How to Start a College Cycling Team
I spent much of 2020 and most of 2021 collaborating with the first HBCU cycling team, at St Augustine’s University in Raleigh, North Carolina. The team was co-founded by Dr Mark Janas, a cycling enthusiast and professor at the SAU School of Business, Management and Technology. I saw first hand how much work it took to get the team off the ground: recruiting athletes who’d never raced bikes, finding sponsors, locating a bike shop to help, teaching fitness and nutrition. It was a massive undertaking for Mark, his co-founder Dr Umar Muhammad and everyone who pitched in to launch this important program.
This is a completely different assignment than creating a club sports team at most universities, where incoming students may already be expert at their sport. Students at an HBCU may love the idea of bike racing, and being inspired by Major Taylor, but if they’ve not raced before it’s a huge leap for them to learn the sport and get to the starting line of their first event. Last year Yan Searcy, a dean at Cal State University Northridge, contacted me to say he’d been inspired by the SAU athletes and wanted to start a program at CSUN. So I put him in touch with Mark, who sent me this 10 point plan. It’s super helpful, so I’m sharing it here for anyone who’s contemplating the launch of a college cycling team.
- If not already, get USA Cycling registered and buy their liability insurance.
- Include an indoor component to deal with weather/traffic/initial lack of fitness, even if it involves basic, old spin bikes.
- Get a good local bike shop sponsor to handle maintenance. Hopefully you can at least get labor and parts discounts. (But plan on learning to do basic maintenance on your own….it adds up otherwise.)
- Ease into races. Don’t push anyone who doesn’t want to race. Stick with local races early on. No need to waste money on travel. Local races will connect your program more to the community anyway.
- Remember that every new season/semester you’ll have to have a plan to start riders from square 1. We use a basic training & nutrition plan to get the athletes started.
- Expect that everyone will not catch the cycling “bug.” Some will want to try things out and then decide it’s not for them. The challenge here is accommodating them while not holding back the others.
- Find a good place to train that does not involve traffic, but make it convenient for students. Ideally you can train mostly on campus so you don’t have to transport bikes and add time to practices. For us, that meant choosing CX as a primary discipline, where we could create our own course on campus. We’re hosting a race series on this same course with four events in April.
- Maximize equipment use….we chose CX/gravel bikes because they let us attack three disciplines: cyclocross/gravel, virtual (on smart trainers), & road riding (with road tires & gear adjustments.)
- Figure out a fundraising mechanism. This can be tricky. We were fortunate in that as the first HBCU there was interest in what we were doing, and we could tug on those strings to generate some $. Many college programs are nearly totally funded by the riders themselves, maybe with a little “club” or “intramural” $ coming from the schools.
- Related to 9, try to find a champion in school administration, even if you can’t get much from the school early on.
