As noted, this year’s Lehigh turnout was unfortunately small, even by the standards of our southern MTB races. The racing was still solid, but the endurance events can’t really get much smaller without suffering. It’s a shame because those are some really good courses, particularly the phenomenal short track course, and it’s just a great, low key, low cost weekend.
A number of us spent a fair bit of time talking about this, and the overall gradual decline in MTB participation from southern schools over the past couple years. My best theory is that we’ve let the schedule drift too far northward, an effect caused by several issues:
- Many southern, XC only venues like Ringwood, NJ and Mt Joy, PA that were used back in the day just aren’t workable given the importance the modern ECCC places on gravity events.
- Other central venues like Jiminy Peak have lapsed as the teams associated with them, in this case UMass, have waned a bit, or as the conference has had negative experiences, such as at Plattekill.
- PennState’s MTB squad losing momentum as a racing organization and no longer putting on events. It’s tough to put such a load on one team, but they were really the cornerstone of southern MTB ridership and together with Lehigh the only consistent promoters.
All of that has combined with the general turn of the century decline in MTB popularity, as well as the usual team ups and downs. For example, both Drexel and U. Delaware used to routinely field over a dozen riders, but both have moved almost entirely away from MTB racing.
When PennState first lapsed putting on MTB events a years ago, I don’t think we realized how big a deal it would be. At the time no one thought much of it because it seemed like a typical short break, and their events had been shaky for a few years—a cancellation, some really rough edges on the weekend logistics, and so on. However, though probably impossible, in hindsight we should have realized those problems were symptomatic of larger issues and the squad was about to fall off the scene.
Combined with lapses at the other traditional central venues, dropping out that second reliable southern race shifted the season schedule dramatically northward. Over time that shift has slowly eliminated the southern MTB racing squads. The lack of southern races has let their numbers and engagement with the season dry up.
Unfortunately, I don’t know that there are simple solutions to this. A few of us have been taking very personal action to try and rebuild the MTB numbers down here, but that’s a slow, unsure, and limited process. Some other ideas include:
- Organizing clinics and trying to build numbers with a wider net. This has been talked about in different shapes for a long time now, but it needs some student leadership to take charge and make it happen. The conference can support and help organize these kinds of activities, but ultimately there’s enough else going on in the conference that this task needs to be driven by some new people.
- Making a commitment to continued southern races. Conroy from NU pointed out that even when they held a race in the south last year, at Blue Mountain, few teams and southern riders showed up. However, I think those teams effectively just don’t exist anymore. They either don’t have riders, or aren’t thinking about racing. In some sense, we need to make the investment in keeping races down here, take the hit for a couple years, and hopefully slowly gain traction.
The good news is that there’s been a slow increase in gravity venues down here over the past few years, so there seem to be more options for southern race locations now than in the past. How to have races put on down here though without teams and riders is a big chicken & the egg question.