Hi Julie,
I'm excited to hear that more people are getting into organizing youth dragon boat racing. the CDBA has put a lot of energy into youth racing here in California. I have been the youth race director and lemme tell you that i just love seeing the kids have their turn in the spotlight.
i am not completely sure, but people have told me that the CDBA has the only Youth ONLY dragon boat regatta around. if this is not true please anyone reading this let me know. we started off with 9 teams the first year and this april (year #5) we had 24. this race really lets the kids have the show and the paddling community really rallies to put this race on for them. it is 100% volunteerism by the adult paddlers that run the race. in addition we were lucky that the local SF cable youth sports guy loves us, the sport and the kids so much that he has put youth dragon boating on TV every time we have them racing.
Our recruiting for the youth program has been really quite simple minded. the coaches that we have do such a great job that several of them are funning multiple crews and they STILL have a waiting list to get on the team. a youth center started up a team with kids that couldn't get on the team at their high schools.
if there are any questions that you might have about building youth paddling program there are several of us here that might be able to help you by sharing what we've done here.
and of course when you get a team together the invitation is always open for you to come down to San Francisco to race in our youth regatta. so far we have repeat out of town customers from portland (Sun Dragons) that have raced 2 years in a row. we'd love to get more competitive crews from out of town, canada, philly, and beyond to add depth and color to our racing field. our local crews are pretty strong i think, they went to toronto for the WCCC and came in 4th place in most of their races (1 third in a heat) so the racing would be worth the trip - as if visiting san francisco isn't good enough
)
good luck!
