Forming a Club
We will be putting local contacts up on this site www.mbi.ie/trails/ shortly, so newbies in the area can find fellow bikers. If you want to give us some contacts we can put up for you / your club, then we can do that.
Find out if there are any road clubs or triathlon clubs in your area. They can be useful to piggyback off, quite often their members will do off-road cycling in the off season etc.
A club web site is a good idea, but just generally get yourself out there, notices in bike shops, outdoor shops, gyms, post notices on other forums, that kind of stuff.
The main thing to try and do is keep what your doing appealing to a broad spectrum and keep it regular. What keeps most of the established clubs going is regular club spins.
If you get a few bodies and can find a suitable bit of trail, try to have mid week races or spins.
Bear in mind that many of the people you will get to begin with will be either pretty poor on the bike or just doing it along with another primary sport. If you just accept this and go with it you will find that the poor people get good pretty quick and the people who are primarily something else end up being primarily bikers.
Try to keep your members as involved and active as possible by dividing-up the key roles – don’t just have a secretary – have an assistant secretary etc. People are more likely to take on jobs if they are small and have a definite role.• Look at the strengths of your club members and try to allocate jobs based on these:
If you have someone who works with computers, ask them if they have the skills to set up a website, if you have an accountant as a member, they are ideal to be or help the Treasurer etc..
You may hear people telling you to run big races straight away, this a bad idea.
If you do not have the man power and experience, running events will drive you around the bend and you may end up running a bad event and lose any credibility you may have built-up, riders will be hesitant to return to an event ran by a certain club if the previous event was poor.
Some events may leave very little in terms of a residual when they are over, careful planning and consultation are definitely needed.
Make sure to go to loads of events and see how they work before you try to run your own.
Build a strong club first, then take on races. Eg; EPICMTB was up and running two years before running their first event, and that was only a fun event.
Once you have a gang together register as a club and join cycling Ireland. Its nice to be official.
Checkout this document from Cycling Ireland, it gives you loads of club-development related info.
