Today, on the emergence of dirt podcast, episode number 43, college club sports are their own animals. They can be hard to form and even harder to control. But once you get 1 off the ground, they can become your very own race direction laboratory. That's, of course, if your experiments don't try to eat you first. Do you hear that sound? I sure hope they didn't close the Starbucks on campus. Mommy.
Thank you for joining me for the Merchant Center podcast. I am Kyle Mondu, your recreational engineer, your merchant of dirt, and your coach for helping you learn how to build live outdoor events from start to finish. Alongside me, as always, is my coach, Mister Murphy, who's always looking to expose the weakness in your plan. And together, we're here to help you learn the do's and don'ts of doing live outdoor events. Today, I'm giving you the strategy for using universities and colleges,
those, you know, institutions of higher learning. We're gonna use them as a laboratory because isn't that where you go to learn things? Well, college, environments, especially club sports give you an opportunity that you may not have realized that you had. So we're gonna look really closely into how Collegia Club Sports can be used as a laboratory for experimenting with your race direction, especially if you're new to race direction.
A college environment can really be a place for you to kinda cut your teeth on some things that you're unsure about. In a kind of safe environment. Okay. So how do you do this? How do you create a collegiate club laboratory without having to really spend a lot of your money in a sense? You have to spend a little bit, but the idea is to help cultivate a collegiate club that the the university or college will support. So you are then building things using their
their their their every college or university has what's called a student fund or a activity fee. Well, someone that goes into club sports. And there's really 2 kind of sports that happen at at colleges. You know, if you haven't been to college, you might you might think about what you see on TV, football, basketball,
you know, those are called Varsity sports. And a lot of times, those are funded, and those are funded very well. Well, there's also sports that are not funded very well at all, and they're done by donations and boosters. And sometimes the university has enough money to give them, you know, some crumbs to get off the ground depending what sport it is. If you have a sport like cycling
in a school that's not really into cycling or in even a even a part of the country isn't in cycling. You're not gonna get a whole lot of money. You're talking, like, a 3 k for a whole season to cover all the disciplines. It's a pretty, you know, pretty good chunk of money when you think about it. It's starting a a collegiate club. But if you're doing equestrian sports or you're doing horses, a lot of times the people that operate
equestrian centers or have horse ranches or do I wanna do horse sports, there's a lot of money in that hockey too. A lot of money in hockey. Not so much in endurance sports. So just know when going into this that sure you can help cultivate some some interest university wise as far as financing, but it's not gonna be a whole lot. The idea is really kind of to generate
something that these kids are going to to learn because as you were learning to be a race director, you're gonna want these kids to learn too. There's a leadership potential here to teach You know, why would I say kids? We're talking, you know, we're talking young adults from 18 to 24.
You're gonna have the opportunity to lead them, to teach them. You're also gonna have the opportunity to have a workforce to help you do events because they're gonna wanna do events. Because there is a collegiate scene for a lot of these sports. And there is an organization that is looking to grow collegiate events in cycling. The 1 I'm most familiar with is USA Cycling. Has a collegiate part of the of this of their world, and they have different conferences,
and they have different events, and a lot of the events are held by the schools. Now they don't really get into how the school holds the event. The conference selects some schools that have kind of other stuff together to hold an event, and that's really kind of how this is done. A lot of this stuff is done kind of grassroots bootstrappy, which is why this is such a good idea for cultivating your race direction
chops to getting your your kind of your feet wetness. Because a collegiate event doesn't have to be perfect. Some collegiate events don't have more than 30 or 40 people show up to it because they're looking to get points and they're we're looking for points to go to the championships and the championships and, of course, held in other places like Montana or Nevada or Arizona or Utah. They're held in really good mountain biking areas, but they need the points to get there.
So you have to you you bike creating these events, you have this small group of people, very interested people, that hold an event, where you can do it in a small scale and learn from this and build from that. So that's kind of the idea. So I'm just setting the stage here for how this works. So to to do this, to launch this idea, the first thing you need to do, of course, is I don't know. This is gonna be a real shocker to you. You have to find a school
That's right. Number 1, you have to find a school, and not just any school. You still find a school that doesn't have a sport that you want to direct. That's the idea. You wanna find a school that doesn't have a sport that you wanna drive, and then talk to them about serving. Because realistically, this is a
a type of activity where you're gonna do a lot of things, and you're not gonna get paid for it, you're not gonna get recognition for it, you're not going to, you know, get an award. There's not gonna be a parade. None of that's gonna happen. And you have to be prepared for that. You have to be okay with that kind of environment because you have to the because remember, the idea is to for you to learn.
And if you ever you ever heard of the the the phrase, you don't take a job for the money, take a job for the experience, this is kind of the same way. If you're very serious about going into race direction, you're very serious by doing live outdoor events.
This is the environment to learn how to do that, to become good at it, to craft your processes and your skills, to fail and fall on your face, in an environment that if you fail falling your face, first off is is is not gonna do a lot of damage. 2nd off is in an environment where where you're not gonna be out a ton of money. 3rd off, it's gonna be in an environment where it kind of that collegiate environment where they'll forgive you for falling on your face.
And fall on your face comes in different ways, you know, where you try to build an event, doesn't happen, you have to cancel it. That's a fall on your face. You want 40 people to be there and 10 show up, and you paid for, you know, if you the out of pocket expenses was for 40 people, and so you took a loss. That's kinda falling your face. That's the kinda thing I'm talking about. I'm not talking, like, you know, hurting somebody or or, you know, you're over slept.
Maybe maybe you do oversleep. Maybe you show up late. But you can be forgiven for that too. It's college. Right? Okay. So that's the idea. So that's I set the stage. Alright. So so number 1, you gotta find a school, doesn't have a sport. And if you think about it, most schools have a track or cross country club, usually. Not some of them have scarcity levels, some of them don't. So think about if you're looking for opportunities for trail running or ultra running,
there is the possibility that their track team is the kind of track team that runs in a circle, or their cross country team is their kind of team that runs a couple trails. But it's it's been very strictly limited to the 5 k environment. Right? So there's opportunities to expand upon that. So trail running, ultra running, cross country, you know, teen cross country, the next level.
So think about those kind of clubs because they might not have 1. They might not have a the trail running club. K? So you can learn from that, or you can become part of their cross country experience because they might be looking for people to expand upon that. And if you're looking to do trail running, cross country is a perfect environment to plug yourself into. K? Next is look for cycling.
Chances are, and this has been my experience as a lot of universities do not have cycling team. And if they do, it was this up and comer little pop up group that disappears.
And remember, collegically, every year, the student body has this turnover. People, you know, go up and people graduate, people leave, people decide it's not for them, people go to different schools. So you'll constantly have this ebb and flow of different people coming in now. So these clubs pop up and disappear really quick. So even if they had 1 at 1 time, chances are either it wasn't very good or it's died out because the people running it, the the core of that club have left. And the people they left in charge of it weren't very good at it because they had other things they needed to do too. Their heart wasn't really into it. And when it comes to collegiate clubs, some of these students' hearts have to be into it. Otherwise, they don't survive.
So think about cycling. Cycling. A lot of times, if there's a cyclicality university, it's road only. I don't know why that is. Every now and then, you might find an environment where mountain biking is really kind of taken off. But it's it's a lot it's weird. In collegiate sports, road cycling easily 3 times bigger than mountain biking. I don't know why. Probably because it's easier to ride for road. Roads are everywhere. Mountain biking's a little more involved.
Dirt, and some people some people don't like mountain biking. I know it's hard to believe, but they don't. Also think about triathlon clubs. This is 1 of those clubs that if they have a triathlon club, usually it's 3 people. I don't know why that is, but traffic clubs tend to be small. Why? Because it's a travel lot. If you ever run a travel lot, they're not easy because you have to swim, you have to run, and you have to cycle.
So multi sport type endurance events are hard to get club members come to. Because people see that. So daunting, you know, it's like, I don't man, that's a lot of work. You know? And I've got physics and engineering
and an English class, and I don't have time to, you know, be in the pool for 2 hours at 5 o'clock in the morning. Usually, traffic clock really small if they have 1. But these are opportunities for mountain biking. You think about maybe the traffic clock the the triathlon club could be an exterior club, you know, off road, triathlons. Or maybe even go far or even go way out there is think about a venture racing.
As you could really cultivate an adventure racing club because that then leads into there's probably there's no universities out there that's least as far as I can tell. There are a few. Usually military colleges have this, but a lot of times, the university that that has a any kind of orienteering is a rare find. Obstacle course teams, you'd be surprised they tend to pop up a lot, especially with fraternities and sororities. Obstacle course teams are actually more available than not.
So I think that's interesting. So think about so think about the the way their club sports is is divided and what they have or don't have, when you're looking at a school to serve. Big cities tend to have more opportunities because there's just more schools. And there are more schools that are more academically focused and not really sports focused that you could kind of get in on a club event of kids who wanna do extracurricular activities.
But don't rule out the smaller schools. Don't rule out the community colleges because as far as collegiate goes, community colleges are still considered a collegiate environment and can be accepted into some of these bigger national organizations.
Because the goals of these national organizations, of course, is to expand their sport and to teach kids how to become professional or, you know, even the amateur level Olympic athletes. They don't want people to come from all places. So you could you have a huge argument even if they they're like, you know, well, we don't know about community colleges.
It's not a hard fight to win. Even if they take you in as a composite team, that's a team that although you are working at community college, you're really part of, like, George Mason University. You're part of Duke University. You're part of, you know, University of Virginia. You really don't go to University of Virginia, but as part as collegiate events go, you are part of their team even though you don't go to that school. There's all sorts of weird kind of combinations you can think of, but that is kind of the idea.
Now, when you think about all this, you have to remember 2 important facts. 1, not all schools are gonna want you there. They are going to snub you, repel you, not be very interested to you. And then, of course, you have to think about not all schools think that some sports are actually sports. Now, this is my experience. I was told once by a person who's moved on at a university level, my name, that cycling wasn't a sport. Now that did take that kind of in a grain of salt, is that's on a sport.
And the the thought of cycling is on a sport, and yet they accepted Quidditch, which is the sport made up from people who read Harry Harry Potter, and now run around with PVC pipes between their legs. And I'm not knocking that sport either. But let's just say that Quidditch compared to cycling is like, you know, a a guy in his sixties versus a baby. Quidditch is a baby's sport. Whitter's cycling is a guy in his sixties, a seasoned you know, veteran.
So to be told that cycling was not a sport. But you're gonna find athletic directors and club sport managers and people who were put into this role, not because they were good at it, or or their
excited about doing it, but because they needed someone to fill this role. There's gonna be those kind of people. And they're gonna send those kind of people that are coaches like I put in this role who only love 1 sport, and that's the only sport that exists to them and no other sport exists to them. So you have to remember that those people exist too. So if you think about those 2 things, they don't want you there and some not all schools think that sports a sport, you're gonna have to fight that battle to educate
the educators and what a sport is and why why this sport is important. So you need to come with both barrels, with all your your ducks in a row, with, you know, take take the metaphor or the the EDM you wanna think about is you need to come prepared. This means you need to show up suit and tie, ladies, business suit, skirt, long skirt, that can be, oh, whatever you wanna do. Make yourself look as professional as possible like you're going to become like you're looking for your your your your
funding, your round a funding for your start up, and you're looking for a $1,000,000. You need to show up to the the school. Dress like that. Think about basketball coaches. You're using a basketball coach just wearing like a t shirt and shorts. Doesn't happen. Right? No. They wear their suit and tie for the game. Think about that. Come come at that level. Show that you're serious, and then come with your PowerPoint presentation.
And I think I've I heard someone say is 10 slides, 30 point font, 20 minutes. I heard VC say that once. That that's how you do a pitch. Have that in your back pocket of telling them not only is trail running a sport, but let me tell you about the national and international level of trail running.
Hit them with you know, we hit them right where it counts when they say, like, well, I don't I don't think trail running is a sport. Then you could say not only trailing in sport, but think about the connections you can cross country is you have cross country kids who could now expand out into ultra running, into the bigger level of running. So you have you have all the facts of your fingertips.
So be prepared to answer those kind of questions so you can shut down any kind of, you know, people with naysayers and people who don't think that you're you're serious. Okay? So that's what's gonna take. And, really, any college or institution of higher learning can be a club you just need to find some interesting students. So this goes into kind of kind of the the the final little little piece of this, of just getting this started,
of creating this this mini little laboratories, is you're gonna have to find some interested students. And a lot of the times, this takes place in interest meetings where they have all the club sports go out and present themselves into the student body. There's other events. There's the the the freshman inner orientation day. There are
weekly events. Sometimes they have vendors come in to, like, the student union or some place where they're allowed to set up tables and sell, like, necklaces and posters and, you know, whatever. You can come there and for a small fee, set up table and get people interested. The idea is once you have some students, even just like a couple students, you can then use them as your your your ambassadors
to the school. Because a lot of these schools want student run organizations. They want to see kids be leaders. In order for them to be leaders, they have to be involved in something to lead and you can help build the groundwork.
You can be the general manager. You can be you're going we're talking about you're going into race direction, but you started off kind of you have to form the foundation of this club. It has to be a president and a treasurer You have to think about how, you know, if you collect money where the money goes, you have to think about how students, do they pay dues or not dues,
the uniforms, what colors do you wear, where are you allowed to participate, what kids have to do in order to leave the campus, in order to be participating in an event. Is there a process or paperwork to get the file in order to be recognized as the from the conference? All that kind of stuff, that's really kind of your role at the very beginning. You're gonna have to get these students involved in that because you're not going to be allowed to do it.
And that rolls into into point number 2 is you're gonna have to fill out a memorandum of understanding, and you're gonna have to make yourself legitimate on this campus. And this is because you don't wanna be creepy and you don't wanna be a criminal. So you need to make sure the university knows that you're there to do a legitimate thing, to be of legitimate service,
and that you've got nothing to hide, and you're not there to harm any of their students. And they take that the the student security very seriously. Especially after all the other kind of stuff that's been happening inside universities. They take
you be on campus with the, you know, with the grain of salt at first. They're gonna they're gonna check you out. They're gonna make sure that you're you're up to par. So you can't if you're a criminal, guess what? This ain't gonna work for you. And if you're super creepy, then I don't know. Go take some Toastmaster classes and learn how to talk and maybe some, you know, some style classes and and make yourself less creepy.
If that's even possible. But if you're not any of those things, then you're fine. You're gonna go to university, and if the students want you to be there, then there's paperwork here for the fill out. And, of course, every university has strange rules and even stranger policies about paperwork. And you need to make sure you understand
what your limitations are. And this goes back to what I was just talking about a second ago, is that a lot of times in the university environment to be a representative of a club, as a coach or a general manager or even a booster or anyone who wants to help the club out. You can't initiate anything. You can't initiate any kind of money transactions coming out of their club account.
You can't be the president of the club because you have to be a student and there are rule for being, you know, what a club member actually is versus what's an associate member. And the idea behind the club environment altogether is leadership. So you want them to be active members. So when you Get your initial group of students who are interested. You're looking for
the students who stand out. They're looking for the students who are very, very involved in making this a success. Those are gonna be the ones that help carry this over the finish line. You don't want the people to kinda like, you know, well, just wanna ride a bike. Well, they're just gonna run. You want people who just want to do the sport, they're not gonna help you build the club as much as the person who wants to not only build the club, but build the club to be successful, get more people involved, promote the club. Be active in making the club a success. You're gonna need those kind of people
because the universities usually, at first, they might let you get away with some stuff, but at some point, they're going to tell you you know, unless the club president tells me that this is okay. You know, I'm not doing it, just because you said so. And this is a very big frustration for a lot of people, especially coaches who are doing club sports because In a varsity environment, the coach has a say because, ideally, in a varsity environment, the coach is an employee, and some schools hire
people to be coaches based on this model. You go improve through a club sport type environment that you can do this. They might hire you on to do this as a, you know, some kind of even part time gig or even a full time gig if you're good at it. So this is you know, if you're in the in the sport if you're in the sports management, degree or you're into any of the physical therapy degrees or kinesiology degrees or even the coaching programs, a lot of schools,
and you can't get a job anywhere. This is how you do it. You volunteer the sport you wanna volunteer in, And then you try to find, you know, from that experience, you build your portfolio or your resume based upon doing these kind of things. So just understand that as you start off in this collegiate experimental environment area, you're gonna have to become legit on the campus before this will actually work.
So just know that. K? What's number 3? Well, you're gonna have to start volunteering and recruiting new riders. Many of these cycling programs, of course, like I said, are unpaid cycling coaches. So much of the school interaction will have to be shepherded about with the college kids is your ambassadors.
And they're gonna have to be the ones that go find people who like to do the sport you're trying to promote, and they're gonna have to be the ones that actually do some of the promotion. Because you're gonna be limited about what you can and can't do on campus for free. There are things you can do on campus that you have to pay for. Remember, a university is technically a business. And the most part, they're looking for money.
So if you have money, they'll help you out. If you're doing this on the cheap, they will not help you out. That's why you need the college kids to be your ambassadors. And unfortunately, and I say this with all the love in my heart, college kids suck because they don't wanna do anything unless you find the rare ones that are wanting to do this and driving to do this and want this to be part of their life even if it's just part of their college life.
Most of them wanna sleep in. They wanna go they wanna go get chicks or dudes. They wanna go party. They wanna go drink. They wanna be pizza. They have classes. They have homework. They have other responsibilities, and they don't have time for this. A lot of times, they're the ones who may or may not show up for club meetings or the ones who may or may not show up for CPR training, or they're the ones who only come to the event.
They don't even help out through your event. They had just come to events just to ride. I just wanna ride.
Those are the kind of people that are they're they're kind of kids that are tough to work with. Now, you need a cadre. You need to roster in order for your club to grow, so you're gonna have some of these kids. But just know you're gonna you're gonna have those kids and how to deal with those kids. Now that's a leadership opportunity for you. How do you inspire those kind of kids to get out of that kind of high school mentality and get into the, as we say, the real world and the college world, and, you know, college isn't real world. They think it is, but it's not. You know? But you have to prepare them for the real world. This is your opportunity.
So think of this as not only as, you know, you're you're building an experimental lab for your race direction or, you know, education, but you're also going to be teaching kids how to be self sufficient themselves. And college kinda does that and kinda doesn't do that. So you're in a way, you know, you're you're the Bin Kenobi, you know, you're the Princess Leia, you're the you're the the big educator of these kids on the leadership aspects.
They're getting education from their teachers. You're gonna help them become leaders. So when they get out in the world, they are a little more self sufficient than they were when they came, you know, when they came into they came into college.
So these interactions have to be shepherded, and you're going to look for the ones that stand out. Look for the ones that'll help you do this because it won't survive I'm sorry, for long, maybe a year or 2, but you wanted this to have some legs because ideally you want to leave this and let it be self sufficient and kind of like push it off into the water and hope it floats. You want this to be a club that goes on.
It's kind of a legacy thing. And maybe that's some reward you can get from all the, you know, the fact that no 1 will give you inoculates is you'll know that I launched this club at this university and it's still going, and you can hang your hat on that. That's kind of a cool thing. Plus, all the things you're gonna learn from that. And let's let's go into the, you know, step 4 of this. Because from those kids, you're gonna look at, you're gonna create club officers.
So this club can become an official club because the school wants those leaders and they're required to have club officers to do all the work. So
you have to be to figure out which ones you think those are. Because at the very beginning, there's not gonna be any elections. You mean, you could probably do an election, but it'll be, you know, it'll be a kankaroo court kind of thing. Everyone will know that that kid is the 1 who's gonna be the president they're gonna have, like, no, who anybody do until else wants to be president, and no 1 will run. They'll run unopposed all in favor I am done. That's how your first club creation will go.
Now when you start building interest and getting people in the club and start getting other new people in the club and people who are looking for opportunities like this, that's when you'll start to get some interest in maybe, you know, an election or runoff election between 2 people and be president, which is a good thing. This is a good thing to want. Now, of course, you know, hurt feelings. You know, I wanted to be president again, and I couldn't be, and that kind of thing. But you have to, you know, what's the best interest of the club? And you have to be constantly telling them what's the best interest. Because
You have to have these officers in place to do the activities that you need them to do. The president has to be the leader. He has to be the 1 to rally the troops and get everyone motivated to do these events. He has to get people set up to go travel to do an event in order to go to a race. He has to he has to be the 1 to help initiate or no to initiate the paperwork for getting reservations at hotels and who's gonna drive and who's gonna where all the gear are gonna go. And did we sign up for the actual event? Did we pay our registration fee? And what uniforms are we gonna wear when we get there? And how do we get those uniforms? He's gonna be the person or she's gonna be the person that runs all that. And the vice president's gonna be the 1 that sits in or fills in when that person can't do it because they have, you know, unfortunately, can't go to the race at the University of Maryland, Washington.
Because I got an exam midterms for that day. I can't get out of it. Or I got a I've got a professor that is just so hard on me for this particular event, then I can't go to the event because now I have this group project I have to finish. You're gonna have all these things pop up.
So you need those kind of officers to take the roles. You also need officers to be safety officers. A lot of universities now require them to be the the defib, the portable defib, the trained. They have to be CPR trained, a 1st aid trained. They have to go to those kind of trainings. They think it's their CPR card. Because they when these kids leave the property, they want them to be at least at a minimum able to take care of themselves if something bad happens.
And additionally, leaving the property is a whole another challenge. Because if you have freshmen and sophomores, Now you have to, you know, who's gonna rent the car and who's allowed to rent the car? And did they take the special university rental car training? And do they have insurance? And do they have a good driving record if they don't? They the university will not pay for their rental car. Or they won't allow them to rent their rental car.
That's a big deal. If you don't know about that, you're about to leave from Montana to go to the university, to the go to the collegiate championships, and you find out that the the kid who's supposed to be you know, he's supposed to go, can't go because first off, the university says you can't go out of state unless he's accompanied by someone from the university or some sort of official, which you can be if you're if you're associated with the club.
And he can't rent a rental car because his driving record was so bad. You have to know these things, the things that they don't teach you. And a lot of times, universities won't tell you. So you need those kids to be active in learning about this stuff because you're not gonna be on campus, and they're gonna have meetings, and there's gonna be information put out, an email sent that aren't gonna come to you. They're not gonna have the, you know, the coach's briefing is usually about concussions.
They teach you about kids getting boo booed by hitting their head on something and how to deal with that and doing the concussion protocol, which is important, but it would also been nice to know things like, no, kids can't rent a car, because of his age or even use or, you know, you can't even go to the hotel because the hotel will not allow an 18 year old kid to go there by themselves. These are the things you have to know.
So that's why the the the officers in the club are important because they become your communications channel to understanding how this club is working. And finally, for setting this all up, is you have to get kids to the events. This is number 5. Get kids in the events. Riders and racers need to get to conference events to get the points, to go to the to go to the actual championships. Because in order to for the experimentation to work, you have to build this clubs legitimacy.
So you're gonna have to start interacting with the conferences and the national organizations in order to get this to work because not all collegiate athletes are built the same. I mean, if you think about it, just use mountain biking, for example. The the amount of men in mountain biking is easily 4 to 1 to women. But in a collegiate world, it's COVID.
So if you have men riders riding in men events, you get points. If you have women writers writing in women events, you get points. If you show up with a team with only dudes, guess what? You don't get any women points? Same if you all show up with only women, you get no dude points. So think about that is in a collegiate environment,
you need to be recruiting people of both men and women in order to get the points in order to get you enough points to make it to take you to a championship little event. If you wanna win the conference, and you wanna win the actual championships itself. But this builds legitimacy because you wanna build legitimacy. So once you're you have this legitimacy built, that's when you can start really doing experimentation.
With a club off the ground and able to actually go to events and actually participate in a conference or national championships, you now have the environment ready to start experimentation. So what does experimentation really start to look like? Well, it starts off with with the first thing, which is you need to think about to promote local event ideas and start your planning.
This this kinda goes out with you the club needs to start not only just being isolated, thinking inwardly about itself, but start to think outside externally. How does the club go about leading just fun things, fun events, fun runs, and leading rides, and partnering with the with existing races out there to start building up the volunteers because you want As a race director, you're gonna want to create
people to help you build a race. Well, what's a better way to help you build a race than to take some of the club members and go to a local event, and make them volunteers, make them hand out water, Make them be the ones at the finish line to help collect bib numbers or or tear off tabs. Help them understand what timing looks like. Take them to events where they're not racing in the event, but they're volunteering in the event. So they get an idea how it it works, the construction of it.
They can participate in see what it looks like outside of the collegiate environment of what, you know, adults doing this in 5 k's or in trail runs or in other mountain bike races. See the outside so they can get an idea of what what kind of what's going on. And then the net after you do that kind of thing, you wanna really kind of think about how do you direct your 1st small event just to give the club a little bit of operating capital to work with. And this is the idea of of leading
fun rides for, you know, maybe think about local cross country events that are small and manageable. Are you doing like a 5 k on the trail or 5 mile on the trail? Are you doing a fun ride where you get a group of people together that it comes at a small cost,
but maybe you're giving away coffee or doughnuts at the beginning of the ride or maybe it's after the ride, things like that. Let me think about small events, small collegiate events that you can sponsor that you can charge a small fee with, that you can do a little bit of registration, even if it's paper and clipboard kind of thing, that you can have a group of people together.
And if you're working with your if your club has been recognized with a national group, you can use these their fun version or their training version of their their permitting process. And give yourself a little legitimacy, plus the university has their own insurance to cover these kind of rides. So you work with the university and tell them you're doing this. You build this event as if you are building a real event, but you make it small. You don't do a whole lot of advertising.
You get some local maybe you go to these volunteer opportunities and you tell people about your little event and bring people little adventures to have fun. This is an easy way to just raise a couple hundred bucks. And you could do it for charity too. That's a big deal with colleges. Is if you want to go do a fun run or do a fun ride, do it for charity.
Make it part of a donation process for a charity that the club is very interested in in participating in. And then when people come to a participate in that, a little bit goes to the club, a little bit goes to the charity, everybody wins. The third thing you need to do is then pay attention on how other schools produce events good or bad. As you start to look outwardly, as you start to go to the conference events and go to the championships,
have your club members pay attention to how they do it. Good or bad because a good run event will teach you just as much as a bad run event. You need to see just how bad the competition is.
And I kinda I kinda like seeing a bad event probably more than a good event. I mean, good event will teach you a lot of cool things about, you know, how well run things are are doing. But the good thing about a bad event, especially if it's in your conference, is that you know that if you're going to run an event to be part of the conference calendar, and you have 2 or 3 events that are just horrible. You know when it comes around, when they ask for people wanna put on events,
you're gonna be in a lot better position, especially if they they they've gotten to know you, to put on event for your first time, based on the bad events that just they just don't wanna see anymore, but no 1 else is gonna do an event. It's really weird. It's collegiate. It's a lot of schools just don't wanna do it. They wanna I always wanna ride, man. They have those people. There's a lot of clubs like that. They don't put on events. They just wanna ride.
So if you wanna be a school that puts on an event, see which ones are the bad ones. If are there bad ones in your conference, and if there are, then when you put your offering up, chances are you're going to you're gonna get on the calendar. It's not too difficult to do. It may take you a year or 2. It may take them believing that your school's club has some legs. And and that's okay. Because if you get denied the first time around, That's fine. You participate.
You look well, you well managed. You help out or you can help out. You'd be you know, again, the serving mentality. You give, give, give, give, give, even on the bad events. Try to help out. Try to be the volunteer. Try to be, you know, as you're there, coaching, your club, or even just managing a club, you know, jump in, be a man you know, be be someone to help out. Help them make their event a little bit better
because the conference people will see that. They'll see that you're participating. They'll see that you're active in that, and they'll they'll understand that when you say you wanna do event, and then tell them you wanna do an event. Start doing preaching about, you know, we really wanna hold an event, what is it we need to do to hold an event? And if there's enough bad events in your conference,
you'll get the opportunity. It will not take you long to do that. They're looking for people to want to do events versus the schools that just had to do 1 because they needed something on the calendar so the points could be done. So that's what you need to do. Is you start you're putting yourself out there. Start advertising. Even if it's just, you know, verbally that you're looking to get on the calendar.
And then you need to think about, if you wanna get big enough to host 1 of the big events, we get you know, not only you got a conference calendar, but to get into a champion event, you at least need to have produced an event. So if you're looking to 1 day, I wanna do a championship then the opportunity will always present itself, you know, just due to the graduation factor of these clubs, the number 1 killer of clubs is graduation.
So there might be some really big powerhouse schools in your conference. Just give it a year or 2. If you're in, you know, in for diamond, for dollar, if you're into this for the long game, your experimentation process may take you a year or 2. 1 of those schools will fade. It always happens. They will be the powerhouse school always does it, and then the up concomers decide they don't wanna do it or the main people all leave and the club just folds.
And now there's no event at that school that that that what they used to do. Just not there. It's gone. Poof. Gives you huge opportunity to step in and produce an event of that quality. Now can you produce the championship event? Maybe maybe you can actually get yourself to that level where you can do a conference event. That becomes the championships. Realistically, in college,
the championship event for the conference I'm talking about the conference, not the national event, the conference event. The difference between a regular calendar event versus a championship event is That's right. Nothing. Not a thing. They are exactly the same. There's no difference. The same way you produce an event for the regular calendar event is the same way you produce a Champions event. It's just it has a different name.
Could you make it cooler? Sure. Is there gonna be maybe a podium versus a lot of time in the collegiate? There's no podium. They get points and they walk away. It's really weird because the collegiate rules allow you to give as part of their registration money, you can give them stuff, but you can't give them prizes or rewards on the podium unless it's like metals. And
metals, of course, in a small event, are tough to do because you have to buy them in bulk and already getting any kind of discount to make them worth for a while. So there's all these kind of weird rules you have to think about. So a lot of times, an occlage event, there's not a lot of podiums. Which, you know, maybe that could be the deciding factor maker event even better is have a podium. Even if you just call the names up and they raise their hands and yay, right, and they get the picture.
But think about you If you wanna take this to the next level, a championship event could be cool because if you put that in your portfolio, let's say that I have directed a championship event. Now you have your first check-in the box if you really wanna go to the national level. That kinda leads to my my last point on this is to direct bigger events and establish your club within a conference. Once you have a foothold and you can promote your annual event until
you no longer wanna support it, you can drive this experiment as long as you want to to get as much out of this as possible. Now think about when you're actually directing this event, what is it that you're going to to learn and how you're gonna build this? But you first need to get to the point where they're gonna let you do it.
And you're gonna use that by building the club internally than building the club externally and getting yourself out there, getting new erasers in the world, and establishing yourself as a viable, you know, school in the conference that's a competitor. That someone just shows up once and then leaves or comes to 1 race a year and leaves. It'll be actually a competitor, travel to the long races, go to the championships, become, you know, serve those events that need those serving.
And that's how you go from the club being birthed to being allowed to create an event. And now let's get into that. What do you do when you finally get to do the events? So you're gonna wanna get 3 really, really important things out of creating an event. And credit card in your laboratory because now you have a club. Now you have some interested people in that sport. You have a group of people who will help you build something that you couldn't do by yourself.
Which is cool to have some like line of people together because a club event to enable to host a race means that all the registration money comes to the club. So you're gonna put out some money to build the event and maybe you can get some sponsors because you're allowed to have sponsors as a collegiate event. There's no rules really against that. In cycling, it's it's been it's like that, but I don't know about other sports. So let's keep that in mind. Each sport may vary depending on sponsors, but you can get local communities to to volunteer
prizes or to help pay for something. Maybe they pay for porta potties. Maybe they pay for your event registration. Maybe they help pay for officials. You can help they can they can help, you know, set aside the cost. The school's gonna give you some money to set us out the cost. They're gonna have their own insurance. With 1 particular university, they have the athletic or the athletic trainer show up who's still 1st aid and EMT qualified,
that became our part of our emergency plan, which is kinda cool. So they can do some cool things for you. But
ultimately, that the little bit of money you make, and it's not a whole lot. But it's enough to to offset the cost at least breakeven if you have to at the very minimum. But add a couple. Maybe maybe as much as 5, the the 500 to a $1000 to your bank account for your club to go and do other events, which is kinda cool. And that's kinda the whole point. You do this event. You're helping the kids get to other events because the school is gonna give you hardly anything and a bunch of grief and those kinda things about about what the spendatures of that. And hotels are expensive, and driving it expensive, and registration fees can be expensive once you talk about, you know, 5, 7, 10 events. It gets kinda costly. Especially if you're going from 3 kids going to 5 kids going to 10 kids going. And then all the rules about the girls can't stay in the same room as the guys and the only 2 guys per room, all that kind of stuff. Right? So think about all those kind of costs. Now let's let's kind of work backwards of now that we're we're doing this, what is it you're trying to learn?
Now, hopefully, the first thing you learn by doing this, and the reason why I call this this this collegiate experiment this sports laboratory is that if you're looking to go into race direction and you've done some volunteering and done some work and this is your kind of your laboratory, you need to learn enough to know if race direction is for you, This is a perfect opportunity,
especially with college kids that are gonna just rub you the wrong way all sorts of places. But you need to find out that by doing small races that this life is just something that maybe you didn't expect It will save you the pain and suffering of building an entire company of outdoor events
if you don't like this. If you go into this and start building races and find out that you hate it or that the work is just too much or that not getting any accolades after working your butt off for a year or 2 years and no 1 seems to care or worse if your rent doesn't your event doesn't happen that year and no 1 even notices, That's that's, you know, tough things you need to learn, and you can learn it in an environment or you didn't, like, blow $10.
Then you learn an environment where not only did you help kids get to event or create a club, where they could go off and do some cool things and be leaders the and you find out that doing 1 event a year is as much as you wanna do. You couldn't see yourself doing 2 or 3 or 10 or 20. You decide that, wow, I can do 1 collegiate event. That's cool. I can help this club out, and that's cool. And but that's as much as I wanna do. This is not what I wanted to do.
That is what the laboratory is for. It will help expose that very quickly. So know that that's that's kind of the first thing you need to learn. The second thing is that you would need to learn that the club, when you find those right leaders, when you find those kids that wanna take it over, they can outgrow you. So this experiment kinda has a clock attached to it. There's a timetable
for your involvement to the point where your involvement is not gonna be won so much. And remember college kids can be punks. And college kids graduate, then, of course, lesser leaders take over. You have those kids who know it all and all that kind of stuff. You're gonna be dealt with all the kind of rough things that you remember as being a kid, oh, it's gonna come right at you because now you're the the the old dude or the old gal who, you know, wants to make this a good and you have to, you know, be the tough love kind of person
to get these kids, to get off their rear ends and actually do something, But when they actually start doing something and they do it well and they don't need you anymore, you need to prepare for that. You need to be prepared for when they take over and, you know, thanks for all your help, but we've got it from here.
You need to be prepared for that. That will happen. The experiment has to end. There is a beginning and end of this experiment, and at some point, you're going to have to stop doing this unless you want this to be your full time job. And if that's the case, then you need to take this 1 step further and build a and help build a varsity program, which is a completely different animal, but possible at some universities,
or go find a job at a university that wants a varsity person and become a employee of that university and build a career out of this. If you're doing this to experiment and not build a career out of this, kids will outgrow you. You know, just it's just a natural evolution of the sport, or they'll graduate and no 1 else will be there and that the club will just die. And you need to prepare for that too. So know that. Know that going in that the experiment has a lifespan
There's a life cycle to this, and life cycle will come to an end, and you need to see the writing on the wall. Don't try to hang on to this and keep it alive all by yourself and have to do this all over again. Learn what you need to learn,
get the event, get the direction, learn your processes, learn how to put this together, you know, use this to help start, you know, realizing what equipment you need, what equipment you don't need, where all your gaps are, learn all that stuff, and then it's either time to go do your own thing, and build your own race company and do this for real or go do something else.
That's that's easily what this laboratory will teach you. And, of course, number 3, this is the biggest thing that I think a lot of people who do collegic events do not really grasp, and that's your events can stand on their own, and you need to be if you're gonna do this for a full time gig, you need to kinda realize that. Holding open events next to collegiate events can help you exit gracefully from a club.
You can use the laboratory or you could even call this I would even call this the incubator phase. Of this experiment is you experiment with the internally external, the leadership, the growth, and all that kind of things. You experiment with holding races and becoming a member of the conference and becoming, you know, recognized and even going to national level and getting kids in national level places.
But if you think about holding open events open events, of course, for those unfamiliar open event is, is the noncollegic people, you know, everybody else, kids, adults, you know, men and women, all ages, and open event next to collegiate event. So you could do collegiate only,
but you're gonna generate us so much money on a collegiate only event, which is fine. First thing you first started out. Remember I said earlier, you kinda need to start small. But as you grow this thing, you're gonna need a bigger audience. A bigger audience means open events. And as you start building these open events,
you can then exit gracefully from the club by just not to include you anymore, or using the open events to launch the thing you wanna launch and let the club do its thing, especially if they've outgrown you. You can only learn so much from the collegiate events do their small size. I mean, in the end, you could start a club, end up launching your own outdoor business from this club,
and all done for a good cause and in a safe environment, for a fraction of the cost that you would do if you're doing this kind of just on your own in any given park and just kinda putting your your flyer up there and says, hey, let's do an event. You can do it that way. You can build small events in that environment.
But the collegiate world is I I believe gives you the opportunity to do something more because you're going to impact the kids that are part of your club in a way you may never understand. You may never know that by helping
start that club, that you got kids involved in cycling. And because they were involved in cycling, they spent on it in this I love this joke. Is is if you get your kids involved in cycling, they'll never be addicted to drugs because they'll never have enough money to buy them. You could you could kind of argue that that cycling or running or any kind of those major sports where they get involved in physical fitness and then can, you know, in understanding
how their body works and food intake and weight management and you'll feel getting strong and healthy minds and those kind of things will help them not succumb to addiction or some of the, you know, other mental things, depression, those kind of things. It's not a foolproof science and it's not, you know, there are arguments pro and con and whether or not this actually has an impact. But in my experience, you know, anecdotally, my experience is that kids involved in sports are
much less likely to get involved in drugs or do something bad because they got other things to do. They have someone they got some place to to push their frustration onto. They have an outlet, and clubs sports could be a huge outlet, especially in the competitive collegiate environment of all the bad things that come out of college as well as good things. You can turn this into something very positive. You could be building these kids up. You can be teaching them, well, they're teaching you.
And you can do it in a safe environment because if the club doesn't work out, the kids just go back to school Closing workout. Klosing workout. You build an event. No 1 comes. No 1 comes. Chances are if you do this, if you follow this plan, if you do this, you kind of work this Collegiate Sports Laboratory, you will discover that there will be kids that wanna do this, there will be conferences that will love to have you create an event for them because no 1 else will.
You will find that you will learn in a way that is very safe You will have people to help you build these events because they're actively involved in wanting this to be to to work for their club. And then you can decide if you wanna continue this as a career If you wanna exit gracefully, we're gonna do something else. This is the strategy,
and this is what this is what Merchants of dirt is here to teach you, is there are many, many ways to create live outdoor events. This is just 1 way 1 idea that you could put in the world. And because I've been to so many universities and so many college campuses and seen so much club sports, that is just so bad. So many bad events in the club sports world There are just I mean, side note,
a vent where a pop up tent, and a girl sitting Indian style on the ground using the waiver form, the back of the waiver form to check people in. And, hopefully, you registered because she didn't know. She just took your word for it. That was an event. That was registration. And timing was done with well, here's 1, 2, and 3. No idea what their times were.
And we started a a bunch of events late, Why? Well, someone took them on a tour of the course, and they got lost because they didn't even know their own course. Things like that. This is the kind of the the collegiate world is full of this. Why? Because it it's it's amateur it's designed that way. The people are learning how to do this stuff. You don't start off a pro. You don't start off. We're at least, you know, doing national level events.
That's not how this happened. You have to start somewhere. And why not start in a collegiate environment with other people looking to learn as well. It's perfect. I don't I I think this is an excellent idea, and if you get a chance to try this, to do this, I'd love to hear from you. I'd love to have your feedback. Get me up at merchants at [email protected], and let me know if you've tried this.
Let me know if you've you've you've thought about doing collegiate stuff. And if you've done this or you're doing this, you know, give me some you can me shout out. I've done this myself. So if you have some Some you're you're stuck on something or don't know how to get past something, let me know. I can probably help you out. And especially if you're a college student. If you're a college student, you want this you want this kind of thing at your school,
You don't need an adult to do this for you. You can do this yourself, and I'll see if I can help you. I'd I'd love I'd love helping anybody who's interested in doing this kind of thing. So take this strategy and could do some great stuff with it. And now you know, Thank you so much for listening to the mergers or podcast. If you're a regular listener, You know I've been away for a while. There's been some stuff going on,
so we'll see if if that doesn't impact the schedule coming up. But hopefully, I'll I'll be back on track here shortly. And if you are a new listener, I'd love to hear from you. If not, if you're something that resonated with you on this 1, I'd also love to hear from you. Please reach out to me via merchants at [email protected]. Or if it's a short question, you have something you just kinda bug and just don't know what the the answer is. Hit me up on Twitter atmerchantzadir.
Or go to the website. I've got, you know, a ton of other episodes to listen to atmerchadir.com. And if you are really interested in supporting the show, of course, you go to Patreon and Patreon button on the Merchantzadir podcast. Go to the website hit the button, and
I'd love to that would be an awesome thing for you to do. Meanwhile, while you're figuring out, you know, if whether or not the collegiate environment experiment is really kind of, you know, in your in your wheelhouse or you need to build your own laboratory, I'll see you on the next episode of the Register podcast. Until then, I hope what you learned today helps you be outside. Take care. God. Why do college kids drink so much coffee? God's day. And I was in the navy.