Good topic, Thanks to TY175 for alerting me. Here's a couple of observations after almost a year as president of our state club.
Hard copy newsletters do matter. While the young guys might be online enough to catch the buzz about trials, the old guys who are the backbone of the club still appreciate having bathroom reading material.
Skill level classes matter. We have been trying to balance having enough classes to keep people interested and safe with having few enough classes that they're not a burden to trialsmasters, our standings secretaries, and our trophy budget. We added a Senior Expert class this year for guys concerned about the danger level of Expert or recovering from injuries. It's been a qualified success. We may try to add a Senior Amateur class to give our older lower class riders somewhere other than Amateur to hang out and let the kids get a few more trinkets as they advance from Beg or Nov.
OSETs matter. TXT50s matter. Beta Juniors matter. TY80s matter. You want family-friendly fun? Gotta have bikes the kids can ride as they grow. Our importers and distributors don't always have the parts and tech info to keep these bikes running. Anything they and the clubs can do to support kids' bikes will have an impact.
Land access issues matter. Here in NM, we depend on public land for most of our events. We have ever-increasing obstacles to negotiate to placate land managers from BLM and Forest Service. Trials riders have not been easy to organize to participate in the politics of public land access. I wish I could mobilize half the number that show up for an event to also show up for a public meeting to protect our access. Or even to write letters or send e-mails or make phone calls. We've been doing OK but only because a core group of us has pushed the rest pretty hard to be aware of political matters. We're working on getting some private land. I worry that once we do we will give up on the public land entirely. It's understandable; who wants to hassle with special use permits when you've got your own place to go? But once we slack off, those public areas will disappear.
Service to the club matters. It's hard to find folks willing to give their time. When club members bitch about rules like enforcing spark arrestors, the volunteers on the receiving end say, "I don't need this crap." Having a service ethic is rare - there are not enough givers and too many takers. Our club has struggled to come up with trialsmasters, board members, even with observers. Your carrot has to be sweet and your stick has to be big and obvious. Everybody wants the club to host a National but finding the 90 or so FTEs (people to fill the various jobs needed to run a National) is tough. We are blessed with a strong national team but not everyone is gonna get to ride both days of a home event.
Our club membership is essentially flat right now. We'll see what happens with membership renewals after the new year. We've been doing some new things such as a Facebook page, but we really need to promote our events more widely. Trials is the cheapest of all the motorsports except for radio control racing, and there is a whole generation enthralled by extreme sports. Yet we can't get into X Games? We aren't widely known among young folks? Why is that? Because we, the old fogies of the sport, aren't finding ways to reach the X'ers. Speed TV has these street stuntas and FMXers - they should be ripe for learning about trials. Whatever the barriers, we need to find a way to break them down. It's just too cool of a sport to see it die from lack of exposure.
