The State of Club Running was a project developed by club running volunteers to assess and address the current issues faced by NIRCA and collegiate running clubs in the United States. At the end of 2019 (and beginning of 2020), SCR produced two documents: 

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• SCR 2019 Report: a full report detailing the current state of club running and NIRCA, and offering recommendations for club finances, membership, leadership, competitions, and NIRCA. Many recommendations and explanations were adapted from the responses to our initial questionnaire sent out in May of 2019. The intended audience was primarily any club leader or general member, with the additional hope that NIRCA would consider some of our suggestions.

• SCR 2019 Development Guide: a guide primarily geared towards new or less-developed clubs, offering advice learned from the evolutions of other successful clubs about many of the possible struggles likely to occur in a club's development. Three developmental stages are considered: Commencement, Growth, and Maturation, and action items to take within each aspect of a running club: Finances, Membership, Leadership, and Competitions, are provided.

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You can find both documents on the State of Club Running Internet Archive Page. 

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The SCR 2019 staff was composed of me: Raymond Friend -- a graduated President of Penn State Club XC, and Brendan Warren -- an officer of MRun in 2019.

 

The graphic designer behind all SCR 2019 logos was Domenic Feola of Penn State Club XC. 

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Below is an explanation of the State of Club Running made during its conception in 2019:

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NIRCA does not do much to analyze its clubs, nor to effectively encourage much conversation between them. As such, there is a severe lack of relationships between clubs beyond competitive; and there is hardly any data on our demographics or internal structures. Moreover, teams across the nation are all quite unique, making the most of their preexisting environments in order to make their clubs successful. No one conference, discussion, blog post, or run could speak to all of them. But we know that there are many shared problems and shareable solutions between these clubs. 

 

Every contactable club was contacted to fill out a questionnaire that gathered information about demographics, travel, finances, leadership, volunteering, athletics, and more. The questionnaire was built with the goal of obtaining all of the information believed to be useful when transferring solutions from successful clubs to struggling ones, as well as useful when analyzing the patterns within NIRCA that could expose any unfair treatment. In particular, we want to tackle inequity in regional opportunity, as well as prevent more clubs from extinction. We also want to show NIRCA that there is a great amount of untapped knowledge stored within the leadership of its constituent clubs.

 

Obviously, we are very excited about this project, and cannot wait to see how much we can tackle before the end of 2019! We are doing this for everyone's benefit, and we hope to help every current and upcoming running club, as well as improve NIRCA's relationship with them.

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You an also read my first blog post on the origins of SCR: https://rayjfriend.wixsite.com/personal/post/the-need-for-nirca-oversight