LA Call Minutes - 05.30.18

LA Call
Wednesday, May 30, 2018

Chuck Hodge - Operations - USAC- chodge@usacycling.org - 719-434-4264

We had a meeting with our Collegiate Conference Directors the weekend before last. Collegiate now sits under Racing Operations and Justin Evans from my staff. One thing we found, some of this is on our side and some of this is on the Local Associations side, is that really there is a desire for the Conference Directors to be more involved with the Permit Coordinators from the Local Associations. Those that have been involved with Collegiate know it’s a little more complicated, or has more and different policies and rules than the regular USA Cycling races. We’re going to try and solve that on the technology side here, in that when a permit is keyed as a collegiate event it should go to the Conference Director as well as the regular Permit Coordinator for the Local Association. That’s not always happening right now, so I see a couple ways to handle this. One is that we will get that technology fixed, and the other is that if your LA Permit Coordinators can make sure to touch base with the Collegiate Conference Director for your particular LA. And one of the issues is that we have LAs that overlap different conferences and vice versa. We’re going to send out a map and list of the Conference Directors as well as the states that they are in so that you know who to touch base with and so that there’s good communication between the two, so we can alleviate some of the issues we saw last year. That’s all I’ve got. Any questions on that?

 

Gina Kavesh (WSBA - Washington)
Hi Chuck, this is Gina with the WSBA, was my Collegiate Conference, the Northwest Collegiate Conference, present at that meeting? Because I can’t get them to respond to anything.

 

Chuck Hodge
Yeah, and we had a dialog directly with them on that. I think a lot of this is a communication issue. And Gina, this came at the request of them. If you’re not getting any type of a response, certainly let Justin or myself know, and we will figure out what’s going on. Maybe it’s an old email, maybe they’re just ignoring you - I don’t know. But this was a request from them and they are eager to be involved in that process as needed and appropriate.

 

Gina Kavesh
OK. Good. That’s positive, because last time I talked to them they really wanted nothing to do with being a part of the ecosystem. I’ll keep working on it, thanks!

 

Randy Legeai (LAMBRA - Louisiana and Mississippi)
Hi, this is Randy at LAMBRA, can you run through how these Conference Directors are structured? It seems like they are operating sort of like independent contractors, so we have been running into problems like paying conference fees and things like that because they may or may not have an IRS entity identification number that the universities are going to require to cut a check.

 

Chuck
Yeah, that was a pretty extensive conversation at our meeting. We’re working on some solutions here. The short answer is that there’s a variety. We have a couple that are incorporated, a couple that are not. We actually run some of the revenue through a holding account here. We are working on consolidating that. Eastern, for example, is an incorporated non-profit, and the others are not. I need to sit down with our CFO and legal team here to run through some ideas of how we’ll structure this. But believe me, fixing that was the number on thing on the agenda, so more to come on that as we work towards a solution.

 

Randy
Thanks. Good to know it’s on the radar.

 

Alright, I will turn it back over to Kelly.

 

Thanks, next Ben Taylor, our Partnerships Manager is going to talk about some new member opportunities for USA Cycling.

 

You may have seen some notice of this on social media, but I wanted to go through some of the more recent partnerships and the benefits for members that come out of that. A couple months back we signed with the Intercontinental Hotels Group - IHG. This is a deal that you can access through the Benefits tab in the Member Portal. The discount is 10-12% off your hotel rooms with IHG. That includes Holiday Inn, Holiday Inn Express, Crown Plaza and any IHG hotel. This is for rooms that you book at any time - it doesn’t have to be for a USA Cycling sanctioned event.

 

Along the training lines, we’ve signed a couple of technology partners: Halo Sport and Solos Smart Glasses. Those benefits can also be found under the Benefits tab in the Member Portal. These are slightly more expensive pieces of technology, and the discounts are pretty significant.

 

There will be another training partner announced in the next month - we are finalizing a partnership with NormaTec - so look for an announcement about that on the website and on social. This will include a percentage discount on a NormaTec unit.

 

Oh, there is one more - Topical Edge came on as a partner around the same time as IHG. So USA Cycling members also get a 20% discount on Topical Edge Performance and Recovery lotion.

 

I am working to get more and more benefits for USA Cycling members, to bring more value to the membership, so we’ll continue adding to the benefits as we get more partners on board.

 

JD Bilodeau from NEBRA, Do you guys have any plans to go after some benefits that may be applicable to clubs - like a clothing partner or something that we could offer clubs to up the value of being a USAC club?

 

Absolutely, we’re in conversations with some potential clothing partners right now. Those are not at a stage where I feel comfortable throwing the names out there, but we’re working towards such a partnership. Great question.

 

Kelly - That is a topic that has been on the forefront in the office here and on the Working Group calls - we’re trying to create more benefits to being a USA Cycling club. This is definitely going to be a focus in the next year.

 

I just want to reiterate that when you log into the USA Cycling website and go to your account page, either automatically when logging in or by clicking on your name in the upper right corner of the page, your benefits tab is the last button on the right. So you have your Licenses, Results and Rankings, Tools and Benefits is the last option. If you click on Benefits you will see a list of each of the products, explaining what they are and how to access the discounts.

 

Jeffrey Hansen - Director of Product Management and Operations

 

I have a couple technology related updates to share with you. One is that we’re getting ready to launch a second version of our new mobile app. This will be a much more feature rich app, more of a replacement for the old mobile app. It’s not just the License and Rider Lookup. It will have Event Search, Results, Roadside Assistance access if you have that, and things like that. I am interested in hearing from folks who have an iOS device to begin testing. To note, we’re developing this on iOS and once we’re happy with all the features and how everything works, we’ll begin mirroring development for Android with the aim to launch them both within the same timeframe. So we haven’t forgotten about Android, but we’re working out all the kinks in the iOS development before developing them in parallel. But to get this first version of what we’re calling 2.0 out the door, we’re looking for testers. My email address is jhansen@usacycling.org. Please email me if you are interested in testing a pre-release version of the iOS app.

 

The other thing is that we are doing some testing for a new navigation for our website - a new nav structure and overall site structure that will hopefully be more intuitive for a lot of folks. It’s tricky. We have a lot of different audiences at USA Cycling: new, returning, essentially business owners, as well as individual members, so we have a lot of masters to try and please with one navigation. We have a few different structures that we’re testing, and by testing I mean actually having real, live users test them instead of just doing what we think is best. You may have seen a little survey on the website to recruit some testers, and some of you may be testing for us as well. But I want to know that we do have a new site structure coming in the next month or two, so that’s very exciting. Any technology questions?

 

Kelly - I actually have a question. Is the goal after you launch the 2.0 mobile app to kill the old app?

 

That depends. Certainly at some point, yes. But only when we feel comfortable that all the needed features are replicated, and once we’ve communicated out to people that we do have a new app that is fully functional on all platforms. I think there are a lot of people still using the old one - at times because they need a feature on the old one, or at times because  they just don’t know that the new app exists. So certainly we’d like to shut the old one down, because it’s fewer APIs to maintain, but we’ll only do that when it’s right for our members.

 

David from Kansas. If I am using the new app now, is the 2.0 version going to be a software update or it’s own application.

 

It will be just an update. If you have automatic updates turned on, you will automatically get those updates. It won’t be a whole new app to launch. I understand that the way I phrased that was a bit confusing. But if you have the new app, it will just be an update. Good question.

 

Joan Hanscom - Vice President of Event Services

 

I’ll keep it brief. We had some good news. As a lot of you know, we lost a bunch of races earlier in the year because we had things like late season blizzards. So our event count took a bit of a hit. I am happy to say that as of today we have clawed back a lot of those events. Nationwide, we are at a 0% loss on events. We’re holding the line on events. We have clawed back a lot. And on racer days, nationwide, we are down 1%. And that 1% nationwide is actually 860 racer days. So we have clawed back a lot of racer days. That is largely in part due to some robust gran fondo participation, but still, it is a good sign to see the racer days clawing their way back

From being down significantly, and looking like we’re in a reasonably stable position on racer days. So I just wanted to share with you guys that we are seeing positive numbers. Larry Martin’s region is actually up on racer days, Don Losole’s region is down significantly less than it had been on racer days. Stuart Lamp has also brought back a lot of racer days from those early season cancellations, and it’s some really good news that the West is holding steady. As you may remember last year, the West was down significantly on racer days, and this year we are level. So that, directionally is good news. Hopefully you are seeing that in your event day participation as well. But these are the numbers being reported to us by race directors and it seems to be trending in a better direction than in recent history.

 

Tom Mahoney

 

Overall, for race memberships, USA Cycling is up 1.53%. The vast majority of those are our Domestic Race licenses. Collegiate is seeing a good add on. International is down, but that is moderately expected because of BMX licenses. And when we look at disciplines, BMX is down but we have to remember that the BMX World Championship was held in North Carolina last year, so we had a massive uptick in BMX last year. All the other disciplines are trending pretty much flat with the exception of cyclocross, which is down a whopping 67 riders nationwide. Regionally, everyone is either flat or slightly up, with the exception of members who live outside the US, foreign based military and things like that. That segment is down 5 riders. When we look at class, so Juniors, U23, Masters, some really exciting news out of this is that Juniors are up 5%. This is a really exciting trend for us, looking into the future. U23 is down slightly, but that is recoverable and is a symptom of people aging up in this category. And both Seniors and Masters are trending up. The patterns are holding true year over year in terms of gender. Females comprise roughly 15% of our population, and there’s no massive change there. Both male and female are trending up at the same rate. An interesting note, renewing are trending very well while new memberships are flat or slightly below. So we’re not bringing in new members as fast as we should, but we are bringing people back into the sport which is great.

 

Sheli Thomas MCA (Montana)

What were the numbers for cyclocross?

 

Right now we have a total membership of 7,374 members who have chosen cyclocross as their primary discipline. We are down 67 riders compared to this time last year.