Please Respond

This is the first I have heard of a Rocky Mountain Collegiate Triathlon Conference. I don't know if our school has a rep for that, since we have never heard of it.

No prob, just send a contact name and information from your school. Basically, what this is, is a way to disperse information from USAT to the individual schools, and vice-versa. Because USAT can't contact each school individually, they're contacting certain regional reps (me, for the MCTC) and they're getting the word out that way.

what exactly is this? how does this relate to the mountain collegiate triathlon conference? as far as i know, arizona doesn't belong to such a conference.

Hey Matt

Just give me a call or email me and I will try to explain this better. I think what I wrote before may have been misleading...it's NOT a conference in the same sense as the MCTC, but a way to dissemenate information from USAT. "Conference"is the term they use.

Dave

Hi everyone in the Mountain Collegiate Triathlon Conferences, my name is Lance Panigutti a former CU Alum and current Race Director of Without Limits Triathlon Events in Colorado. I think it's awesome that you guys are getting really organized and taking the conference to the next level. As a former collegiate triathlete I understand how much fun it is to travel to races as a team, camp out, and meet other schools. However, racing is expensive on a collegiate budget and logistically the southwest US is very spread out in terms of race locations. I'm looking for feedback on what collegiate athletes truly want (give me the wish list) out of a conference race. Would you like a race that is central to all the schools over spring break, just as warm as AZ, allows everyone to camp in a party atmosphere, closed course, and still 20min from a city? To me the dream when I was racing was to have all that in an event that the main focus was the conference race, not the age-groupers. I'm not going to blow smoke, but we're working on a "top secret" location that could make all that happen but would need the support of the schools to rally behind it. Send me your feedback - seriously any suggestions hit me up. Gutti82@gmail.com We currently put on a Sept 20th Oktoberfest Sprint Tri that has a collegiate division and send me an e-mail to enter as we offer reduced entries to collegiate athletes.

All of the things that you have described sound awesome, but where would the race be? I have done a lot of research to try to find such a location, and it doesn't seem to exist. The most central location with a lake, Elephant Butte, NM, has cold water and outrageous wind until late april or early may. Everywhere in Colorado or Utah is cold, and Havasu is one of the only places warm enough in AZ with a lake. On top of that, Jonathan Grinder has been absolutely the most helpful race director as far as putting the collegiate race as a focus. This last March at Havasu, he gave us our own waves, scoring, Conference T-shirts, and conference trophies. All inscribed with our conference logo, and with special pricing for all collegiate athletes. Because it is hard to find race directors willing to do that much for us, I wouldn't want to lose that race as a conference race, but since we do ideally want to have a 4-5 race conference series, if you can host another race that adds to our series and delivers all of the things that you promise, then we can definitely get all of the schools to rally behind it. I have heard more support for pursuing inter-conference racing over this past year than ever before. Give me more details, and we can get the ball rolling.