Hi Everyone, thanks for taking you time to attend this meeting.

I feel this has been a very positive year for the club. When I took over the presidency last year my goal was to increase membership numbers and complete the BikeNZ affiliation the club had been discussing for some time.

We have written our constitution document and completed the affiliation process with BikeNZ. This brings the club National status (and liability insurance!)

Increasing membership numbers, I felt was the most important direction as we needed more new people to attend rides, join up, take an active part in organising rides, and take part in the club’s operation.
We have grown from 68 members in August 2016 to 211 as we meet today.

We have tried to increase awareness of the club name, what we do, and our ride events. Some things that have contributed to this successfully are; The skills rides have been a fantastic benefit for our current members and have enticed new members to join, thanks to Rick for these. Weeknight rides provide regular, easier rides and a friendly face to represent the club to newbies, thanks Bryan and Bob. The maintenance sessions were also popular, thank you Carl.

We have tried to be more active on the Facebook page with club updates so our members and prospective members can see what the club has been doing like track maintenance or ride reports or our donations as I think people need to know what good we are doing with their membership money. Also on Facebook, we have been sharing Mt biking news to keep everyone in the loop with what’s happening in the Mt bike world thanks to Leisa.

The open-day ride in January was aimed at welcoming new riders to attend and was a success with 28 riders.

We have run many popular ride events, including some in association with other Canterbury clubs to create ties in our community. These rides were; Timaru Centennial Park with South Canterbury Mountain Bike Club, Lyttelton Urumau Reserve with Lyttelton Mountain Bike Club, maintenance at the Christchurch Adventure Park and Haven Mountain Bike Park.

Some of my favourite rides were the Twizel weekend, Lake Taylor, Hakatere, and many around Bottle Lake due to this very wet long winter.

Thank you very much everyone for your part in achieving these things, whether it was being a member of the committee, being a ride leader, or sticking with me slowly on rides! Thank you.

“Life’s not always uphill”
Hannah – Club President.