Support Weekly Practices
Our weekly practices are entirely run by volunteers. If it weren't for all our volunteers, we wouldn't have such a great program. Interested in helping out at the weekday or weekend practices and having a ton of fun? Read on!
How to join
Joining is pretty simple!
We are an entirely volunteer run organization, and we believe in people doing what they want to do. One of our biggest needs is help on rides. We have more kids every year and running the practices and events takes more and more volunteers. Most of the rest of this page is dedicated to information about helping us out on rides.
- Email [email protected] to get started, or fill out a Contact Request
- Let us know how you want to help
- We'll get you on the right email list, and on the right track for helping out
We are an entirely volunteer run organization, and we believe in people doing what they want to do. One of our biggest needs is help on rides. We have more kids every year and running the practices and events takes more and more volunteers. Most of the rest of this page is dedicated to information about helping us out on rides.
Who is qualified to help with rides?
We have a very wide spectrum of skill and fitness levels on the team, so we can use help from a similarly wide spectrum of adults. Beyond that
- we're looking for people who care and want to help
- ride leading experience is NOT necessary
- we especially need help on the weekday training rides
- experience with high schoolers or middle schoolers is NOT necessary
- mountain biking experience is a big plus, but not strictly required
- using a team ride to get in a good workout for your own training plan doesn't usually work so well
- experience with basic bike repair is helpful but not necessary
- you have to get properly certified with NICA and you have to follow the rules
Is it actually useful to just ride along as an extra adult?
You bet! We start all our new volunteers out as extra adults along for the ride, once they are certified. You get to know the kids, they get to know you, you see how it all works. We like to have at least 2 adults per subgroup, so usually our first year volunteers are the 2nd adult for a subgroup where a more experienced adult is the group leader. We won't ask you to ever lead a group or subgroup unless you want to, and even then we like you to be just a general volunteer for at least a year first. Running rides is a bit of an adventure, like mountain biking in general is, and so there are a wide variety of circumstances where simple adult presence keeps everything running smoothly.
Getting certified to ride with us
So if you want to work directly with the kids (ie ride with us) you need to get certified as a "Coach Level 1" aka General Volunteer. Here are the steps to getting that done
- We send you an invite to the NICA pit zone to get registered. from there you log in and follow the instructions to
- register with NICA ($25)
- get a background check (about $40)
- take an online concussion training (35 minutes)
- take a NICA philosophy training (20 minutes)
- take a NICA risk management level 1 training (45 minutes)
- take the abuse awareness training (2 hours)
Coach Resources
(Under Construction!)