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Fall Resource Round-up

We wrangled a list of all of our newest resources so they’re at your fingertips at the start of a new season.
Photo by Adam Haynes, Idaho Interscholastic Cycling League

As we welcome our spring leagues back to their preseason, we wanted to do a little resource round-up to highlight our newest templates, tricks, tips, and links for our amazing coaches. Our goal in the NICA coach education department is to help our volunteer coaches with everything they need to be successful, competent, and confident coaches! These new resources and tips are especially relevant for our team leadership (team directors, head coaches, etc.). We hope you can share these resources with your teams so you can do less admin work and more rad coaching and riding. 

NICA Coach Help Desk

Ok, so maybe it’s not new…but it is a resource we want EVERY NICA coach to know about! The Coach Help Desk exists to assist and support coaches with any questions they have about being a NICA volunteer: from course troubleshooting to coach benefits—the Coach Help Desk is a one-stop shop, and it is staffed by NICA humans who can directly assist with your questions.


Coach website 

We’ve been refining and restructuring the content on our website so coaches can find what they need quickly. Here are a few highlights:


Guides for common coach processes

Using step-by-step instructions and visuals, we’ve created a library of “how-to” guides for common coach processes and troubleshooting. These are especially helpful for our head coaches and team directors who are recruiting new coaches to their teams.

Here’s our current (and growing!) list of coach how-to guides:


Canva templates for teams

Canva is a free graphic design software that many teams and coaches use for visual needs. From website banners to info flyers to printed postcards, yard signs, and more, we’ve started a library of Canva templates that can be adapted to your team needs. 

  • Info meeting flyer (in English and Spanish)
  • Info meeting Facebook post (in English and Spanish)
  • Yard signs (both informational/promotional signs, and custom signs with athlete names)
  • Postcards

Find all of our Canva templates linked in the NICA Coach Education Center’s Coach Resources section; simply search for “Canva” and the resource will pop up.


GRiT Try-it-Out resources

One of the best ways to recruit more girls and women on your teams is to host a GRiT Try-it-Out event! We’ve found that creating a welcoming, less intimidating space for girls and women to try riding for the first time results in a lot of great team engagement. Check out our GRiT template over in the NICA Coach Education Center. These tried-and-true events are a great way to open the door for more riders to join your teams and we hope these templates make it easier for you to run one!


A new roadmap for starting a NICA team

If you’re new to NICA, check out our roadmap for getting your team off the ground in its first year. Not new, but still looking for some guidance? Take a peek and see some best-practices for team management!


As always, the resources we highlighted above (and more!) are ALL available in the extensive coach resource library housed in NICA’s coach Education Center. To access the Coach Education Center, simply log into Pit Zone and click the Courses, Resources, & Benefits button, then find the resources link on the right side of your dashboard.

Special thanks to ROCKSHOX, a NICA lead partner.

NICA Partners are enabling NICA to reinvent youth sports and engage families in a thriving cycling community, for life.

Our partners’ commitment to NICA’s mission has a huge impact on our student-athletes, their families and communities across the nation. NICA partners are changing the world by getting #MoreKidsOnBikes!