Track Assignments Closing Soon
As you may know from our Road and Mountain Bike Assignment requests, we’ve started using social media to announce updates and deadlines via Facebook and Twitter. I’m aware that not everyone has availed themselves of these sources, but in an effort to maintain a more immediate response to our rapidly changing sport, I encourage you to check those sources out or at the very least, make it a habit to log into your USA Cycling Account to check for updates.
Track assignments have been available to officials via their My Account login page on USA Cycling’s web site. Log into your account, select Official Links on the left, Track assignments are the first thing displayed in the center of the page. Please take a moment to review the events open for assignment, the qualifications required and register your requests by Friday, February 28 at noon Mountain Time. Cyclocross Assignment Requests will be posted soon, in the same manner.
News
I know that you’ve been waiting for news from our membership department and it’s still coming! Soon! There will be some new FAQ’s on Membership that will be posted on the Resources pull-down on the top dark blue bar on the opening page of USA Cycling. We have restructured our membership offerings and now, any level of membership receives a license. Standard Memberships include the ability to race Novice Only events. A license for anyone that wants to get out and try racing in any discipline purely as a beginner. Premium Memberships are racing licenses for Category 4-1 for Road, Track and Cyclocross and 2-Pro for Mountain Bike. There will be some updated information to show you the license differences; Standard is a Vertical format, Premium is the original Horizontal format. One of the exciting changes is letting all juniors and collegiate racers receive a Premium license for a reduced cost. These two licenses will have categories reflected on them. Collegiate licenses are now good for any racing event that the holder is eligible for, by Category. The premium licenses can still show “Novice” as a category (as it simply replaces Category 5 Road, Track and Cyclocross and Cat. 3 Mountain Bike) in a discipline.
New Upgrading procedures are in place. Why do you need to know? Because people will ask you questions, and you’ll want to be knowledgeable! We appreciate the work you do on behalf of USA Cycling and want to make sure we work harder to equip you with information you need.
The new upgrade policy is on the USA Cycling Web site https://www.usacycling.org/about-us/governance/policy-viii#roadupgrades. Be sure to check out the general description and the simple graphic guidelines for each discipline. There is an FAQ with a lot of information for questions, so check that out as well. Upgrading has long been an significant task of commitment in terms of tracking and accounting for many, many variables in the former structure. While you may see similarity in the tables with the former policies, many of the “if”, “then” conditions have been removed to simplify the process.
Renewals are in full swing. Technical Licenses (you!) are still annual licenses good from January 1-December 31, each year. I’ve had a few complaints about “not knowing I expired”, so hopefully this reminder is sufficient….if you haven’t renewed between December 1, 2019 until now, you’ve expired and we’d love you to go ahead and complete that process! As I wrote in December, the new renewal system is up and running. There are known problems and when you encounter them, I’d like to give you a couple of steps to ensure rapid renewal. Please send questions or problems encountered to me (we have a large list and we are working hard to address them).
Prerequisites
In order to renew, your SafeSport, Criminal Background Check and MVR (only if a moto official) have to be completed and reported back to our your accounts. Please allow a minimum of 24 hours for this to happen (SafeSport doesn’t get updated on the weekends).
Tips and Tricks
- Log into the SafeSport.org web site directly. SafeSport will either have you do a refresher or full course. (After the full course, you will only be required to take a refresher annually.)
- For CBC, log into your My Account, Official Links, (scroll down) USA Cycling Legacy My Account. From there, look for Account, select that and scroll down on the left. You can link to the CBC from the Background Check link available there.
- For MVR, continue to use the following link from the moto ref pages. https://s3.amazonaws.com/USACWeb/forms/officials/Motoref-MVR-Self-Reg.pdf
Finally
Don’t use the USA Cycling front page Renew Membership racer link. From your My Account page, click on Licenses and you’ll see a graphic representation of your licenses. Click on the one you want to renew. All licensees should look for the small check boxes below the description. Moto Refs-when renewing, there is a small check box for your Moto Ref as well.
Known Problems Please understand that with every new system, things break and we discover things that we don’t know how they happened, but we’ll fix them.
- Your Account is validated in the Legacy account. We are not getting good updates to our new system, so “Legacy” is the ”source of truth”. Your license in the new web site may still show expired. If you’ve completed the purchase as described above, you are valid. Ignore the new messaging.
- Moto Refs. Status and Category have been dropped occasionally. Nothing personal, you didn’t get demoted, just write to me and give me the category you held and we’ll get it updated!
Thank you for your continued patience as we update our systems. There is never a convenient time to pull off a big change like this when you can’t test all parameters and permutations until renewal time. We value your membership and your desire to support USA Cycling in your mission as an official.
Enjoy the Spring-it’s right around the corner,
Randy Shafer, Technical Director
