Reducing costs and membership fees

The PPYCC committee met recently and decided to reduce membership fees from £25 to £15 for individual members, and from £15 to £5 for additional family members (whether young people or adults). This is from immediate effect so when you renew it will be at the new prices, including if you are currently overdue.

This is in response to the cost of living increases that everyone is facing. There are a variety of other means that PPYCC uses to keep costs down for club members and racers such as free road bike loans for youth members who request one and free track bike loans for youth members who want to race at the Weds night track league. This is of course subject to bike availability but we have purchased 6 more small track bikes in the past year with 24″ and 650c wheels which seems to have kept up with unprecedented demand from our youngest riders! We still have some road bikes to refurbish and are in need of volunteers to replace cables, brake blocks and bar tape. Please let us know if you can take a bike home to refurbish it, we will supply all the replacement parts and it will be fine tuned by a professional mechanic before being released back into the loans pool.

We recognise that cycle clothing is expensive. The committee agreed that all of the kit in our secondhand boxes should be completely free so please take what you need from the kit and shoe boxes. There is some great quality gear in there including team kit donated by pro riders and lots of good quality donations from current and ex-members who have grown out of it, included PPYCC club gear in smaller sizes. Please do consider donating any old kit you have, just bag it up and drop at the sign-in container on a Saturday. For brand new PPYCC club kit, we are doing a flash sale in September so look out for news on that soon if you need anything new.

The other major cost for the smaller number of riders who travel to regional and national races is fuel costs. It has been encouraging to see lots of car sharing among our members this year. We encourage anyone travelling to regional or national races to offer spare vehicle places to other members. At the Spring in the Park series this season parents were taking it in turns to take groups of riders up, which is really great. Please feel free to use the parents WhatsApp group to offer rides, you can ask any club coach to add you to the group.

On a related note, the committee agreed to purchase a few lightweight PPYCC branded gazebos for those who travel to regional and national events. Anyone attending races will know how useful these are for keeping riders out of the sun or rain between races, these should be with us in September and will be free for any member/parent to borrow.

We wish everyone happy holidays and hope you get lots of riding in while the weather is good. Don’t forget that Saturday morning sessions are still on throughout the holiday season, we are lower on rider and coach numbers but so far it looks like we can run throughout the holidays. And if you do any amazing or interesting bike rides then please feel free to send us words and pictures and you can have your very own website post 🙂