Dave Campbell
Good pts. Central issue here for MTB series...we need a "Jim Fischer".
Hats off to Jon Myers and Renee Pype and their friend (names slips my mind,
sorry) who volunteered to do results in exchange for the meager
compensation of racing in the events. We would be LOST without them! But
having such a system of results posting combined with all of Mike's points
means results come out inconsistent as far as format, time, sponsor, etc.
Obviously, this whole thing is in its infancy, and in some cases we are
just trying to get the job done, so we will try to keep improving as we go,
but...
What I think is needed is an MTB rep (that Jim Fischer-type situation) that
is somehow compensated and does results in a central, organized fashion as
a liason btwn all of the promotors that are scattered all over and the OBRA
site, re-mailer, and general public (Auker is EXACTLY right, by the way, we
have to get our events back into the main stream media like the Oregonian.
Way back in the mid-80's, my buddies and I used to real psyched to see our
names in the Register-Guard...they even ran the results of the Thurs Night
training series for a while!). The central problem is this is a ton of
work and we promoters are slammed with our own events and (I will speak for
myself here, though I know many others agree) once they are completed we
are pretty burnt out and ready to get on with our own stuff...like riding
and racing our bikes! I would like to see our MTB series pay somehow
fairly to be this rep all season long, even if it tacks a few bucks on to
entry fees. I think the efficiency, speed, and consistency it could bring
would be worth it to the riders. WHat do you think? And who is willing to
step up? Fish did it for free, basically, and although he did a great job,
it was a ton of work and not something he was excited to do again!
DC
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Lindsey Richter <orel-@yahoo.com> wrote:
I just wanted to briefly touch on the web site and how
the race results are posted. It is so hard to read
them and it is very frustrating. Not only are they
hard to read, but there are no times or series points
posted....
I wanted to race this coming weekend and I cannot find
driving directions or information on the race. I will
not go because I can't get my entry in soon enough.
I am going to start saving money to race out of town
if OBRA does not start getting better organized. It is
so frustrating.
There have been calls for the results to be posted in a standard format and
complaints about timeliness of results in the past. Let me clarify why that
is difficult by explaining the process.
The results that you see posted are sent to various re-mailer lists,
including OBRA's, generally by Candi. Sometimes they are either sent to her
or to the OBRA re-mailer list by the race organizer or the officials. Most
often Candi enters these results to e-mail by hand following the event. For
road events this is fairly do-able, although data input intensive, since
Candi attends nearly every road and track event. For mountain bike events
it works less well since we are dependant on the individual race organizers
to post the results somewhere before Candi can forward them. Some of the
race organizers are very slow at doing this. We have in the past been asked
to present the results in a standardized format but since they come to us in
several different formats this has been difficult to accomplish.
Getting race organizers to get us information on their events is worse than
pulling teeth. An example of this is this weekend's race. We have never seen
an flyer, e-mail or hard copy. It is also difficult to get other items from
race organizers. One organizer didn't get us a request for insurance
coverage until the Friday before the race was to start. After general
business hours to boot, making it impossible to contact the insurance
company prior to his event!
We do snail mailings of hard copies of the flyers when the race organizers
get them to us and agree to pay for the cost of mailing. This is kept to a
minimum by combining flyers from several events and sharing costs. When we
get a hard copy of the flyer we always produce an e-mail version that we
send to the lists. In addition the race organizers may post e-mail flyers to
the list themselves. A few do but many don't. Many race organizer fail to
ever produce a race flyer of any sort.
We also have a telephone answering system that is set up so that race
organizers may record a message giving information on their events. We set
up the system with a default message giving the race organizer's name and
phone number. The race organizers may change that message at anytime and
they can also use that system to refer phone calls to the OBRA line to them.
NONE of the race organizers use this system.
Considering the problem that we have getting information on upcoming events
it is amazing to me that people actually do turn out to events in any
number. What is even more amazing is that the race organizers will question
why they don't have bigger numbers. Duh! Maybe they need to market a bit to
let people even know they are happening.
Ed Garfield volunteered to put the web site together quite some time ago.
He does all the maintenance of the site. It would seem to be a fairly
simple job until you consider the volume of stuff. Between today and the
end of the month there are 38 days of bike racing. Each one produces
results and needs to have some information on the site.
People need to keep in mind that when a comment is made like "OBRA does not
start getting better organized" what they are talking about is not a single
entity but the activities of all the race organizers in addition to the very
few officials and the volunteers.
Mike Murray
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