A round of applause, please, for USA Cycling, which announced last week that it had created the permanent position of director of collegiate cycling.

Anyone involved in bike racing at the collegiate level in this country knows the value of collegiate clubs and racing conferences. Collegiate cycling provides an entry point into the sport; a social group for making lifelong friends and riding buddies; and a place for athletes to challenge themselves, maybe even launch into the pro ranks. I know I would not be writing this column had I not joined the cycling team at UC Santa Cruz.

Another thing anyone involved in collegiate racing knows is the sport’s grassroots nature. Volunteers have made collegiate cycling happen, its success riding on a few individuals’ labors of love, and thus the sport’s organization has waxed and waned over the years.

My club was pretty good at raising money through team dues and securing gear and maintenance sponsors. But we always seemed to screw up our kit. One year our president forgot to put our title sponsor’s logo on the jerseys. D’oh! Another year we sported bright yellow shorts, which, when wet, showed more than a little too much ass crack. Then there was this specimen — notice how none of the lines seem to match up. Weird, huh?

But I digress….

While USA Cycling’s appointment of a full-time director probably won’t do away with poorly stitched, ass-crack shorts, bake sales or collegiate cycling’s grassroots nature, it will provide some much-needed stability. Now, collegiate cycling has at least one salaried person working to maintain and advance the sport.

That person, I was surprised to learn, is Kam Zardouzian. I first met Kam in 2003 when he moved to Santa Cruz. He had just left the corporate world and was busy establishing himself as an endurance-sport coach and race promoter. He took our collegiate cycling team under his wing, gave a number of cyclists free coaching advice and helped us achieve the stability we were lacking. He also taught us how to make homemade energy gel (I never tried any).

Kam Zardouzian on the job

VeloNews: How did you go about getting this gig?

Kam Zardouzian: Honestly, the job kind of came out of nowhere. I was actually on my way toward law school. I had done all of the testing and some applications and stuff and I get this email from Brooke Miller [the 2005 women’s Division I collegiate road national champion] talking about the job opening. I emailed her back and sent her my résumé, which was also sent to USA Cycling in November. Within about two weeks I got a phone call from USA Cycling saying they had gotten my résumé and were looking it over. Next I had a phone interview with [USA Cycling CEO] Gerard [Bisceglia]. The next thing I know, I’m flying out to Colorado Springs.

VN: What do you think your main selling points were for getting the job?

KZ: Well, I went into the interview with a business plan that kind of mimicked what I saw while helping out at UC Santa Cruz. I think I tried to address what are the real challenges for collegiate cycling right now … the organization and communication. Because of the nature of college, every three or four or five years you get a new batch of bodies coming into the club and everything you have set up and organized for the club eventually goes out the door. I went into the meeting [with USA Cycling] with a pretty specific business plan of how we can address that. And raise money, of course.

VN: Why did you decide to take the job?

KZ: Well, I thought about it long and hard. I mean, I had had my mind pretty set on going to law school and had some other plans on the total other side of the spectrum, you know. I had to do some soul-searching. But I thought back to 2001 when I left the corporate world to pursue coaching and cycling and realized that that is my passion, and it’s what makes me happy. I look at the decision [to work with USA Cycling] as a faith-based decision. I mean, I’m not in this to make money (laughs). I’m doing this because I love my sport.

VN: What does your job entail?

KZ: Well, it’s a pretty all-encompassing role. I’m pretty much responsible for all things collegiate cycling in the U.S. From a bird’s-eye view, I’m in charge of the growth and management of collegiate cycling in the United States. Cycling on a collegiate level has never had any real structured staff or management at USA Cycling. Part of my job is to create that structure and foundation for growing the number of schools with cycling programs. I will also be dealing a lot with the points system and standardizing scoring. The way I see it, there are lots of little brushfires in the sport of cycling at the collegiate level — a ton of things and discrepancies and problems that need to be addressed. Collegiate cycling has been very fortunate over the years and has pretty much been taken care of and managed by volunteers. But they are volunteers and can’t give all of their attention to the sport. I’m not going to come on board and start addressing every single idea and problem all at once, but at least now USA Cycling has a permanent member to address the issues for collegiate cycling and focus attention on.

VN: And this is a new position?

KZ: Yes. I really applaud USA Cycling, as a member of the organization, for deciding to focus on cycling at the collegiate level. It goes back to Gerard’s vision that collegiate cycling is a really important wing of cycling in the United States and a talent identifier for the Olympics and pro ranks. Because this position is just created and has no history or precedent of what it’s supposed to be like, I’ll basically be creating it as I go along. It all comes down to writing a business plan for what I want to accomplish and then following it.

VN: What is the present state of collegiate cycling?

KZ: Oh, boy. That’s a tough question. I have never really tried to verbalize what I see. How I see collegiate cycling is that it rides on the shoulders of passionate individuals. Whether they are students or faculty or volunteers or a combination of both. Some programs are more successful than others, but that fact is the same. Some programs like the University of Colorado or Fort Lewis College or Boston College, the schools that are deemed "successful" because they repeatedly do well at nationals, they put on races and they keep having high numbers, these schools have a lot in common with the small programs. They all have a core group of individuals at the center who keep things going. If these individuals, for whatever reason, leave, graduate or retire, the success of the program oftentimes leaves with them. In its current state, collegiate cycling resides on the passion and energy of the individuals who are willing to step up and make each program carry on and happen. Now, there is good and bad in this. The good is that you can identify the go-to person for each school. The risk is that that is not a sustainable system. I think that fact makes collegiate cycling have problems with sustainability.

VN: How do you hope to help programs with sustainability challenges?

KZ: Well, first I am going to travel around the country and visit as many programs as I can and try to learn from them. I want to be able to help other programs duplicate their success around the country. But each school and program has its own culture and nuances, of course. There are things we can put into place to help clubs come up to speed to manage a good program. Let’s take UC Santa Cruz, for example. Whoever is stepping up as club officers have to contact vendors and beg or steal to get simple things like gear, kits, nutrition and all the little things you need to keep the club going. This happens every year or so. One of the thoughts I have is to approve a national collegiate cycling vendor program to identify vendors who want to help collegiate cycling programs. We can create a hub for products and services that any collegiate program can tap into to get the equipment they need to keep going. I want to help schools take shortcuts to be able to race and train without having to put in too much extra effort.

VN: What does your five-year plan look like?

KZ: Well, let’s start with five years and work our way back. I would like to see cycling as an NCAA (National Collegiate Athletics Association) sanctioned sport in five years. That’s a simple statement that has huge meaning. There’s a lot of debate over whether it deserves to be an NCAA sport and a lot of work to do to make that happen. I come from an endurance-sport background — I played tennis in college and was a triathlete for a long time and have been a cyclist even before playing tennis — so I am biased because I love my sport. I think cycling is the type of sport that promotes the kind of character-building that I would like to see in more people. From that standpoint, I think it definitely deserves to be an NCAA sport. I think having it with NCAA affiliation would also really help sustain the individual programs as time goes on. Now, as the fresh kid on the block, I see the NCAA as something that could help us solve a lot of collegiate cycling’s problems. But, like I said, I’m the new kid on the block and don’t know all of the nuances involved in getting a sport sanctioned. That’s something I’m going to spend time on. For shorter-term goals, two- or three-year plans, I would like to see the number of collegiate cycling programs get close to 1000. Currently there are between 200 and 250 in America. I would like to see a four- to five-fold increase in that, which I don’t see as impossible. For shorter one- or two-year plans, I want to see a development of the infrastructure that collegiate cycling needs to address membership. That, and sponsorship. I want to be able to raise some money and find sponsors and partner with companies who can benefit and see the benefits of cycling at the collegiate level. Another short-term goal is to revisit the organization of the different conferences. The folks in Arizona and Utah have to travel huge distances to attend races to get team points, and oftentimes there’s not enough races for them for them to attend. They have to drive for like two days to go anywhere. That’s a big challenge. We need to address that.

VN: What else do you want to address?

KZ: Well, the one thing I can’t talk enough about is talent identification. If you look at the junior programs in the United States and compare them with the junior programs in the rest of the world, specifically Europe, I would say that our juniors are on par with the world when it comes to passion, gear and availability of races. But something happens from the ages of 15 to 23 where the kids in Europe leapfrog over the kids in the U.S. Some of that is cultural and structural. In Europe when you’re a U23 and race, you are put under huge stress in races that are way more challenging than probably anything over here for U23s. You learn to be a better cyclist over there, and there are more races over there. Anyway, something happens to the junior and U23 racers over here and we fall behind. I think collegiate cycling can help us in that regard. Talent identification and nurturing is something that is really important at the U23 age and collegiate cycling can be a very strong tool. It can be a talent identifier for future Olympians. I think we can use it to identify and funnel national-level talent into Olympic hopefuls. I think the same can be said about the status of women in cycling. The collegiate infrastructure could serve as a more welcoming environment for women to learn about and further their interest in cycling. Women can use collegiate cycling as a natural springboard for pursuing a tremendously healthy activity that can be with them their entire lives. I have heard from so many women cyclists that their first exposure to bike racing was intimidating. These women got into cycling much later in life, perhaps after their collegiate years, because they were simply not aware of it as a possibility. And, obviously, to date cycling remains a male-dominated sport. I would like to see a balancing of sorts and will be focusing energy to attract and retain women in collegiate cycling.