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Hi everyone,

with our relatively poor entries to the four opens promoted this year I wanted to get a discussion going about how to rectify this for next year. I know this is the responibility of the committee but thought we could at least help by contributing our collective thoughs on the subject.

This year we had 30 entries for the early season hilly 30, and the same number for the 15 and the Marlow bypass 10 and we only had an entry of 20 for the recent hilly 30. When you take into account that you get a number of DNS riders at each event we could be looking at more volunteers than riders! I'm sure this must have been the case yesterday as only 10 riders made it to the start line!

Small entry levels = small prize funds and a poor atmosphere at races and still requires the same ammount of work on behalf of the club so I think we need to come up with a strategy for getting more entries and all get behind our club's promotions by helping out in some way if we can by marshalling / increasing intrest / producing startsheets etc (personally I've been a bit poor in this department having helped at one event in the space of 3 or 4 years).

It seems to me that the factors that influence enries are, the course used, the date of the event (relative to championships etc) and publicity generated for events.

Looking at the startsheets on the CTT site to see what kind of entry is possible I have found the following:

Newbury RC (April) - H25/1: 84 entries
High Wycombe (April) - H10/17r: 94 entries
West London CA (May) - H10/1: 57 entries
Newbury RC (June) - H25/1: 50 entries
F&CCC (June) - H10/8: 85 entries
Reading CC (June)- H50/8: 37 entries
Oxonian CC (July) - H10/17r: 49 entries

It seems that the H10/1 and H25/1 courses (between Reading and Newbury on the A4) and H10/17r (on the A420 South of Oxford) are very popular. These are amongst the quickerst 'H' courses which I think helps attract entries. Our own H10/2 could be popular too as it has potential to be a quick course (PB of 20:30). The new H10/22 (Marlow bypass) does not appear to be very quick or very popular, this may be due to the early starts on the course.

Other thoughts on courses that are relatively local are the HCC175 near Odiham. This club course is to become an Open course soon and already has a course record of 18:50 something. Word gets out about such times and this will no doubt attract a high number of entries. How about promoting a round of the Rudy Project? There is the course around Heckfield that was used for the BTTC a number of years ago which is ideal for such an event. Clearly we'd all need to help out with such a promotion but at least the entry level would be relatively high.

Please let me know your thoughts on the above or any other thoughts (sorry for the long post)

Pete