It’s always one of our happiest days and our most stressful days. We recently announced our 2018 team of Coeur Sports Ambassadors and now almost everyone in the Coeur office is drawing a deep breath.
We tend to write about our team frequently so for some of you this is not “new” news but for those of you just finding our blog, the ambassadors are incredibly important to Coeur. When we started the company, we were determined to make a positive mark (no matter how tiny) on our little corner of the endurance sports world.
Coeur Team Cheering in Kona
To do that, we needed help and we naturally turned our attention to our fledgling team of ambassadors. We knew we’d be asking them to go above and beyond the normal call of duty for sponsored athletes, so we made the decision to not ask them to cover any of the costs of being a member. This caused our one person finance team to “pucker up” in the southern region but we believed we had to make the team free. That gave us license to ask every single member to go out of her way to be a role model and to draw more women into endurance sports. We stressed the fact that being fast was nice but being nice was mandatory.
The 2014 Team was comprised of 56 amazing women
As luck would have it, the team embraced the concept and before long, we began receiving emails from women commenting us on our ambassador team and how gracious they were at events around the world. That prompted us to expand the team in 2017 and we grew by almost 25%. Once again our finance department reached for the bottle of alka seltzer but we were confident that the additional expense would be money well spent and it was. We saw an exponential increase in positive comments from women all throughout the year.
Some of our ambassadors showing support for the troops on Memorial Day
When a nice email, or on occasion, an actual paper letter came in, we’d stop everything and read it out loud in the office. Then we’d email everyone who works remotely so they could share in the happiness. We just cannot overstate how great we feel when someone compliments the ambassador team. We literally glow with pride when we hear about an ambassador helping someone new to endurance sports or congratulating a competitor on their race. If you ever make it by the Coeur office, we’ll show you the wall that is full of complimentary cards and letters.
When we opened the call for athletes for the 2018 team, we had to deal with an unintended consequence of the great work done by the 2017 team. We had over 1,000 new applications for the team! We read every single one and many of them talked about a positive interaction with someone currently on the team and they almost universally said that they also wanted to help encourage other women to adopt a lifestyle of health and fitness.
Then we went to work trying to come up with a recommendation for the 2018 roster. The challenge was that so many of the ladies applying were absolutely fantastic! We had an incredibly diverse mix of athletes and when we finished sorting the applications into piles, the “not a good fit” stack of entries was practically empty and the “would make a great Coeur ambassador” pile was so tall it almost fell over.
That’s when our stomachs dropped. We all knew that we’d run out of money long before we ran out of amazing applicants. So, that’s why the announcement of our 2018 team evokes such a range of emotions.
On one hand, we have a team that is unbelievably good and who will without a doubt push forward the Coeur mission of support, encouragement and positivity. That makes us incredibly happy and excited.
On the other hand, we know that there are hundreds and hundreds of athletes that we’d like to take on the team but just can’t afford right now. Because of that we can’t help but be a little blue.
Fortunately, Coeur is growing rapidly and we’re looking for a way to bring more positive people into our little community. So if you applied and didn’t quite make it, we ask that you not give up. As athletes and entrepreneurs we’re natural problem solvers and we’re deep into problem solving mode now.
For those amazing ladies who are on the team in 2018, we say congratulations and welcome! We look forward to cheering for you and providing support as you work to make dreams come true for yourself and (most importantly) for others just getting into endurance sports.
The 2018 team is comprised of 112 Incredible women whose hearts beat as one
Happy Training and Racing!
Your Friends at Coeur