What's up with this year's IMBA Report Card?

Let me start by saying that IMBA kicks ass! The organization has worked tirelessly to grow mountain biking and help it gain the level of respect it now enjoys above many other trail user groups. This has been particularly true the last couple of years since Mike Van Abel took over as executive director. During this time he has refocused the mission of IMBA, repositioned the organization with professional branding, and has embraced freeriding and developed whole new programs to help this aspect of the sport.

I've always been impressed at the tools the organization has provided to regional mountain bike associations to help them advance the cause. Which brings me to the annual IMBA Report Card. One of the mainstays of the regional advocacy tool set, the IMBA Report Card provided a grade - as judged by riders - to the state of mountain biking in every state or province in North America. IMBA suggested that regional organizations use this grade to help advocate with local officials. If your grade was good you could reinforce the great work that had been done over the past year. If your grade was bad, you could more easily build a case for a disaffected constituent group. (Read my post on this year's report card survey for more on this).

This year, however, IMBA, somewhat inexplicably, decided not to provide the full report card for each of the regions. Instead it chose to highlight the best and worst locations based on their grades, saying only that:

In 2006, IMBA has stepped away from assigning each state, province and nation individual grades. Instead, we're hoping to focus attention where it's most needed: the top of the class, and the problem students who will need extra attention to succeed in 2007.

What about every area in between? Don't we at least deserve to know the grade?

The real question is why would IMBA suddenly change course this way after eight years of producing the report card? Speculating for a minute; my guess is that either there were too few votes for the poll to be meaningful, or the results were so wildly different region to region based on prior years that it would call the polling methodology into question.

Is it just me, or do others find this a bit odd?