A Little History:
In late 2007 it was becoming obvious that if our sport was to survive in Southern Illinois that we were going to have to do things a little different to reduce cost of shipping races and to increase competition. First was the formation of the Shoal Creek Racing Pigeon Club. The flyers of this new club contacted the West Central Indiana Racing Pigeon Club with the idea of flying together. It was decided that was a good idea and a meeting was set to develop a combine and set a race schedule. With the passing of our good friend John Hadlock, founding member of WCI, came a new problem and that was a meeting place.
Dale Martoglio formed the Crossroads Racing Pigeon Club in mid 2008 to serve central Illinois flyers. Without a meeting place all the members of West Central Indiana joined Dale's new club to fly young birds with this new combine. Therefore in August 2008 our first young bird race season was launched and ended very successfully in October 2008 with 17 races flown over 8 weekends!!
In November 2008 our combine met to distribute awards and to start to look to the new year. We officially adopted the name
Between The Rivers Combine.
Currently:
We are hosting two Futurity Races in 2009, you can find information on each race on the links above. In January 2009 we accepted the Southern Illinois Racing Pigeon Club into the Combine making us three clubs strong with over 30 members in the combine!! In the late summer - early fall we will be flying both Old Birds and Young Birds as separately released races. We are testing the waters as to how the old birds react to an August-October Race Schedule.
Into the Future:
Going into the future we are looking at growing our membership in the individual clubs and adding new clubs to our combine. We are also looking at creating a Concourse and then a Federation to promote competition in a multi-level tier of the racing sport!! With everyone working together this is entirely possible and you will see the levels of competition expand in the Midwest!! Watch out Central Jersey & Gulfcoast, here we come!!
