As many of you know, I'm the volunteer team mechanic for the local public High School Mountain Bike team. We're a 100% self-supported team, with no school money paying for our activities. The League we race in is called Norcal: https://www.norcalmtb.org/ We race in the southern division of Norcal, against teams from Berkeley, Albany, Oakland San Francisco, and the Monterey Peninsula. The Marin teams are all in the Northern Division. In our division, the races are dominated by Salinas High School. They have a huge team, and are very well organized. Last year we came in 2nd place right behind Salinas, and were able to beat both Berkeley and Albany, with our smallish team of ~16 riders. This year our team has grown to nearly 30, and we only have one or two seniors, so we are definitely on the upswing. Our team has a higher percentage of scholarship riders than most, where we provide bikes, equipment and registration fees to a significant number of our riders. We have a few rising stars in the league and think the Salinas Cowboys might start to hear footsteps...the footsteps of the El Cerrito Gauchos.
My own personal contributions to the team are in the form of time and money. I'm the 'on-call' mechanic for all the kids, helping keep the bikes in good repair and helping the kids learn how to maintain their own bikes and do trailside repairs. I also maintain our loaner fleet of race bikes. My big new activity was to build and equip our race day tool board into the door of our team trailer. I took about $500 and a couple days out of my sabbatical to build this up, and I was really proud of the results. TEAM TOOL BOARD <https://www.flickr.com/photos/45758191@N04/37668307886> Now, on race days, I won't have to strip my own tool board bare and throw it all into a duffel bag. Being a volunteer working with these kids has been kind of a fountain of youth experience for me. It is really great to be around high school athletes that are super supportive of one another. Mountain bike racing is one of those precious few sports where boys and girls are all on the same team and all contributing, and I treasure that race day atmosphere and watching the kids gain confidence in their abilities. They inspire me more than I could have imagined. Today is our one big fundraiser. The kids are doing a spin-a-thon event at Cyclebar in Berkeley. The kids were all encouraged to sell 'sponsorships' that go towards a raffle for some local prizes like A's tickets and other stuff. I plan on throwing a donation into the pot, independent of the raffle stuff. If any of you feel so inclined, and you want to grow the size of the donation I make to ECHS Mountain Bike Racing, you can paypal money to my gmail: tapebubba ...at... gmail. If you want our tax id number, let me know. This RBW Group helped a ton in helping pay for our trailer last year. Thanks, and Go Gauchos! Bill Lindsay El Cerrito, CA -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/rbw-owners-bunch. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
