Making some changes to categories has been an ongoing conversation in NEMTB for awhile now. Mountain bike racing in New England has a lot of categories between ability levels and age classes. The desire for most involved with sanctioning and promoting is to simplify things and reduce the overall number of categories.  While at the same time trying to make sure we offer a meaningful race day experience for everyone. Doing both of those simultaneously is a difficult balancing act.

We discussed this at length at our Promoter’s Summit. There are many ways to go about this and lots of great ideas on how best to accomplish it. The challenge is in getting everyone to agree on which great idea we are all going to go with.  We didn’t quite come to a full consensus but the discussion was productive and based on feedback, registration data analysis and some of EFTA’s junior development goals we have made a few subtle tweaks to our category structure for 2018. We will look to continue this discussion in years to come as we try to zero in on that perfect setup.

  • We have combined Men’s Senior and Vet I categories into Senior 19-39 and eliminated the Vet I and Vet II split, it is now just Veteran 40-49.
  • We have broken Junior 12-18 into additional categories that are more inline with NEHSCA. There will now be u13, u16, and u19 fields. u13 will only exist at the Novice level and u16 will only exist at the Novice and Sport level.

So the new breakout looks as follows:

Men’s

  • u13 (Novice only)
  • u16 (Novice & Sport only)
  • u19
  • Senior 19-39
  • Veteran 40-49
  • Masters 50+

Women’s

  • u13 (Novice only)
  • u16 (Novice & Sport only)
  • u19
  • Senior 19-39
  • Veteran 40+

**UPDATE**

There were some questions on Facebook about some of the other specialty categories EFTA has historically offered. Nothing has changed with those. Elite/Open will still be offered as well as Clydesdale. Both will be tracked for NECS points. Singlespeed will remain an Open category like always but for 2018 it will not be tracked for NECS points as we are partnering with the Zanconato folks, they will run the SS series this season. For additional category info head here: http://efta.com/general-information/racer-categories-classes/

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