The Rough Draft: Latest info from the Fresno Cycling Club

Happy Holidays from the Fresno Cycling Club!!


The Rough Draft
A Monthly Update from The Fresno Cycling Club  - December 2018.

The Prez Sez

Greetings club members and fellow bicyclists. Happy Holidays to you all.

  Well, our Christmas party happens at the same time as the newsletter comes out!   Thanks to VP Diana Millhollin and crew for organizing the party, and to Jim Hawe for helping secure the site, St. George Church on N. Orchard Street in Fresno. The Christmas Party has always been the culmination of the bicycling year, a time for everyone to get together for dinner and an evening of sharing stories and gifts. With about 100 registered, it's a chance to eat, dance, enjoy each other’s company, and score some really great bike gifts (if they bought raffle tickets, or bid on silent auction stuff!!).

New Year’s Day Ride

The New Year’s Day ride will be held as usual on the first day of 2019. I think 10:00 am will be a good start time. Look for updates on the website, and an email will be sent to register for the ride. The ride is free to everyone, non-members must sign a waiver. 

Other Upcoming Meetings/Events

Homegrown Cyclocross.  December 2nd, Woodward Park.   Central California Off Road Cyclists (CCORC) has been putting on the Homegrown CX series for a number of years. Check out the Facebook events page: https://www.facebook.com/events/424428628085981/

Bike Shop Holiday Parties! (check with your local shop for more!!)

  • Steven's:  Dec 6th, 6 to 9 PM
  • Rubber Soul:  Dec 13th 6 to 9 PM

Board Meeting:  There will be no Board Meeting this month. The Board will reconvene on Wednesday January 2, 2019, 6:30 pm. Location to be announced.

General Club Meeting: There will be a club member meeting on Wednesday January 9, 2019 at 7 pm. Guest speakers will be Hilton Osborne and Nancy Dooley. Location to be announced.

Everyone REALLY DOES Love Raymond!

  The Everyone Loves Raymond Gravel Ride was our first club-run gravel ride event and it was a great success. The committee (headed up by Henry Pretzer and Patricia Dailey) put on a terrific event. The Raymond Community Park was a great venue for the start of the three challenging rides (your choice of 30, 60, or 90 miles). It was very exciting to have about 150 registrations for a first time ride! The weather was great, and the routes were challenging.

  Just as the name invoked, everyone loved the ride and expressed that they would be back next year. There was also talk of having a spring event. Riders expressed how nice it was to do a ride where they didn’t have to worry about motorists, and how they enjoyed the great scenery. Great job Patty, Henry and Team. Thanks also to our sponsors Rubber Soul Bicycles, Steven’s Bikes Shop, The Bike Shop at Woodward, and Pro Bar as well as all our great volunteers.


Year-End Recap

  • Looking back over 2018, we’ve put on a lot of bicycle rides for the Fresno Cycling Club members. We had the New Year’s Day ride, the Kirch Flat Century, the Climb to Kaiser, the Tour de Lakes ride, the Grizzly Century, the Bass Lake Double Century and the Everyone Loves Raymond Gravel ride. In addition to these great rides we have had daily and weekly rides. 
  • Since updating to our current website (www.fresnocycling.com), we now have an active calendar on our home page. This means that you can see up-to-the-minute updates on rides, including ride changes or cancellations. As many rides as we have, there is still room for more. 
  • Another improvement to the ride calendar was the addition of several sub-groups, (i.e., the FACT-Filipino American Cycling Team, the Killer Bees, several of the bike shops, as well as our long-standing Mountain Men/Women group, the ROG (Retired Old Guys) group, the Ken and Nancy Tuesday/Thursday group and others all putting rides on the calendar. If you have a small group that you ride with on a regular basis, become a ride leader and put your rides on the calendar. Just contact the Ride Coordinators, Henry Pretzer or Devin Bovee.
  • I would like to thank Nancy Dooley, who served as the A/B Ride Coordinator (and before that the C/D Ride Coordinator) for over 20 years. She has been an active member of the Board of Directors through the terms of several Presidents, and I have had the pleasure of working with Nancy during the last 6 years. Although she stepped down as the A/B Ride Coordinator, she remains actively involved by leading rides as well as helping with SAG on many of our event rides. She will be one of the guest speakers at the January 2019 Member meeting, speaking about her recent bicycle tour.
  • I would like to give kudos to Joseph and Kelly Cassinerio, for all the work they have done promoting and caring for the members of the Killer Bee group. They have really shown what can be done with a caring and loving attitude to promote a cohesive group of bicyclists. They have filled a niche in the club that had been neglected. When I became President of FCC, people would tell me that they didn’t join FCC because they could never ride with the elite fast riders.  The Killer Bees have changed that perception, and have over 200 members in their group of B/C riders. 
  • Over the past 20+ years, the Fresno Cycling Club has been at the forefront of Bicycle Advocacy. This is mainly due to the leadership efforts of our former Director of Advocacy, Nick Paladino. Both at the local and state level, Nick has worked tirelessly for bicycle safety laws and bicycle infrastructure.
  • I just want to say thanks to all of you who took the time to vote for the Board Members. Our on-line voting system worked great. Thanks to the dedication and hard work (a labor of love by passionate bicyclists) by all the Board Members to help keep our Club great. 
  • Congratulations go out to Fresno Pedaljunkies!  Anthony "Tea" Gonzales was glad to report another successful bike polo tournament.  They get riders from all over to attend their events.  Check out the link for more information:  https://www.facebook.com/pedaljunkies1.  

Are We Doing What We Are Supposed to be Doing?

  Every so often we need to reflect on the purpose of being a club, and we must ask ourselves if we are meeting the needs and expectations of all our members. We must review our Mission Statement and objectives to determine if we are still on course, or have our objectives changed? At some point we may find that we need to adjust our mission statement and set new objectives. 

The current objectives for the club are:

A) To promote bicycling as a sport that provides social and healthful recreation and a viable means of alternate transportation.

B) To promote safe, lawful, and courteous travel on the road.

C) To aid the community and other governmental agencies to promote bicycling in a way that is mutually beneficial to cyclists and non-cyclists.

  The Mission Statement and the objectives are contained in the Club By-laws and were updated in April 2015. I think we are doing a great job with Objectives A & C, but it is an ongoing challenge to accomplish Objective B. As much as we teach and preach safe, lawful and courteous riding, there are still those riders who want to ride the way they want to ride; running stop signs and red lights, and riding two or three abreast without regard for traffic behind them. We encourage all our riders to simply follow the laws of the road, as it makes it easier for everyone to get along. If we could get more cyclists to do it, just maybe the motorists would follow our example (Not holding my breath on that one).

Club Growth

  When I became president 6 years ago our membership was at about 250. A goal that I had for the Club when I took office was to increase the membership to 2,000 or more. Although it is a lofty goal, I figured that the Central Valley was home to a vast array of bicyclists, and we just needed to get them connected. Why the need for a large membership you ask? The Fresno Cycling Club is one of the oldest and largest bicycle clubs in the state. An important aspect of our Club mission is promoting Bicycle Safety, which is done by education and advocacy. 

  Over the past 20+ years, the Fresno Cycling Club has been at the forefront of Bicycle Advocacy. This is mainly due to the leadership efforts of our former Director of Advocacy, Nick Paladino. Both at the local and state level, Nick has worked tirelessly for bicycle safety laws and bicycle infrastructure. Having a large bicycling club gives our advocacy efforts a lot of clout when it comes to getting things accomplished. Also, having a large membership helps with the education process by being able to reach out to as many bicyclists as possible to keep them up to date with the latest laws and issues that affect our bicycling. 

  Looking at our database in 2012, we had upwards of 1,200 people listed.  However, about 250 were current members, and the rest were lapsed members. I felt we could start increasing the membership by reaching out to that group of lapsed members and see why they hadn’t renewed. I felt a good gauge of our success as a club would be the growth of our membership. 

  With the help of technology, and an increase in folks getting the bicycling bug, our membership has grown incrementally to over 700 active members. We updated our website, made good use of email, Facebook and our new website to communicate to our members, and gather new members. Our new website was able to mitigate the issues of joining and renewals by making it easy to do it online. 

 However, I would like to solicit a couple volunteers who would work with our Director of Membership, Gia Parker, to put together a survey that we could send out to those that don’t renew to learn why they are not renewing. Maybe there are other reasons we can work on to keep our members engaged. It would be nice to know so we can continue our quest to 2,000! 

That’s all for now. Stay safe and ride legal.

Hope to see you on the road.

The Prez

Dennis Ball

 Ride Groups

  Our list of Ride Groups is growing. It’s exciting to see our members have so many options to ride. The purpose of ride groups is to provide a way to connect with riders of like abilities and styles of riding. I encourage everyone to check out the various ride groups and ride with as many as you can, as often as you can. We are trying to provide more and more rides to accommodate as many ride schedules as possible. If you have a ride group that you like riding with that isn’t yet one of the listed ride groups, please contact one of the Ride Coordinators, Henry Pretzer or Devin Bovee to have your group added. 

  The current schedule for these, and other Rides, can be found on the FCC website: www.fresnocycling.com.  

  • The Tuesday/Thursday morning Ride Group - Lead by Nancy Dooley and Ken Herrington. B/C rides
  • The Diana Dean and Larry Allred Ride Group - B/C rides.
  • The Mountain Men/Women - Ride Leader Tom Braner. C/D rides
  • The Velominati Ride Group - Lead by Greg Schoonard and Jeffery Simpson. C/D rides
  • The Killer Bees Ride Group - Ride Leaders: Joseph & Kelly Cassinerio, Cody Hill, Michael Stevens. B to B/C rides
  • The FACT (Filipino American Cycling Team) Group - Ride Leaders Angelo Quitorio B/C/D rides.
  • The Steven’s Bicycles Ride Group - Ride Leaders Devin Bovee and Tina Kutzbach. A/B/C/D rides from their shop.
  • The Sunnyside Bicycles Ride Group - Ride Leaders Vanessa and John McCracken. A/B/C/D rides from their shop.
  • The Bike Shop at Woodward Park Group - Ride leaders Joshua Houssiere and James Zumwalt. A/B/C/D rides from their shop.
  • The Rubber Soul Bicycles Ride Group - Ride leaders Jon Stewart and Helen Guenther. C/D rides from their shop.
  • The “A” Train Ride group - A rides
  • The Social Train Ride Group - Ride leaders Mark and Michelle Locatelli. A/B Rides
  • The All-Roads Ride Group - Ride leaders Henry Pretzer and Susan Smith. B/C/D gravel and road rides.
Reminder:  see www.fresnocycling.com, including pages Ride Codes and Rules of the Road for a full explanation of the A/B/C/D codes above. 


Bicycle Shops and Other Supporters
 For many of us, eating and riding are the two major things in life.  We all rely on and support our local bike shops.  These are the people dedicated to making sure that we can all safely enjoy what we do.  A few local restaurants go out of their way to accomodate cyclists.  Please be sure to support these folks, and tell them you are an FCC Member!


Other Items:
Click Link Below, or go to www.fresnocycling.com
   The Fresno Cycling Club is a group of some 800+ cyclists who enjoy bicycling as recreation and sport. As a club we seek to offer cycling events and activities that span a spectrum of cycling interests. Club rides are scheduled year round and range from novice level to 200-mile expert rides. We protect the rights of cyclists by following local, state, and national affairs as they concern cycling. Club members receive a monthly newsletter listing ride schedules and other information of interest to cyclists.  Don't wait another minute! Join now! Welcome to the Fresno Cycling Club.