Instructor Training at Ride The Hill
They shoot horses, don’t they
It was a beautiful sunny morning. As I drove into Worcestershire the Malvern Hills brought back all kinds of memories from my years in this part of the world. And as I drove down the A4103 I almost turned right to go to Out To Grass.
At Hereford Board and Bike Park, with no digger coming this weekend as planned, the five of us went up the hill and after a bit of time spent clarifying the plan, we got to work digging by hand.
Digging gives you a lot of time to think. And at a mountainboard centre my thoughts were about the current state of mountainboarding and whether we are flogging a very lame and unhealthy horse.
I’ve had previous thoughts about how we have got into the current situation of not enough mountainboarders riding often enough through a lack of infrastructure, and I think I’ve known for a while now that there isn’t very much the ATBA-UK can do to fix it, all we can do is respond to the situation in what we think is the best way.
One of the consequences of fewer riders in recent years has been reducing the number of competitions the ATBA-UK holds. This in turn had a knock on effect on the amount of money the ATBA-UK makes through entry fees and membership. This income had to be supplemented somehow and the most likely to be successful way was through instructor training. So, the ATBA-UK changed it’s model for delivering Instructor Training and rather than external training providers offering training it was all provided by the ATBA-UK. This worked and we made enough money last year and this year to cover the business overhead costs and continue to trade. But of course it had a not-unexpected consequences.
Some of the training providers felt that the ATBA-UK was taking away income from them and despite explaining the reasons behind this change they wanted to take it back. One of the ideas they talked about was setting up an alternative organisation to deliver instructor training. The thing is, the ATBA-UK is a community asset, it belongs to the mountainboard community. It isn’t ours, we are just looking after it for the community. It makes me laugh (and wonder if the issue is that the current committee haven’t communicated this to the community) when I hear about mountainboarders talking about setting up another governing organisation in competition with the ATBA-UK. If they want an organisation to provide validity and authority to whatever they want to do they could just have the ATBA-UK. They don’t need to set up in competition, they can just have it. I don’t think there is a single member of the current committee that wouldn’t happily hand it over and walk away, and I would certainly spend a lot less time and money driving around the country teaching people to be mountainboard instructors.
In some ways, the ATBA-UK committee, the team that does the work of the ATBA-UK (instructor training, organising events, marketing, accounts, etc.) is a microcosm of the mountainboarding community and is suffering from the same problems; not enough people doing enough work. I’m as guilty as anyone on this point. My focus is the Instructor Training but I’m behind on finishing the new training manual. Other things in life get in the way and mountainboarding becomes less and less of a focus.
So that’s the horse. Not enough people doing enough work to encourage more people to go mountainboarding to get even more people into it, and some conflict, and some other things in life. At some point we’re going to have to face the fact that it just isn’t worth carrying on with (in it’s current guise, anyway).
Anyway, we made the berm much better.
The social graph of the mountainboard community
I’ve always believed that the mountainboarding community follows the laws of networks and so benefits and suffers from network effects. Networks are made up of nodes (people in the mountainboarding community) and edges (the social connections and relationships between those people). Understanding this helps us understand how the connections between people in the community work and what effect changes have on the entire network.
Understanding the problem
There aren’t enough people mountainboarding often enough. That is the problem. Looking at the problem from the perspective of the social graph of the mountainboard community, we have people (nodes) who are either active (riding regularly) in the community (network) which means that they have existing connections which are continually renewed and reinforced, or inactive (not riding regularly) which means that those preexisting relationships have lapsed. There are also dormant nodes but for the purposes of this we would say that they have dropped off the graph.
If a node becomes inactive it weakens the edges and has a knock on effect on the other nodes. If a node is active it can affect the activity of nearby nodes but may not be sufficient on its own to keep them active.
If node A in the diagram above becomes inactive, nodes C and D become disconnected from the rest of the graph, and the connection between node B and the rest of the graph is weakened and so weakens the connection of nodes E, F and J to the rest of the graph.
That’s why understanding the mountainboarding community as a network is important, because it shows us what happens when a single rider stops and how it takes more than a single rider to build up the community. We can use this understanding in order to help keep the active mountainboarders riding and reactivate the inactive riders. This will follow the same network effect rules as the weakening of the network and exponentially strengthen the community. So, how do we do it?
Towards a solution
We need a plan. If we want to solve this problem we need a plan, people, resources, etc. It’s not an easy problem to solve, but I think with the right things in place, and the right understanding, it is possible.
- Identify active and inactive (and dormant) riders. Knowing this will be essential for targeting the right riders. Luckily the ATBA-UK has a database of mountainboarders across the UK. They could all be assigned an activity score (5 for most active, 1 for least active) and then their postcodes mapped onto Google Maps using TableFusion.
- Focus on active nodes for retention. We want to keep the active riders riding as if they become inactive the network effects will multiply. So we look for areas on the map that have the highest concentration of active riders.
- Then we establish regular scheduled meets in the areas where the active riders are, doing the type of riding they like to do. If there is a cluster around a centre (as we could expect) then we organise a meet at that centre. The meets need to be at least monthly and planned in advance so riders can know about them and plan to attend.
- The meet-ups then need to be promoted across the community. This could be done using the ATBA-UK email newsletter, group chats on messenger (segmented by area), various websites and Facebook groups.
- Doing this would require quite a commitment from someone, and probably some funding from the ATBA-UK, but it would help turnaround the decline of mountainboarding in the UK.
Mountainboarding doesn’t have to be like snowboarding
Diego Anderson wrote an interesting article on Remolition about the past failings of mountainboarding to ‘make it big’. I have a lot of respect for Diego, and he certainly makes some interesting points in the article, but I can’t help but think that the article, Diego’s opinion, and the ambitions of mountainboarding as a sport are underpinned by some unhealthy and unhelpful assumptions.
To be successful, mountainboarding doesn’t have to be like snowboarding. It doesn’t have to have superstar athletes who are paid to compete in huge international competitions with TV coverage. I think the future of mountainboarding relies on it stop trying to be what it’s not and define it’s own vision of what successful means.
Durham Guerilla Jam
While the rain poured down south, up north it was getting hairy. Hairy of the guerilla kind.
Wilmington BMX track, home to a failed BMX club and failed ski shop, might be ghetto by BMX standards but with tarmacked berms and some good gradient it is ground breaking by mountainboarding standards, and the perfect place for the first ever Durham Guerilla Jam.
What made it guerrilla? Well, Scott, the chief gorilla, found the track and organised a meet for NE⚡AT (North Eastern All Terrain) Boarders, which spawned the idea for a competition, and the guys from NE⚡AT just got on and organised it. Simple as that. No asking for permission, no suggesting someone else do, just getting on with it and making it a success.
And a success it was. 11 riders, 44 races, more overtaking than you’d see on a usual BoarderX track, fun for everyone including the local kids who’d probably never seen anything like it…
Highlights of the Day:
- Making Lane choice by rolling dice.
- Making better riders ride is switch when drawn against less experienced riders.
- Lewis nailing the track despite only riding for one day using his laid-back longboard style.
- Morgan doing a ninja overtake on the final straight when Cheb thought the win was in the bag.
- Collecting stickers for winning a race and being cool. With whoever has the most stickers at the end winning.
- Andy Brind unbeaten in every race!
UK Mountainboard Championship 2016
It was a gamble. Holding just one mountainboard competition this year rather than the four we’ve done for the past few years. What if it got rained off? What if there was a major injury or system failure meant we ran out of time? What if key staff couldn’t get there? If any of those things happened it would have meant no national level competitive mountainboard event this year, which would have had a knock-on effect on the ATBA-UK, it’s reputation, the decision to only hold one event, and the future of mountainboarding in the UK.
But after three days of flag-planting, gate-dropping, roller-pumping, wheel-spinning, berm-swooping, collarbone-popping, sumo-wrestling, cable-laying, track-grooming, laser-beam-breaking, fire-breathing, mini-ramp-riding, chilli-eating, cow-onesie-wearing, double-backflipping, 1080-ing, medal-winning mountainboarding, it was over. It was a gamble, but it worked.
Mountainboard Instructor Training at Kilve Court
