With the first quarter of the CRCA Club Series officially complete we have a few updates to share based on feedback from the club's members and other stakeholders including NYC Parks:
Marshaling
Marshaling remains a vital element of our race calendar - when marshals do not show or do not perform as expected it puts our entire schedule at risk. The attendance rate thus far this year has been good but some issues came up at the most recent race:
- All Central Park Policies apply to marshals - NYC Parks reported three marshals riding backwards on Park Drives at the most recent Club Race. This is a clear violation of CRCA policies and taken very seriously by NYC Parks. Any marshals caught riding backwards on the Park Drives at future races will be considered in violation of the CRCA Marshaling Policy and suspended.
- Marshals need to arrive 60 minutes before race start - NYC Parks requires that all marshals be in their assigned location 15 minutes prior to race start. If marshals show up 30 minutes before the race start there is no way to get them to their assigned location on time and races will be delayed / laps cut.
Club Series Results
We recognize there have been some growing pains with the shift to full professional results for the CRCA Club Series - a switch that was implemented in part because our old system was quite simply no longer viable. The all-volunteer Board is working to streamline the process but the Club Series results are inherently more complex than a standard Open Race: instead of dealing with 100 race numbers per field assigned specifically to race starters we have a roster of 500+ eligible racers with only a portion of those riders racing on a given day. We are discussing a potentially significant upgrade to the registration process (see below) but in the interim we have the following guidance to offer on Club Series results:
- Per USAC Rule 1M7 racers should take advantage of the 15-minute protest period once results are posted at the Rambles Parking lot to address any concerns directly with our officials and results service before leaving Central Park. This is by far the easiest and most direct way to insure your results are accurate.
- Recognizing the aforementioned growing pains we have also created a post-race Feedback Form where we will collect feedback for 48 hours following the race before relaying to our Results Service for consideration. While the entire Board is as responsive as possible to all inbound member emails our inboxes are typically swamped post-race so please use the Feedback form and be patient regarding any corrections (for an immediate response use the 15 minute protest period!).
Any additional changes to the results process will be published on CRCA.net.
Club Race Registration
Coming into the 2018 season one of the biggest projects taken on by the Board was largely behind the scenes: revamping the Membership portion of the website. Doing so allowed us to automate the process of posting race rosters and marshaling assignments among other important improvements. However with the aforementioned switch to full professional results for the club series it also revealed some deficiencies in our race day-of registration process for the Club Series that is playing into some of the recent challenges with results.
Recognizing that fast and easy race registration is one of the greatest benefits of CRCA membership and that streamlining the results process is important to members we are working through a potentially significant upgrade to the behind the scenes process for race registration. As a result there might be some slight disruptions to the registration process at upcoming races but we hope to find a long-term solution that only continues to improve the Club Series for all racers. Stay tuned!
