It would be great to see a coordinated calendar of events, better marketing. And better value too, which can come with greater rider numbers.
Tried that, you always get a couple of dissenters who think that just because they don't agree with every single idea you need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. You come up with a calendar that you think will work, gives some gaps etc, and all of a sudden there's either another dozen events filling the gaps, of clashes over top.
IMO the way to go for club events in the future is inter-club series, certainly in Victoria anyway - InterWinter, RAMBO etc. regional Inter-club series rather than single-club series. The you get this whole problem with this idea that the 'state' series should just be four to seven club events slapped in to a series rather than all the contruting clubs running all four to seven events jointly, rather than club A runs round 1 and takes all the revenue minus a series pool, club B runs round 2 and same again... that's not a state series, that's an inter-club series.
I've tried to give assistance as best I can to Shane Coppin (the new MTBA EO) to make the new Marathon series as best we can - to not revisit, and in fact to correct as many of the mistakes as we possibly can that CA introduced in to their XCM series. Things like not running five rounds in the space of eight weeks or whatever stupid period it was, not using all completely new events at untested venues, not overlapping them with other existing, popular events - and most importantly the fact that noone even knew most of them were on until a few weeks befor. For a true National series it's looking good - now MTBA just have to advertise it right, and hope we can convince people the travel is worth it. As you already know, you have the opening round at Alice Springs over Easter, and the Marathon Championships at Derby just out of Launceston, Tas.
I hope people will make the decision to put these and the remaining events on their to-do list for 2015 - and if people want to give feedback on what would make people travel to this kind of event, this is the ideal thread to make that feedback known, not just for us, but relating to events in general.
On the other hand, cyclocross seems to be booming, maybe we are all just really fickle?
I dunno, Cyclocross isn't doing as great as at times it appears. Numbers in it are dwindling too after people get over the initial "holy crap it's new!" interest. We've seen it in every series that's come along over the years - Specialized CrossMelburn, Dirty Deeds, SycaCross and FOJCX have all had big numbers to start out and none are anywhere near as big as they once were (or have shrunk to a point they've died off).