A Sport for Everyone

One of the biggest appeals of the sport is that a wide range of people can participate. One of our corporate teams, the Ensco Innovators, last year had team members ranging from 16 to 61, paddling together. “As long as a paddler is in basically good physical condition, there are no real limitations on age, size, or ability.” says coach and steerer Kathy Wright. (Paddlers must be twelve years old to participate in the festival) “It is a vigorous sport and gives you a good workout, but paddlers do not by any means need to be superior athletes. Of course, if any paddler has a history of medical problems, we recommend that they talk to a doctor before starting into dragon boating, as they would any exercise program.”

Most importantly, it is a sport that everyone can participate in, with no experience required of any of the paddlers. One of the goals of the Washington DC festival is to introduce people to the sport. The coaching staff has undergone significant training under some of the best coaches in the world, and they have developed a strong curriculum which can turn what seems to be a ragtag bunch of inexperienced paddlers into a competitive team in just three practice sessions. The instructors start with the basics—how to hold the paddle—and methodically work our way through all of the skills needed to paddle together and be competitive. The coaching team has developed a series of lesson plans—tailored to the skill level of each individual team—which maximizes the performance gains in each one-hour training session.

Unique Team Building Experience

Paddling together in a dragon boat is a team building experience unlike any other. There are no stars in a Dragon Boat team. If a team takes first, it is because they paddled together well as a team, not because they were necessarily the team with the strongest paddlers. A team who has good form and is in synch with each other will almost always outperform a somewhat stronger team with poor form or poor synchronization. Paddlers on a good team know how to be aware of each other and act and paddle as a single unit. The members of the team from WSCLC (Washington School of Chinese Language and Culture) remind us, “No single person can win the race alone. It takes a highly harmonized team with the right people, the right mind and body, the right way of doing things, at the right place.”

The time spent together during practices and at the weekend festival provides a good environment for nurturing friendships among the team members and the friends and family members that come to the festival with them. “This team is our floating support group,” says Hope Afloat-- a sentiment that is shared by many other teams who participate regularly.

Groups having fun for cheap

Dragon boat racing is one of the least expensive ways for a large group of people to spend time together. The average adult team will spend just over $40 per person for the entire event. This includes three practices for the team led by experienced dragon boat instructors, two full days of racing where each team typically participates in two or three races a day, and medals and trophies for the winners. Youth teams receive a 50% discount so costs are typically only $20 per youth.

“For companies, youth groups, schools, and social clubs who are looking for community-building opportunities for their organizations, the economics are quite compelling,” says Chris Chang, vice-chair of this year’s festival. “In Washington DC, forty dollars per head can scarcely buy you a nice corporate dinner party, but at the festival, forty dollars can buy you an entire weekend of good healthy fun together. For social networking groups and schools, the festival will cost less than a trip to King’s Dominion—and have a powerful social bonding and team-building component that a trip to an amusement park will never have.”

The cost of the festival to the sponsoring organization is actually often less than $40 per person. An informal survey of teams shows that most teams ask that the paddlers pay for some or all of the expenses. In some cases, the sponsoring organizations have paid for refreshments, t-shirts, or offered to cover the shortfall in registration fees if fewer than a full team signed up. Linh Hoang helped organize the “Out to Paddle” team, sponsored in part by AQUA (Asian Queers United for Action), a local networking group for queer Asians and their allies. “We charged each participant $36; We didn’t know how many people would be interested, so AQUA offered to pay the registration fees to the extent that our boat came up short of paddlers. Of course, once the word got out, we ended up with 30 people wanting to sign up, and the fees were paid entirely by the paddlers, not the organization.”