[NCNCA] NCVA A track racing question

[Casey Kerrigan]

OK here is my 2 cents worth of input.

Nor Cal is a very road centric area. THe vast majority of people are  
road riders first and track riders second ( if they ride track at  
all).  since the pool of people who are track riders first is so  
small this makes it hard to hold well attended track events when  
there is a conflict with a popular road event. Unfortunately for the  
track the number of road races in general and popular road events  
keeps growing which limits the times when you can have a tack event  
that may need the more casual track riders to fill out the fields and  
have more competitive events.  Instead of playing musical chairs by  
moving nights with the same type of events I think some more out of  
the box type approach needs to happen to build the pool of people who  
are riding/racing at the track.

TT events

We don't have nearly enough TT type event on the road side of things  
and the number of TT events on the track side is even grimmer.  Why  
are running races so popular? Well they have a variety of standard  
distances and everyone gets a time. This makes it fairly easy for the  
average person to track their improvement say in 10K events over a  
period of time. Yes Kilos and pursuits take a long time to run on the  
track since you can only run 2 people at a time. still I think there  
are a lot of people who would ride the track more often if they could  
do more Kilos and pursuits. Ideally there should be 3 TT events  
during the year. one at the start of the season, one in the middle  
and one at the end of the season. This year riders can track their  
improvement over the season and get an idea how well their training  
programs are working. TT events can also be run with regular road  
bikes so riders who haven't ridden the track before can give the  
track a try and get an introduction  to the velodrome.

New rider feedback

The last three years NCNCA has sent out surveys to newly licensed  
racers to get feed back on what programs they felt helped them and  
what didn't work so well. The feed back from these surveys has helped  
us tweek programs to make them more valuable to new racers. when ever  
a first time track riders comes out to the track an effort should be  
made to get that person's email.  some kind of follow-up survey  
should then be sent to these new riders to find out what they liked  
and didn't like about their track riding experience. This type of  
input can help develop programs that will hopefully bring more riders  
to the track.

More times for novices

Everyone can't make it to the track on Sat mornings for the novice  
sessions. There needs to be more times when novice riders can come  
out and learn about how to ride on the track. Maybe have special  
track classes where riders pay to learn the same types of things they  
would learn at 3 Sat sessions so they can qualify for Wed nights in  
one session instead of 3.

It seems to me there use to be a lot more special club days at the  
velodrome. These were days when members of a single racing or touring  
club could come down and take part in a Sat morning like program. It  
was always fun to watch 3 or 4 riders from the same club get  really  
competitive over who could turn out the best 200 time or the best  
flying 1 lap time. These special club days were always a great way to  
introduce new riders to track riding.

Email gathering

Since almost everyone has email these days some kind of effort should  
be made to collect an email address from everyone who comes to the  
track. This is the cheapest way to let people know about programs  
that might be of special interest to spectators, novice riders,  
experienced riders etc.
On Oct 30, 2006, at 8:27 AM, garyyokota at aol.com wrote:

> My 2 cents again...
>
> Why not have Tuesday (after Farid's session), Wednesday, and  
> Thursday (perhaps even Friday) evening racing sessions for a month  
> or two - say April or May?  We would need to find a handful of  
> extra volunteers, but seeing Larry do his Thursday training series  
> almost single-handedly, I think we could cover the bases.  We would  
> then see a concrete answer to the question of which nights to offer  
> racing: keep the most-attended nights and drop the least attended  
> nights.  Let people vote with their feet/legs.  Many people chime  
> in with their opinions but never actually get their butts out to  
> the track, and the local track racers end up with their choices  
> limited by those who talk more than they ride.
>
> Two groups.  Scratch race. Miss and out.  Long points race.  Each  
> night, every night.  No omnium scoring until this whole thing gets  
> figured out and a summer series schedule gets finalized.
>
> I know it sounds a bit extreme, but this might motivate someone to  
> open their mouth, too.
>
> Cheers,
> Gary Yokota
>
> p.s.  I would attend one night a week, whichever night had the  
> faster, tougher racing.
>