There's been some consideration over the past few years about where AERC's members come from and whether the average age of members is increasing.

Some believe that getting junior members started with AERC and retaining them is the Òfuture of our sport.Ó Others believe that more mature adults in their mid-30s are where most of our new members come from. It's important to know something about this if we want to focus on how to grow our sport in a reasonable way. Today junior members are about 7% of our total membership and have been about that level for a number of years.

There were 308 juniors in 1996 and, 12 years later, only 42 of those former juniors were still members in 2008. If we look back even further, only about 15% of our juniors are still with AERC 20 years later.

In comparison, about 36% of all members from 1996 are still with AERC in 2008. Adult members stay with AERC at more than twice the rate our junior members. Part of this could be juniors going to college, starting families, entering the military, and taking the first steps in their careers as they reach their 20s.

The question of the average age comes up because an organization whose average membership age is steadily increasing is one that doesn't have a good future. Plots of the age distribution of our membership show that for the past five years there has been almost no change in the age distribution.

The peak is at about 55 years old for our membership. This indicates that members are able to keep enjoying our sport for a long time with a number of riders still actively competing in their 70s.

It's also interesting to note that most of our membership fits in the 35 to 60 year old range. Our most mature members are in their early 90s and there is a small peak of young members around 15 to 20 years old. Our most mature riders are in their mid-80s.

The age distribution of new members is similar but with fewer data points. It shows that most of our new members fall in the 30 to 50 year old groups with a peak at about age 45.

There are about a thousand new members every year. Keeping those new members with AERC is important with the biggest effect coming from our present members helping them get started and have them enjoying our sport.

To me this says that encouraging juniors to ride and become adult members is important but we need to recognize that many factors in their lives may take them out of our sport for a number of years. It's important to focus our membership efforts on adults with personal interaction a key in retaining new members who join and will stay with our sport.