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Coach Education Department 2024

NICA’s Coach Education team exists to support a network of thousands of volunteer coaches across the country in their work to develop youth through the sport of mountain biking. NICA’s comprehensive coach education program and resources provide coaches with the skills, knowledge, and abilities to be confident and effective leaders and role models who build strong minds, bodies, character, and communities through cycling. In 2024, we’re welcoming several new faces to the team. Meet your Coach Education staff and learn about their experiences and the path that led them to NICA!

Alumni Invite Letter

Coaches, we need your help. Can you share the NICA ALUMNI NETWORK with your graduating athletes? Here’s an easy email template you can use to send a note to graduating seniors and their families. Help us continue to build a thriving cycling community, beyond our teams and leagues!

Team Expansion Playbook

It can be scary and intimidating to split a large and successful team. Splitting a growing team can be a really good thing! It means that you’ve created something so amazing that it needs to grow. NICA’s new Composite Team Expansion Playbook helps guide you through team growth and helps teams understand when and how to split their teams.

Design a kit with Borah Teamwear

Designing a team kit is a process that can be both exciting, fun, creative…and maybe a bit daunting. Teams have so many choices to make when it comes to vendors and types of kits. And, design options are literally endless! NICA partner Borah Teamwear works with hundreds of NICA teams across the country (in addition to their many other clients) to make the team kit process as simple as possible. Borah offers discounted pricing exclusively for NICA teams, has a wide variety of kit styles and options, plus they provide full-service design support, easy online ordering, and even a size guarantee to ensure your riders end up with the right fit!

Training Zones & Injury

Injuries are common during athletic activities, including sports like mountain biking. As coaches, we know crashes are inevitable and that part of our duty is to try and mitigate risk as much as possible. We can use training zones to help us manage these risks thoughtfully.

Brain Injury Awareness

March is brain injury awareness month, a great reminder for coaches to refresh their knowledge on concussion protocols and training. Check out these concussion-specific resources and tools to ensure you’re doing everything you can to keep athletes safe and healthy.

Try-it-out templates

As NICA coaches, it’s part of our job to create welcoming and inclusive spaces on our teams, but it can be hard to try to explain every aspect of riding to someone who has never heard of mountain biking before. It can be an intimidating space to be a beginner, whether you’re a parent of a rider, a new athlete, or even a new coach. A half-day or two-hour “try-it-out” event is the perfect intro to MTB for many beginners!

What is misconduct in sport and how can you respond?

While sport should be a safe place for athletes to grow and thrive, the devastating reality is that there are times when that’s not true. That is why it’s so important for the many adults who surround young athletes to understand what qualifies as misconduct, intervene when necessary, and report information to authorities.

A year in review

As 2023 comes to an end, the Coach Education team would like to thank over 14,000 registered NICA coaches across the country for their dedication to creating life-changing experiences through youth mountain bike programming.
During our first year of hosting content at The Trailhead, we’ve created a growing library of updates, resources, featured articles, and coach community highlights! We’re excited to keep adding relevant, timely content for our coaches in 2024.

Here are some highlights of what we published for coaches in 2023. In addition, we encourage coaches to access several new permanent resources/references linked through our coach resource library. Coaches can find these resources within the NICA Education Center.

We hope our coaches can continue to refer back to these articles and resources again and again for use on their teams and within their own personal coaching practice!

We’re stoked for 2024 and can’t wait to see all the amazing things our coaches accomplish.

How can we help you reach your goals? Connect with us and share what you’d like to see at The Trailhead in the upcoming year!

Get inspired with book recommendations from NICA staff

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As the days get shorter, and the weather turns colder (in many of our leagues, at least!) we’re looking forward to cozying up on the couch next to our trail dogs with a cup of tea and a good book. For coaches who are just finishing their time with their teams, the off-season is an excellent time to reflect through reading! For our spring coaches who are starting to plan and ramp up their season, it’s the perfect moment to be inspired by a good book!