Dam 2 Dam - Canceling after 2018
- Thread starter ISUKing
- Start date
spot on. many boards have lots of "experience" and don't recruit the right people to take over for them. they want their ways to continue forever (often not realizing or accepting that things change) and if it was good enough 10 years ago or 2 years ago why change? i face this situation on a monthly basis with boards i am on. the best ones don't always get friends to be the new board members but people who add the right value. if the D2D board is full of runners it will fail if no one looks at the details and becomes the "heretic" to bring up potential problems. If the whole board is detailed finance guys they'll be bad at marketing. for volunteer boards it's not "who you know" but rather "what THEY know".
a professional manager is only as good as the people they can get to volunteer. if it's not a working board the sole staff person will still have a tough time herding cats.
Being a non runner and not a DSM person how does their entry fee compare to others of similar scale, offerings etc. It seems to me a lot of the draw was the "dam to dam" aspect. My fear is that they are giving up one of the biggest positive aspects of the event just because they didn't want to raise the entry fee $10.
The release I read really made it sound like they were just mailing it in. There are plenty of races, and larger races, which are run successfully with volunteers. If lack of volunteers is their reason, it makes me think they didn't try real hard to find any. Every single high school in the area offers graduation honors for volunteer hours. That's thousands of potential volunteers just in this area. So their excuse of "not enough volunteers" sounds pretty weak IMO.
I think it is on the lower scale, especially considering the popularity that it has.
I looked it up last night and was kind of surprised how high it was. Perhaps it's comparable to other races in the area, but I've run the Bolder Boulder multiple times and the price was within $10-15 of that race. The Bolder Boulder is often considered the gold standard for road races under the half marathon length. 55k+ runners running in a city roughly half the size of Des Moines.
getting people to volunteer on race day is not the problem. those people commit to one day of work for a good event. the problem is finding volunteers to RUN the event, discuss it's details, line up all those one-day volunteers, get permits, get insurance, organize the party festivities, etc. Those are run by the volunteer board of directors that is having trouble finding people. again, it's not getting people to hand out water or shuttle people the day of race - it's getting people to be the board of directors.
You are telling me they can't find someone to do that even as a part time job? Weak excuse IMO. I don't know if they do but from my math if they sold out of all spots they would have $430,000 in revenue plus sponsorship money.
Yeah, but I think that is the whole point from this existing board. They didn't want to charge more. They didn't want to sell the race. They didn't want to hire a "for profit" race manager. The Spirit of the race, and keep in mind how emotionally attached this board is, was that it was put on by volunteers that love racing and all funds went to the race itself (food, drinks, pre-party, post party, police, EMT, music, etc.). Without that premise, they didn't want to continue the race.
If you are looking for a logical decision, there isn't one that occurred. This was pure emotion. They are putting the family pet down rather than watch it suffer.
It seemed like last year the prices were higher than they used to be. In the past I thought I could sign up for $40 (for the half marathon, which is very low for a half) and get all the free stuff at the Friday night event and all the free food and drink at the after party. That has been the draw for a lot of the people I run with....the low entry fee and the "extras" that cannot be beat by any race in Iowa.
As someone who has planned large events (not a race, but week long conservation projects), they have a way of consuming your life. It's not a "once in a while" thing, it's a "do something every day, put out fires" thing. It's constantly on your mind and can be incredibly stressful.
I don't know their finances
Exactly. I think some people here assume the "volunteer" must be the people driving runners to/from the starting point, handing out water, and signing groups up. Those are easy, one-day jobs. It's the people who are in charge of those people that have the stressful jobs. The problem with hiring one person to do all of that is you are putting their success on the backs of their volunteers whom they can't really control. You've now monetized, whether you know it or not, the entire process and if the one-day volunteers do a bad job it trickles up to the paid staff person who gets all the blame.
As a long time committee member I thought I would share some insight with my Cyclone friends. I have been involved with Dam to Dam for 36 of its 38 years and the race is very special to me and all of those associated with it. We had certain principles that we always wanted the race to have - all volunteer (be passionate about the event - its not a job), no appearance fees - run the race because you want to, not because we pay you, all proceeds go back into the race to make it a great event for those participating and ALWAYS have cold beer at the finish - that's it. But the race is difficult logistically and the city has grown up large around us so the race now consumes the board members year-round to the point that it is another 1/2 job and many have become burned out. And as Neil Young said (and Kurt Cobain echoed) it is better to burn out that to fade away. We did not want this great event to just fade away - it means too much to us so we decided to it was best to just let it go and throw one hell of a party!!! Yes we had options, but no one willing to step in and live up to our founding principles. The race will not occur again but Dam to Dam as an organization will remain to promote Iowa running and may offer running scholarships (likely to kids wanting to run for ISU as ISU has given the race some great runners over the years). Tom Riley
