The Snoqualmie Valley Unicycle Club is currently the front runner to host the 2017 North American Unicycling Convention and Championships, and to bring a national event to the Valley.
Originally started as part of an after-school program at North Bend Elementary that spun off into its own group, the club has been active as a program for people of all ages to learn and practice unicycling skills.
Aaron Kinsella-Johnson, club director, said the club has grown and is now about the fifth largest unicycle club in the nation.
“We have 75 registered members with 45 also being members of the Unicycling Society of America,” he said. “The SVUC has more adults but it’s still primarily an elementary school club. We have two riders over 50, a couple of us are in our 40s, a few high school students, a few middle school students, and the rest are elementary school.”
The SVUC performs at events like Snoqualmie’s Railroad Days, North Bend’s Block Party, Macy’s Holiday Parade in Seattle, and at halftime for Seattle Pacific University and University of Washington basketball.
The club also hopes to host the week-long 2017 national convention, NAUCC, and has put in a bid to bring the event to the city of North Bend. Kinsella-Johnson said the host city will not be confirmed until just before the previous year’s event, NAUCC 2016.
“North Bend hasn’t hosted since 2002,” he said. “It’s exciting to see the possibilities.”
The world championships take place on even years so the national event is usually moved by a couple of weeks to keep the events from overlapping. Because of this, attendance at NAUCC is often lower in those years.
“The NAUCC events on odd years are more well attended because people don’t have to have split attention between worlds and NAUCC,” Kinsella-Johnson said.
Organizing and setting up an event like the national convention is a real labor of love and luckily there is a solid group ready to take on the challenge.
“The experience and templates and lessons learned are carried over from the last year’s event,” Kinsella-Johnson said. “We have a board which includes non-rider parents, rider adults, students, and junior directors. Now that we have that, it is a lot more feasible.”
The collaborative nature of these events also provides a good opportunity for the younger members of the club to get some leadership experience by getting involved with the process. A lot of the work that needs to be done involves organizing the venues and lodging. Kinsella-Johnson said he hopes the North Bend hotel planned for the corner of Park and Bendigo is built by 2017 to accommodate for the approximately 300 people expected to come to the national convention.
The NAUCC is a week-long event formatted like the Olympics, with many different unicycle-based events running on different days.
“There are all the same events you would find at the Olympics,” Kinsella-Johnson said. “Basketball, hockey on unicycles, track, long jump, high jump, cross country, a 10k marathon, mountain unicycling.”
This year’s national competition was in Wisconsin in July. The club did very well, he said. Kinsella-Johnson’s 13-year-old son, AJ, won the International Unicycle Federation Slalom event, beating out competitors much older than him.
“We won multiple events,” He said. “We did very well, too numerous to mention, all ages, all groups.”
Kinsella-Johnson is proud of the SVUC and said it is a great way for anyone to get a good workout while also learning a brand new skill.
“Pushing yourself to be able to unicycle is quite an accomplishment. Unicycling is a very unique skill, it is a great example of fortitude and changing yourself,” he said. “It put North Bend on the world map for something very unique.”
