Next team meeting is in two days

Hello South Side Roadies! I now have over 20 people on a list that are interested in possibly joining our new racing club, so far that is. I expect that to grow quite a bit since we really just started talking about it. At our first meeting though we had a disappointing turnout of six eager cyclists. Worse yet, there were no volunteers for President, except that I would reluctantly agree to take on that role. Mark Adair has now come forth willing to be the President though and vows not to forget about this Saturday's meeting. He at least texted me during the last meeting. I forgive him. I did not want to be President because instead I would really like to be in charge of organizing all of the local training rides. David Carpenter stepped forward for Secretary and Jon Langford for Treasurer. Mark Anderson previously agreed that he would take the role of race promoter. We did not vote any of us in yet, so if there are more willing soles out there, please make it known to me prior to the meeting if you are not going to show up or come to the meeting and present yourself. The way I see it we need a President, a Ride Coordinator/e-Newsletter guy (Me), a Secretary, a Treasurer and a Race Promoter. Perhaps the secretary should do the newsletter. We will talk about that at the meeting. I would hope it goes without saying that these are all positions of service.

I also spent some time answering a lot of questions about what bike racing in general is like and about how things were going to be set up with this new team. I kept stressing that much was still yet to be decided since we were new, but since starting this new Club/Team was my idea, I need to lay out my vision of what I am wanting. If you disagree with my ideas please bring up your suggestions at the meeting and then I will have the bouncers kindly escort you outside. :)

My vision is to start a simple club/team. USA Cycling calls amateur teams a club and I do not expect that every member of the team will do licensed racing in 2010. I hope everyone gives it a try at least once, but I do not want to make race attendance a requirement. As a matter of fact I do not want to require much of the members at all. When we hold our race we will need lots of volunteers to man corners, run the registration tables, etc. I expect most of us to volunteer our time for that annual event.

I do want to see most of you showing up for our local training rides and those that do want to go to the sanctioned races I expect will race together as a team, implementing race strategies learned at our training rides. Most teams pool together the prize money earned in a specific race category and split it evenly amongst those that were contributors to the overall outcome of the race in that specific category. For example if five of you enter the Category 4 race, two of you place in the money, two more of you contributed to helping those first two place in the money and one of you either fell off the back early or felt they did not contribute, then the prize money would be split 25% to each of the four contributors. That prize money earned in the Category 4 race would not be shared with those that were racing in the Category 3's or Masters and so on. I would like for our team to operate in that fashion.

I am thinking of an annual dues amount of $25 plus the requirement to purchase a jersey and shorts for about $25 each as well. That would make the annual dues $75 which includes the jersey and shorts. Jerseys and shorts cost more than $25 each, but I feel that we can easily get sponsors on the clothing to more than make up the difference. I want to make it inexpensive for poor people like myself to get into the club. The sponsors advertising on the clothing want their logos to be seen and club members will be expected to be seen riding in the team jersey a lot. It would be recommended to get a couple so that you can train or race in one while the other one is being washed. My little sister has run teams for several years and she thinks we should not have a problem getting more than the small amount of money we need to make that happen. She also is most likely going to be able to negotiate great prices for our team clothing since her organization buys several hundred thousand dollars worth of clothing every year. There is room on the clothing for about eight sponsors. Some money will be needed to promote our local sanctioned race, but if done right it will make us a profit as well. With some of the money left over I think we could come up with an entry fee reimbursement program to make it less expensive for us to go to the races too. Being a member of a team will also let you avoid paying the "unattached rider" fees that many race promoters charge.

I want to organize a training ride schedule like I did when I was the Ride Coordinator for my bicycle racing team years ago. We varied the location of the training rides every week. We did not do the same boring course every time. We also varied the type of training we did each week. We did road races, time trials, team time trials, and more. My favorite thing we did was choosing two captains, splitting the team into two teams and raced against each other. There was a little 5-minute strategy meeting after the teams were selected and the goal was to place our 5th place guy ahead of the other team's 5th place guy. That way if one team had one really strong rider that did not guarantee them the win. Sometimes this involved pushing our slower riders up a hill, which is cheating, but mostly it taught us to use team strategies. You will learn more about these strategies as you come to the training rides. The ability to implement strategies is part of why I think bike racing is so much more fun than doing triathlons would be. I envision that these training rides will take place on courses around Newnan, Peachtree City, Fayetteville, Senoia & Brooks. On different nights it may be quite a drive for some of us, but fun will be had by all. One guy asked me today if the rides will have a no-drop policy. My response was that for the most part my personal policy will be to try to drop you. Any questions?

It would be cool if we did some carpooling and occasionally babysitting for each other when we go to the races. I intend to mostly go to the ones that are not very far away, but there are races to go to every single weekend somewhere in the region. I work in a bike shop and Saturday is the biggest day of the week, so I can not go racing every Saturday, but I get one Saturday off every month and plan to use those for racing.

The group of guys we have on my list is mostly comprised of people who have never raced before, so they would all go to the races as Category 5 riders. Most Category 5 riders do not have a lot of teammates, so you would have a big advantage over them. I intend to start as a Category 4 racer, which I would only be allowed to do since I have a long history of racing in the past. There are a few of you like me, so I hope you too will start as Category 4's so I will have teammates. If Isaac Strickland joins our team, he would at least at first be the only Category 3 we would have and I do not know of any potential Category 2 or 1 riders yet. We are new, so we can not offer much yet to entice riders to switch to our team, but I expect this team to grow into something more. We would never put a limit to how many riders are allowed to join, but someday we may have a separate elite squad from the development squad. We do not have to worry about that yet. I would love to see legends such as John James join with us to help the newbies learn the ropes, even if he does think that triathlons are fun too.

We talked a little about whether the club should be for mountain bike racers in addition to road bike racers. I personally am not interested in mountain bike racing at all. If we do open it up for mountain biking, I think we should have an additional Ride Coordinator that organizes the local mountain bike training rides. I want to hear people's opinions on that as well. For that matter, what about triathletes? I know there is a PTC Tri club, but I have no idea what the club does for its members. If any of you know the answer to that, please let me know. In triathlons there is no working strategies together allowed and there typically is no prize money either, so much of the benefits of belonging to our team would not entice them any, but if they could get some entry fee reimbursements, maybe they too would be interested in joining. I do not imagine triathletes being interested in what we have to offer, but we can spend a little time discussing it at the meeting.

As mentioned before I plan for there to be an e-newsletter and probably also a club website. We would use those to post a calender for the local training rides as well as the race events.

Anybody creative enough to help with jersey and shorts designing?

The club still does not have a name either. Hopefully you will all agree that "The Road Crew" is the best choice. Think on it.

The governing body for the racing we will be doing is USA Cycling and their website is:
www.USACycling.org
You can go there to apply for your racing license and learn more about the sport. They also cover track (velodrome), cyclocross and mountain bike racing.

You can download the racing rulebook here:
http://www.usacycling.org/forms/USAC_rulebook.pdf

Reminder - We are meeting at Bicycles Unlimited @ 9:30 AM this Saturday. Be there!