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Strange week for the rider Demographics
Fri, 04/28/2006 - 8:36am
This is the first time I can remember then number of Cat 5s actually going down during the middle of the season. Last week we had 970 Cat 5s. I upgraded 20 Cat 5s but we only had 15 Cat 5s either renew or buy a new license last week. The end result is that the number of Cat 5s went down by 5 riders.
Overall we currently have 3261 licensed riders in the NCNCA territory. This is 14.4% ahead of last year at this time. Hopefully by next week we will exceed the number of full price adult USCF licenses we sold in the region in 2005. This means that NCNCA will start earning $15 per adult license sold instead of the normal $10.
Our junior numbers are running 34.4% ahead of last year at this time ( 174 total juniors). Cat 4 women are showing an increase of 11.7% compared to last year at this time and Cat 5 men are running 15.2% ahead of last year at this time.
The Junior licensees may be up, but not with the girls. Twenty-two, and 9% are my two daughters. Nationally, the number of competitive women decreases as the get closer to age 18, if you base it on those who raced at nationals and rankings on USACYCLING's database.
Perhaps they get tired of always racing against the guys when the distances get longer. My girls were thrilled to race only with girls at last years Nationals, and they like Districts for the same reason. Even 13-14 year old boys are tough to race against; Kendra was the only one able to stay with them at today's race. The others were in small groups off the main group and not that hard to track how many laps down. Or was it?
See Junior forum for more on this topic. Oh, and look up rulebook 3D3 and 3D7 before you visit from your pocket USCF RULEBOOK (quicker) or online (MUCH slower). The officials assume we know these already!
The barrier to entry in running is very low in terms of costs and suitable areas to train.
A better comparison is triathlon which has a similar or higher time investment required to excel, and similar or higher costs for equipment,training and competition. The key thing is - the parents are used to these things if you can convert them to cycling which can be cheaper by comparison.
http://www.usatriathlon.org/News_Info/demographics.htm
Interestingly, the number of licensed cyclists is very close to the number of runners with PAUSATF cards (pacific association of USA track & field, which also includes road racing, cross country running and race walking), which is currently 3,372. The PA region is similar to the NCNCA, and includes Northern California & Nevada, but slightly smaller since the PAUSATF border is north of Fresno.
One big difference though is the number of Juniors who are PAUSATF members, 1500 (797 boys, 703 girls) which is 44% of the 3372.
In contrast, there are a lot more adults, especially masters with cycling licenses. It seems that a lot of runners, like myself switch to cycling as they get older.
It would be so great for the sport if we could somehow get some of these track running kids into cycling.
If I had known about organized cycling, or seen my peers doing it when I was in high school, I definitely would have started way back then.
Chris
http://twitter.com/cpbike