The regular meeting of the Nittany Valley Running Club was held on Tuesday, April 1, at the Hi-Way Pizza on Westerly Parkway. In attendance were Boyd Brumbaugh, Marty Mazur, Mike Casper, Morgan Wasikonis, Dave Eggler, and Jim Taylor. Even after February's jam-packed meeting, there was still plenty of new business to attend to at this meeting.

Before we went through the agenda, Morgan passed out Club correspondence that she, as President Emeritus, still gets piles of. As I type this, I notice that in my stack of said correspondence is a Hi-Way Pizza menu. How did that get there? I'll have to return it at the next meeting.

First on the agenda was the new club advertising policy, which had been discussed at the last meeting and revised via email by the officers. We approved it and will be posting it on the web site soon. Next, we got some brief updates on activity of the Tussey mOUnTaiNBACK and Art's Fest race committees. The mOUnTaiNBACK race committee will next meet on April 22 at 6PM at Kissinger, Bigatel and Brower Real Estate on South Atherton.

Jim Taylor will get the ball rolling on getting a Centre County Convention and Business grant for the Club. These grants come from the money that the local governments get in revenues from hotel and event taxes.We'd like to use some of this money for race promotion. For this purpose, we'll be contacting the Club counsel Tony DeBoef regarding our non-profit status.

Jim Taylor will be contacting Tom Cali about the two of them getting going on what will hopefully be a State College Race For The Cure next year. We need to be an The Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation affiliated organization for a year to host a race.

Dave Eggler is going to put to rest the issue of the club measuring wheel. "Ol' Bessie" has been around the block a few too many times. Dave has the action of either putting some new hooves on her or taking her behind the barn (and thence to the glue factory) and buying a new one.

Speaking of measuring, we have the USATF certified Art's Fest 10K course and Campus Loop 5K course descriptions online at the club web site. There was a good deal of discussion about the fact that some campus organizations don't like to use the certified course because, by crossing University Drive twice, it requires additional University Police traffic control, which is an added cost. Morgan will look at the USATF material we have and see if there is any way we can make another 5K loop that doesn't cross University twice out  of half the Arts Fest course. If this can't be done, we might end up having another option certified separately.

Another thing we discussed was getting a club phone line with message mailboxes available to director's of the big club races. These could be used to give answers to frequently asked questions and to receive incoming messages. Jim and Mike will look into the cost of this.

We talked about partnering with professors and instructors in the Kinesiology Department to increase participation in races and the number of volunteers as well. Mike Casper will call Bob Ricketts on this.

The Summer All-Comer's Meets will probably be held this year. The Club will help advertise them. Some Club members always show up to help time, etc. No formal participation there.

There will be a runner's shoe seminar in late April. We'll have some more details on this on the web site soon.

The hour was getting late. We decided to defer the remaining agenda items until the next meeting. These included a discussion on how to increase member participation, and a review of the club bylaws to make sure we all know what we're supposed to be doing and to see that there weren't any obsolete bylaws.

Next Meeting: June 3