British BBQ Society wrote:All good feedback, I will need to work on the text. The concept has been taken from a friend in the states that runs a team but doesn’t have any help so everyone on his team has paid for the opportunity. The team that they will be joining has been created just for training purposes, i think the problems you mentioned could arise if the team they joined was a serious contender throughout the year. This is designed so that those that paid for the experience would be hands on in every aspect, trimming, rubbing, smoking, presentation etc. Not just washing up and water carriers. The team would be overseen by a single pitmaster, so in essence its their team. Does that make more sense?
Yes it does, and that does sound promising. To be honest, that is what I thought you originally meant, but my comments resulted from JEC's suggestion that existing teams take on novices.
Both approaches have some merits. Yours as a purpose-built team of (changing) novices with a PitMaster, as a paid weekend course; JEC's with existing competition teams taking on short-term apprentices for free (in which case they *should* expect to have to do some gophering, to a certain extent). No reason why both of these shouldn't happen, provided folk don't confuse one for the other.