an invitation to the chancellor

An email, dated January 21, 2019:

Dear Dr. Greenstein,

You've had a busy new year! 

I've been reading your communiques on upcoming PASSHE changes and listened with interest to your interview the other day on Radio Smart Talk (or at least of much of Scott Lamar as I could handle). 

In that interview, you mentioned your fall system tour and beginning each campus visit with a bike ride. At Shippensburg, we didn't get that opportunity. I believe our ride was cancelled due to rain, leaving a half dozen students and myself rather disappointed. First, because of course we were all looking forward to meeting you. Second, because I'm drilling into them constantly that, on a bicycle, rain is to be embraced, not feared. (Plus, didn't you come here from Seattle?)

:-)

Anyway, with the new semester, and especially because we're really just down the road, the students of the Shippensburg University Cycling Club and myself would like to offer a cordial invitation for you to join us on any of our spring training rides as we prepare for the upcoming collegiate road race season. 

We host a regular mid-week training "race" on Tuesdays, 3:30 pm until the time change, then 6:00 pm (details: https://sites.google.com/site/shipcycling/home/training-rides/tnr). Saturday mornings we ride long, anywhere from 2-5 hours, depending on the student, the weather, and our whims (details: https://sites.google.com/site/shipcycling/home/training-rides/saturday-btogs). And Friday afternoons, our most casual efforts, the No-One-Gets-Dropped-Ride, leaving from the campus flagpole (time varies; https://sites.google.com/site/shipcycling/home/training-rides/friday-no-one-gets-dropped-ride).

One more thing: If you're available, you may be interested in coming down to watch some of the races as Shippensburg University hosts an Eastern Collegiate Cycling Conference race weekend on April 13 and 14. We need about 60 volunteers to pull off the event; bring the family, we'll put you to work.

Here's hoping we'll get to ride soon. 

Best of luck with your work this coming semester,

Nathan (and the students of ShipCycling)

-----
Nathan Goates, PhD

Dept. of Management, Marketing, and Entrepreneurship

Shippensburg University
Shippensburg, PA, USA

http://webspace.ship.edu/nwgoates/

2019 Spring Race Calendar

*** 2019 COLLEGIATE RACE CALENDAR***

Let's talk about racing...

If you don't know the first thing about collegiate bike racing, please start by reading this right here:

https://sites.google.com/site/shipcycling/

While you're there, please poke around through the other resources on that site as well. Including this bit which explains what a "racing license" is:

https://sites.google.com/…/shipcyc…/home/tutorials/licensing

Based on our geographical location, Shippensburg University is in the Eastern Collegiate Cycling Conference, or ECCC. Here's the 2019 ECCC Road Race Calendar:

http://collegiatecycling.org/eccc/wiki/index.php…

Because of distance, there are really only three race weekends I expect our riders will have any interest in attending. However, these three weekends (including our race weekend) are SO CLOSE this year that I hope EVERYONE will put these on their personal race calendars. These are the races. These are why you are in this club:

MARCH 16-17, Philly Phlyer, Philadelphia, PA
MARCH 30-31, Bucknell Cycling Classic, Lewisburg, PA
APRIL 13-14, Shippensburg Scurry, RIGHT HERE, PA

However, besides these events we can all race collegiate events in other conferences. The Atlantic Collegiate Cycling Conference (ACCC) is just to our south. Here's their calendar:

http://collegiatecycling.org/accc/schedule/

Of particular note are:

MARCH 23-24, Virginia Tech (two road races!)
APRIL 6-7, Maryland

These races fill in gaps in the ECCC schedule quite nicely. Taken as a whole, we have FIVE really great, reasonably accessible race weekends ahead of us this spring. This is really great.

Remember that the club reimburses all race registration fees (and sometimes more, depending). And we generally travel on the cheap--big carpools, sleeping on floors, etc. We want to keep this racing thing as cheap as possible.