Collegiate Cycling Updates

[Bryan Garfoot]

Greetings everyone,

Hope everything is going well for everyone.  It's certainly been a long, strange year for many of us.  I hope all of you are still able to get out riding (in whatever form you feel safe in), even if there isn't a great deal of racing going on at the moment.

There are a couple of announcements that I did want to make you all aware of.

1. If you haven't been aware, USA Cycling is putting on a National Collegiate Challenge.  Stage 1, a Strava challenge, is already over, but Stage 2 will be a virtual race series October 30-November 1.  Team registration can be found at the above link, and is free for any current collegiate license holder.

The goal is to live stream at least the A category races for both Club and Varsity teams, thus providing a great way for fans and spectators to get familiar with your team.  As part of this, teams have the opportunity to race in their own virtual kits.  If you are interested in getting your avatars in your team kits, please email a vector file of the team kit to Liz Kollar (lko...@usacycling.org) by the end of the day Friday, October 9th. 

It's important to note that Stage 3 (Community Service) and Stage 4 (Media Challenge) are also going on currently.  Details of those can also be found on the Collegiate Challenge site.

2. If you have ambitions of racing at the 2020 ESports World Championships, trials for the US team are being held this Sunday, October 11th.  Collegiate license holders are being offered an 80% discount on registration, making it only $10 to enter.  Details on that event can be found here.

3. Lastly, it's time to start planning for the 2021 collegiate road season.  Although the COVID forecast for March and April of next year remains incredibly murky, I still want to start getting the calendar together for planning purposes.  Given that events will still need the approval of your university and local municipalities, I wanted to give everyone plenty of time to contact relevant parties.  Thus, I'm going to give everyone until November 27th to let me know you're interested in hosting a race.  I'll get the usual planning calendar together by the end of the weekend, and send that out when I have it.

To that end, I'd like to know how everyone is doing and how everyone is feeling about racing next year.  I'll be scheduling a virtual meetup in the next few weeks, although I do realize most people are probably getting fairly sick of Zoom meetings at this point :-)

Take care, and get out and ride (safely),

Bryan Garfoot

MWCCC Conference Director

(269) 267-4429