Q&A: Wildflower Tri's Race Director

It's coming back in 2025.

So as to not bury the lead: Mark your calendars, Wildflower Triathlon will be happening in spring 2025. Date tba.

To talk about this news, I chatted with Colleen Bousman, who was the long-time race director and co-owner with her dad, Terry Davis, of Tri-California Events — which put on Wildflower, along with a handful of other well-known races in Northern California and also contracted to run the race management services for a number of events.

Colleen has now bought back the Wildflower assets from Motiv Sports and is running the events side of the business through her own production and race consulting company, See & Be Productions, which also race directs for other events (while her brother took over the traffic management business out of San Francisco).

Wildflower, which was at one point considered the “Woodstock of Triathlon”, had to deal with a modified course starting in 2014 after an extreme drought — combined with other challenges — led to low water levels in the lake. The race was canceled in 2017, came back in 2018 after an ownership stake was sold to Motiv Sports, and then was canceled in 2019. And then COVID.

You can hear more about the history of the race in Colleen’s interview with Bob Babbitt. We talk with her in the Q&A below about what happened with the race and what the plan is from here.

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I was hoping you could kind of start by just telling us about how you’ve been doing this since you were 10, how your dad started Wildflower, and how it kind of grew over the years. Just because I don’t know that everyone knows how much it was run by a family.

Terry [Davis] and I, in the beginning, instead of me calling him ‘Dad’, even though it was a family business, it was always ‘Terry.’ A lot of it had to do with being a female in the sport as a race director and gaining enough clout so it wouldn’t be ‘Oh, he just gave his daughter the job.’

Because I actually grew up working Wildflower every single year. I started when I was a kid, he had all of us out there volunteering. My mom used to help manage the timing team, back when timing was literally handing out tongue depressors with numbers on them and you had little pace clocks. So it was all I ever knew. When it came time to go to college, my dad was teaching this Wildflower group at Cal Poly and I had been going with him for years to Cal Poly while he was teaching the class, so I was just going to Cal Poly, that’s what I knew and that’s what I was gonna do. No brainer. 

When I was there, I was on the water ski team, I think I needed something independent, but I still came back to the race. I went to work for a marketing company — at the time, action sports videos were really popular — and I just wanted to learn something outside of the family business.

Then we got the contract for Escape from Alcatraz. And my dad called me up and said I need to meet you for lunch. He’s like, ‘You need to come back, I need help doing this.’ From that point on, we started working together and race directing. I helped him in ’96 and ’97 was the first year I fully race directed. He and I have been side by side at all the events. My specialty was always race logistics, and his specialty was sponsorship and government agencies because he came out of the Monterey County Parks Department. 

That’s kind of the start of it. He was great at being the face of everything, and I loved being behind the scenes. For years, people didn’t even realized I was race directing, but I managed all the central command stuff, if there were medical incidents, the whole communications system.

How did the race grow? You mentioned the Alcatraz contract, and TriCal had four or five big races eventually and contracted with a ton of others. But it started with Wildflower. 

He worked for the Monterey County Parks Department and the event had just kind of stalled [by the early ‘90s], because there wasn’t a focus. It was kind of a Bluegrass festival that grew into something bigger and they didn’t know what to do with it at the time. So, in his negotiations with the park, he said he wanted to take Wildflower but they were gonna stay working together and the goal was to get the park ready for Memorial Day weekend and get people to come to the park earlier. They would still get that and he would run the event from then on.

And when you have somebody who their sole attention is Wildflower, and they love to do it, and he knew so many people, the event just grew and grew. Then he decided he was ready to start making it into a production company. He started working with Betsy on this charity event at Laguna Seca Raceway at the time. Then we got the contract for Alcatraz. You learn a lot from working with different businesses and organizations. We had a relationship with Team in Training through Wildflower, and they came to him and wanted to put on a charity event, a women’s marathon. 

Nike Women’s Marathon, we managed that race from year two until it was finished, I think it was 12 years. That was another one we learned a lot from, because it was 100% brand focused, everything they did was about the brand and the experience. The budgets they had were over the top, because it wasn’t an event meant to make money, it was all coming out of their marketing budget and they were so innovative. Every year, I had to basically throw away my binder, because they didn’t want any race to ever be the same. 

Photo: Wildflower Triathlon

What were some of the things that really made Wildflower what it was?

I think we legitimized the entire festival aspect of things; it’s not just triathletes driving down, doing the race, and leaving. When you come to Wildflower, you have that weekend set aside and you’re here to stay. You’re not rushing back to a kid’s soccer game or lunch date. There’s a certain amount of decompression that happens.

I think the tri clubs was another one. The fact that they created their own little groups and campgrounds and activities, their own training programs and t-shirts. There was a whole thing that was created through the tri clubs.

The energy the college students brought, too, was fun.

In 2018, we also were able to get rid of a couple hurdles and had all of these glamping options, for the people who don’t really like to camp on their hardest race weekend of the year. We made it really easy to come in and pitch a tent or bring your RV or rent an RV or rent a complete glamping set-up. There was something for everybody.

When I first went to Wildflower it was huge, there was the giant Team in Training Tent, all the college kids. And then, over the years, it did start to feel smaller. When did that really start? Was it with the water and drought issues causing some of the uncertainties?

It happened a bit before that. The numbers went down a little bit when the economy went down. That’s when we saw our first little dip in numbers. I think the people who understood it was a whole vacation, those people who had been doing it for years, they kept coming. But we started getting fewer newbies. 

But we had started to build back up again. Right as we got momentum again, after the economy picked back up, that’s when the water issues hit. That took the numbers down a bit. We also started to evaluate, you get to a point where 36,000 people isn’t making you more money than 20,000 people because of the cost of infrastructure you have to put in, and the experience gets deteriorated. We started trying to balance out that we were getting the right number of people through the gate.

What was it at the peak?

We had almost 36,000 people through the game. It was just over 9,000 registered athletes. It was almost a 4:1 ratio of people coming to hang out v. race. That’s when we realized we need to find a way to bring all those people a race that matches with them. That’s why in 2018 we bought in the 5K, the yoga, paddle boarding.

Do you want to explain a little bit what happened with the race. It was a drought in 2014-15, but there have been droughts before.

Prior to the drought you’re talking about [in 2014], the only experience we had had in 35 years with a drought affecting our race was in 1991 and we were still able to do the race.

A couple of things happened this time. We had the drought, but they also had to lower the water level in the lake way way down in order to do some dam maintenance. Then the water that was supposed to come and fill it back up never came.  And then we got rain, but it came so hard and fast they had to protect the dam by letting some out — and they let it out too fast and all of a sudden the water dropped. There’s all kinds of speculation about what happened, rumors it was a calculation error, that the fisheries talked farmers into things, that there were a bunch of politics. We’ll never know, but it was unprecedented. Just two or three things that compounded.

How much of a problem did that cause?

We lost six-figures each of the drought years.

Because participation went down. When you have this traditional event, people get concerned if things change, they don’t know if they’re going to like it. That year we moved the swim and Heather Jackson actually said she liked it better, it was fun. Jesse Thomas was the same way. I don’t think it was a diminished experience, but there was a lot of added expense for us, too. We had to bus everybody to the other side of the lake, our operating expenses literally doubled.

The park has a concessionaire that runs the restaurant, the dock, the cabins, the store. When there’s not enough people coming to the park, they don’t open those things. So the concessionaire wasn’t there and the park employees weren’t there — because that’s all based on the number of people coming through the gate. The park was still open during that time, but not a lot. So we had to hire more sheriffs, more security. 

Then in 2018, the park was gated close, so that’s when I had to go in there and, literally, we were doing all the weeding, the mowing, the janitorial. I was cleaning restrooms myself. The cabins hadn’t been open. My husband was taking out the floors and putting in new floors in the cabins. Thank goodness he owns a construction company. We brought in street sweepers and my son was driving one of those big one. 

I don’t know how we did it, but it was fun.

And this all just compounded and then you had COVID?

We were fortunate that we had title sponsors every year and that really helps. Events don’t make a ton of money. You don’t see a ton of rich people out there who are event directors. Most of us have other side jobs as well. So yes, when we had those hits back-to-back: We had just built back up from the recession when the drought hit. We were back up to 27-30K through the gate. Then the drought hit and we were still sustaining at that point, but we knew that if we were going to continue to have water issues then we’d have to come up with an alternative plan — whether it’d be another venue.

That was our initial desire to hook up with Motiv Sports.

I was going to ask you about that. [Ed note: Wildflower was sold to Motiv in 2017.]

People probably thought ‘Oh, they sold to Motiv.’ But really the biggest thing for us was the long-term. We felt like we could team up with somebody who had sold us on the idea of expanding Wildflower to other venues. Then we wouldn’t be so dependent on water issues in one location. The brand was sustainable enough that when we were originally talking to them we were talking about doing Wildflower Europe, Australia, one on the East Coast. That would have added to a portfolio that would have made the business more sustainable.

We honestly believed it was the best for the business and we still had enough ownership that we could get it back. Unfortunately, what happened is the guy who had sold us on this whole vision, who we were very close with, left the company a month after we partnered. Your business really follows your leadership and the leadership was no longer there. And the new leadership was really counting coins. None of the visions were put into action with all of these races that had partnered with Motiv, and they were really scrambling.

And that also led to the last cancellation?

Yeah, 2019, we were on track to do just fine. And a decision was made that we were notified of over email that the race was being canceled. For us, integrity was really important, so to just cancel the race like that — with all the clubs we had verbally committed with — and that was when we knew we needed to get our race back.

Then, COVID happened.

Right, we did get our race back. I did an announcement on Facebook. We’re all excited. And literally a couple months later, COVID happened. 

Colleen and her family in their announcement post that they had bought back the race in 2020.

I don’t think people understood how hugely that impacted events. We’re all independent contractors. We’re not making a ton of money to begin with. Events are the last thing to come back and no stimulus package. All of us had to go get other forms of employment during that time. 

I never thought I was going to go through what I went through with Motiv, with personal issues, my health. I got COVID four times, I had long COVID, now it’s a heart issue. That’s not the kind of stuff you share on social media. 

But the event did not sit dormant in the background. I always knew I wanted to bring it back but I was struggling with: Is this viable? Do people love it enough to bring it back or have things changed? Is there even still a place for Wildflower in the modern market? I had a really hard look at that. 

I never felt that we just needed to be a triathlon. I always considered it an endurance weekend, so I was always looking in the background at what other sports are endurance and encompass that same target market. How could I integrate those into Wildflower? So I’ve been doing that behind the scenes for three years now.

And what was your conclusion? Is there a spot in the market?

There is! There are also one, if not two, large other sports we will be bringing into the event in 2025. 

What are the obstacles between now and Wildflower 2025?

We’re already working with the park on the permit. They’re not obstacles, but just whether I’m going to be able to do all these things at once. I know there’s gonna be water next year, because I know the release schedule and I have that, but I need to get a comfort level that there’s going to be water long-term. So I wouldn’t say that’s an obstacle for the 2025 event, but it’s just a question of if it’s going to be a single-year event that we get everybody to come to because it may be the only time it happens or whether we’re able to figure out how to evolve the event, which is what I’m working on, so it’s not so water-dependent.

It’s building everything back up. We had this feeder program that once you graduated and were on the team with us at Cal Poly, then they’d come on as volunteer staff at our other events. They would volunteer for us first and later on, sometimes, we’d contract them and pay them for the weekend, and they’d do higher level jobs. That’s how we created this pool of independent contractors. But it’s been four years, there’s not a single student at Cal Poly right now who has ever experienced Wildflower.

And then sponsorship. You try to sustain your events on sponsorship dollars, and you earn your revenues and profits on your race entries. 

In 2018, we had a goal of 5,000 athletes. In our budgeting, the magic number was 4,000 registered. Could you do with with closer to 2,500-3,000 and bring in a larger sponsor, or another kind of race?

That’s another challenge now: Events are all vying for those same athletes who used to do six to eight triathlons/year, and now they’re doing two to three tris, a running race, a gravel event, and something else. So your pool of participants is a lot harder. What is the balance between the number of triathletes we bring in v. adding another large-scale endurance event to the weekend? I’m sure you can guess what some of those sports we’re considering adding would be.

Is there a plan to bring back TriCal’s other races too?

San Francisco became too expensive and difficult. And there are so few events there, we don’t need to be on top of each other. We need to be working together, sharing databases with each other — your event’s is in the spring, mine is in the fall, let’s work together. We had already started refocusing our efforts on doing fewer events really well. That way we can all thrive. 

Pacific Grove, the city was fantastic to work with, and it’s in Terry’s backyard. If I had one other event to bring back, that would be it.

It’ll be interesting to see how the market all shakes out here in California.

I would like to be in the business of putting on endurance events and festivals, rather than just triathlons. For the person who’s doing six races in the year, just different types of stuff, if you have more things to offer then they can do more of your things.

I think, unfortunately, the endurance industry went through a lot of sales of events to financial companies that when things don’t financially make sense they just sold them off or closed them down. It shrunk the market. 

This is a family business. I’m getting my daughter involved, she’s helping me out with some of the marketing stuff. I would like to bring in the success of 2018, but with some additions and evolving as far as what’s offered, the sports offered, the distances, but the management and the heart behind it is going to be the same.