PRACTICEThe season system for the newest riders on your team.
Practice plans, rider levels and trail routing for NICA teams — built over five seasons on the biggest team in Texas, and now running for any team that wants it.
“What are we doing at the next practice?”
Every volunteer coach, every week of the season. NICA's licensing ladder runs Level 1 in year one, Level 2 in year two, Level 3 in year three — so by design, and it is a good design, the league produces new, under-prepared parent-coaches every single season. Nobody hands them a plan for the next practice.
Most teams already sort riders into ability pods. That is the recommended baseline and it works. The gap is what happens next: once everyone is on the trail, nobody can tell which group a rider belongs in.
Too fast a group and a twelve-year-old gets dropped in front of their friends — and the sweep coach rides the whole session at someone else's pace. Too slow and they are bored. Both roads end in the same place: a kid who quietly stops signing up.
NICA runs 6:1, or 8:2, and every group needs a Level 2 or 3 coach in it. So your Level 2 count — not your total coach count — decides how many groups go on trail. Six coaches with three at Level 2 is three groups, not six. This says so in September instead of letting it surface in February.
It pulls the trail networks near your team straight from the map, then assembles the mileage your group needs and gets you back to where you parked. Repeats and out-and-backs included, because that is how a practice actually runs — not a tidy loop the map happened to find.
One stripe per level, counting up, on the handlebar. Any coach can read a rider's level across a car park — the sweep most of all, because the sweep is the one who needs to know who is likely to be at the back and why.
Coaches tag trails with NICA's On-the-Bike 101 skill names — the eleven every Level 2 and 3 coach was already taught. Tags pool across teams, so the next team to ride your venue starts with what yours worked out.
This is not a ranking and it is not about who is best. NICA's model has no try-outs and no bench — every kid who signs up rides — and that puts the entire weight of the season on putting each rider in the right group, and moving them when they outgrow it.
The ladder ships as however many rungs your coaching bench can staff — for most teams that is two or three, not five. Call the group whatever your team already calls it; my team says Bronze, the product's own default is Foundation.
A rider can sit on the same stripe for years and be exactly where they should be. Some are here to race and will climb fast; plenty are here because their friends are here and the trail is fun. The evaluation asks which, before it asks anything about ability. Nothing in this flags contentment as a problem.
Your roster numbers, the venues you ride, and honest feedback when something breaks. That is the whole commitment.
You build a real season on it, not a demo. Regular training starts 1 November.
Beta teams hold $149 a season afterwards as a thank you, and I report back to the Texas NICA board on what actually happened.
Yes, and they are good — six sample plans, a blank practice template and a season-planning template, free in the Coach Education Center. They are templates. This is the specific answer for your team at your venue on a specific Tuesday, with your roster and your trails in it. I would not build what NICA already gives away.
No. Bronze is my team's word. The product's default is Foundation, and you rename it to whatever your team already says — C group, Development, Green, a number. The stripes inside it work the same either way.
Pod position and progress are coach-only by design. Riders and families see their own stripe, their own goals and nothing else — never a ranked list. A leaderboard would produce exactly the outcome this is built to avoid.
No, and deliberately. Strava's API terms forbid the way a product like this would need to use their data, so instead you bring your own rides in as GPX files that you export yourself, and coaches paste their own segment links. Trail geometry comes from OpenStreetMap.
That is the reason skill tags pool across teams instead of living in my head. The whole design assumes coaches leave — and the data a team contributes outlasts both of us.
That is the normal case in Texas, not the exception — plenty of venues have geometry and not a single graded trail. Distances are still solid, the engine says plainly where difficulty is a guess rather than a fact, and a coach rating four trails takes about five minutes and fixes it permanently.
