Great Plains Cycling Club History

1970 to 1980
Still digging in the archives regarding this decade.

1980 to 1990
Still digging in the archives regarding this decade.

1990 to 2003
Still digging in the archives regarding this decade.

2004 to Present
The forerunner to newly formed Great Plains Cycling Club was founded in January of 2004 by Ann Schuler, Brian Dahl, Caine Opgrand, and Jerry Finken. Jerry Finken had previously been contacted by Pete Knudsen of Wayzata, MN, who had been racing for U.S. professional team, Schroeder Iron. Schroeder Iron dropped the team sponsorship at the end of 2003 season, leaving several struggling professional cyclists in the lurch. The team had really gelled as a unit and most of the riders were interested in staying together as one team rather than individually seeking a spot with other teams.

Pete contacted Jerry seeking advice as to how these newly unattached riders could find sponsors. Jerry later approached me with the idea of providing seed money to Pete’s new team so that they could leverage off this initial funding their further efforts of attracting sponsors. The key sponsor was to be Parish Foundation, a non-profit group dedicated to helping young children deal with their mothers who were struggling through cancer treatment. So brimful with idealism, the new race team was going to race their bikes and help support a worthy cause by attempting to raise money for the foundation.

The Parish Foundation and the team couldn’t align their interests well enough and the team was forced to seek a different key sponsor. Meanwhile, the seed moneys had been given to the Parish Foundation by C.S.M. and Amity Technology. Furthermore, permission had been granted for the local club in Fargo to use the Parish Foundation name and share team kits and the like with the pro team. The local FM team was called Parish Foundation Cycling Club and was registered as a USAC club. Afterwards, the pro-team morphed into Team Seasilver. The relationship between the club and the pro team remained and the local club used the Seasilver team kits while retaining the defunct name of Parish Foundation Cycling Club. The professional team Seasilver made a two year run and had some good results in the domestic racing scene including overall championship at the Tour of Gila in New Mexico. So when you see local riders wearing Team Seasilver kits, you now have the story behind the name.

When the local club was formed on January 1st of 2004, Fargo and Moorhead had three bike shops (counting the two Scheels stores as one) and no bike clubs. The founders decided that our numbers were so few that we might be better served by remaining nonaligned with any particular bike shop so that we could attract new members without carrying the bias of which bike shop the rider frequented. In almost the same breath, we also decided to attach ourselves as much as possible to the regular group rides that had been well established by Island Park Cycles. In fact, Island Park Cycles offered for sale the Team Seasilver kits and helped solicit new members to the club.

The first racing season brought the team some excellent results highlighted by Ann Schuler’s winning MN rider of the year and a stage victory at Superweek where she lapped the field before an exuberant crowd. What the club lacked in organization, it compensated with steady performances in the races.

During our initial club meeting prior to the second season, we decided to change our name to the Great Plains Cycling Club in order to better characterize our membership and the heritage of the same name in the local community. In addition, we agreed as members to allow the bike shop, Island Park Cycles (IPC), as one of our sponsors and we conferred veto rights to the those initial sponsors over the acceptance of any additional sponsors during the two year commitment. IPC continued its role of sponsoring group rides, soliciting and collecting on memberships to the club, selling club wares, along with designing(Jeremy Christianson) and ordering the team kits. Besides IPC, we fortunately had enough other sponsors, including Jerry Finken’s CSM, The Clinic, Skagen Bicycles, and Amity Technology who kept our bank account healthy.

Subsequent to establishing the sponsor relationship with IPC, Paramount Sports opened their doors as a multi-sports store including a bike shop. Some of our club members had an affinity towards Paramount owners and employees. The idea was floated to allow two bike shops to sponsor the club at the end of the two year commitment to the original sponsors. The idea took further shape when a motion was passed at the September club meeting to transfer the authority for approval of new sponsorships back to the membership and away from the existing sponsors. A committee was formed to solicit proposals from the two bike shops for consideration of the whole membership at the October 3rd meeting.

IPC owner, Tom Smith is stridently against allowing an additional bike shop sponsor of the club. He also has and desires to maintain an amicable relationship between himself and Paramount Sports owner, Craig Benson. The bike shop sponsors look at the sponsorship differently from the other sponsors in that the activities of the club and the bike business are inseparably intertwined. Moreover, the bike shop has put its stake into the club with the expectation of maintaining a long term relationship as club sponsor. The shop does not want to put its efforts into supporting a club that may turn to a different bike shop at the end of a season, hence allowing another bike shop to reap the benefits of the IPC’s previous efforts. In the September 2007 meeting, the club elected to admit Island Park Cycles as the sole bicycle shop sponsor, after Craig Benson of Paramount Sports withdrew his bid for sponsorship.

New team kits were ordered in the fall and new sponsors signed on including DMI and Bytespeed. The cyclocross season provided most of the team’s highlights for 2007, with Minnesota Cross Rider of the Year awards earned by team members Linda Cooper in B3 women’s and Kent Throlson in A2 mens’ category. We sponsored the 3rd Annual Red River Cyclocross Challenge at Johnson Park in September. This event gets good reviews from outsiders who participate.

The other main race hosted by the team is the False Flat Time Trial, a 15-mile out and back course at Sabin, Minnesota. In 2006, the TT was included in the North Dakota Cycling Federation’s points series. The event is named with tongue-in-cheek, as there are likely few other time trial courses in the entire country as flat as this one. But because it starts out upriver (uphill) and returns downriver (downhill), there is an average slope of approximately 00.01%. Some suggestions have been made to offer King of the Mountain award at the turn-around, which peaks at 4 vertical feet of gain from the start. The club will take this suggestion under advisement.

The eponymous Rollag ride held each Wednesday evening April through early September offers racing equivalent action for competitive club riders and occasional out of town guests. For many of us, winning one or more of the six sprints on the Rollag course offers the satisfaction of winning a regular road race. As many as 40 riders in one evening have participated in the Rollag ride. This legendary ride predates the existing club. Originally it was done on an out and back course on MN Hwy 32 between US Hwy 10 and MN Hwy 34. In the summer of 2005, road construction at the Hwy 10 and 32 intersection forced the moving of the start northwards on Highway 32 to where it intersects Clay County 10. One feature of the ride that was adopted in the summer of 2004 calls on riders to regroup after each of the six sprint lines to allow all the other riders to catch back on before the start of the next race segment. On the newly adopted course, the final sprint is completed at the city sign of Rollag at the top of the hill going north.