Wausau, Wis., mountain bikers form club as WORBA passes torch to Bicycle Federation of Wisconsin
Mountain bikers in Wausau, Wis., have only just formed their own club. But if they are to build singletrack trails at Rib Mountain State Park, as their organizers wish to do, they may want to marshal forces with a mountain bike club in Stevens Point and the Bicycle Federation of Wisconsin, which announced Tuesday it will soon assume advocacy for mountain biking statewide.
The Central Wisconsin Offroad Cycling Coalition, as the Wausau-area club is calling itself (see its Facebook page here), wants to help maintain existing trails, including those at the Nine Mile County Recreation Area, according to the Wausau Daily Herald.
Building new trail at nearby Rib Mountain is also a dream, said Scott Cole, a pro mountain biker and manager of the Hostel Shoppe, a bicycle and ski retailer in Stevens Point. "I think it would be a huge draw for the Wausau area," he told the newspaper.
Cole said the Wausau group could benefit from working with the Point Pursuit Mountain Bike Club, which is affiliated with the International Mountain Bicycling Association (IMBA).
Many IMBA members in Wisconsin are members of the Wisconsin Off-Road Bicycling Association (WORBA), but that group will cease to exist in March after more than 20 years as an advocacy organization. At that point, WORBA and Wisconsin IMBA members will become members of the Wisconsin Bicycle Federation, an announcement made by Bike Fed Executive Director Kevin Hardman at the 2012 Wisconsin Bike Summit in Madison on Tuesday.
(The coming merger wasn't a well kept secret. IMBA's Midwest Regional Director Hansi Johnson announced last November the deal had been brokered -- prematurely, as it turned out, and he publicly apologized with this blog post.)
More than a year in the making, the merger of WORBA and the Bike Fed involved discussions with top IMBA officials. They talked openly about the possibilities at the 2011 Wisconsin Bike Summit, as I wrote here.
To ease the transition, John Siegert, a long-time WORBA officer and membership coordinator, was named to the Bike Fed Board of Directors on Monday. And Dave Schlabowske, the Bike Fed's marketing director, said he will be overseeing the organization's mountain biking initiative.
WORBA will add about 160 members to the Bike Fed's current membership of 3,500. Schlabowske said the goal is to increase membership to 15,000 by the end of the year.
With the Bike Fed eager to prove itself to be the best friend of mountain bikers in the state, the timing may be ideal for the Wausau-area club to get the organization's backing for singletrack at Rib Mountain.
Full disclosure: This week ended Joel Patenaude's three-year term as a member of the Bicycle Federation of Wisconsin Board of Directors. After seeing so many better qualified candidates seek election to the board, he opted not to run for re-election last month.
1 Comment for "Wausau, Wis., mountain bikers form club as WORBA passes torch to Bicycle Federation of Wisconsin"
Allow me to sound off on your article. First, while the Central Wisconsin Off-road Cycling Coalition is the first mountain bike specific club for the Wausau area it is NOT the first club dedicated to maintaining and building single-track for our area. That was previously handled by the Wausau Wheelers bike club (also an IMBA affiliate and for the last few years a Chapter of WORBA). Over the last 5 years the Wausau Wheelers has grown tremendously in membership with the majority of members being recreation road riders.
Along with the change in demographic of ridership. The launch of IMBA's new Chapter program and the impending merger of WORBA with the Wisconsin Bicycle Federation (and the loss of being a WORBA Chapter and it's benefits) it became apparent something needed to be done to handle mountain biking for our area. Plans for a mountain bike specific club began being laid out last fall (2011) before the Wausau Daily Herald began printing articles about single-track in Rib Mountain State Park. While we all would love to have trails in Rib Mountain State Park it is not the sole purpose for the creation of the club. There are many opportunities for building more single-track in areas other than Nine Mile and the State Park and we fully intend to explore those possibilities.
Moving forward the Central Wisconsin Off-road Cycling Coalition is in the process of applying to become an IMBA Chapter. While we have not reached the point in defining the geographic region we would like to cover, we will likely be contacting those to the south in Steven's Point as well as north to Merrill (Underdown Recreation Area) to see if including those groups in our region would make sense.
That being said by aligning directly with IMBA we will have access to exceptional assistance directly from the professionals at IMBA to help us achieve our goals.
Matt Block
President
Central Wisconsin Off-Road Cycling Coalition
mblock78 Feb 22, 2012 9:29 PM