you might be interested to see who is registering with SASL.
We are especially pleased to see the spread of experience levels. This indicates we are achieving one
of our important goals with the league: to give everyone a competition worth entering. It's great to see
so many novice jumpers keen and entering the event.
Thanks to everyone for your support. Let's keep the league strong and a permanent fixture on the skydiving
calendar!
The South African Skydiving League
Game ON!
September 2009
Are you ready? Have you registered? SASL is here at last and kicking off in style at the 2009 tonto Boogie.
As you hopefully know by now, you can participate from any PASA dropzone, but if you're after spot prizes, some guidance, a wicked party,
and a great vibe, get your butt out to JSC on the 3rd and 4th of October to join SASL and the Annual tonto Boogie - a weekend of South African record
attempts, competitions in various disciplines, good times with friends old and new and, of course, celebration of the life of tonto, a man who touched
all of us - even those who never met him - through friendship, knowledge, guidance, instruction, and development of our sport.
If you can't make it to the tonto Boogie, you have no excuse not to enter - just three jumps, submitted online or by drop-off any time until the last Monday of October,
will ensure that you start earning your league points from the beginning, and better your chances of being the final winner. And you don't even have
to find a committed team - you only need to do this month's draw with your team and you can hop onto another team next month without losing any individual
points or lessening your chances of winning the league and claiming the loot. Check out the rules to see how it works and how
we all get to play despite our different experience levels, locations, schedules and commitment.
If you have any questions or need any help, contact your dropzone's SASL rep (see below) or contact the SASL committee directly by emailing GameON@Skyleague.co.za.
We'll have the most appropriate committee member contact you to answer all your questions and help you get your piece of SASL action.
The South African Skydiving League
Game ON!