Over the weekend Northeastern hosted their second race of the 2011 MTB season, taking the conference back to Holiday Farm and Jiminy Peak after not being there for a couple years. Short write-up is on the USAC Collegiate Weekly Wrap; full results on the calendar.
All in all I think the weekend went super well. Northeastern’s pretty on the ball as promoters. If you know what to look for you can tell that they have established a decent trend of passing on knowledge from year to year, e.g., simple things like having receipt slips printed out. Attendance seemed solid but was below previous years’. Downhill was a notably exception, with good local turnout for the Open race boosting that over 70 riders.
The slalom course was interesting and worked well. It was buried in the woods and carved in and out of trees so it had a very different, much closer feel than almost all slalom courses. It fits right into the trail network there, so for a change Holiday is planning on keeping it intact. A minor issue we’ll have to watch for in the future is that the lanes had no gap between them at the finish, so setting up the gates was precarious and they got knocked around a bit.
I spent a fair bit of time over the weekend taking photos. In some ways this is a little sad as I only have a passing interest in photography and would much rather walk around or conduct operations. However, we don’t really have that many people taking and making readily available high quality photos throughout the MTB season. We need more of that kind of stuff if we’re going to really push back against the MTB attendance drop, so I’ve been consciously taking more photos.
One thought I had for the future is possibly buying a decent, action-photo ready camera for the conference and passing it around throughout the weekend. That way I don’t have to spend time on it, new people get to try taking photos with more than a point & shoot, and I reliably wind up with the photos at the end of the weekend.
I also spent a fair bit of the weekend trying to consciously standoff a bit from the timing and officiating while still also being there. This coming weekend I will actually miss an ECCC MTB race for the first time in over six years. Not that long ago this would be almost unthinkable in terms of the quality of the event, but the guys are super on the ball even with the new timing equipment thrown into the mix. Other than a few errors that have crept into the short track results recently, I’m actually not concerned at all, which is somewhat of a relief at long last.
More photos are in my flickr gallery. Amanda Buerger (NU) also has a good bunch of photos up on FB.
