Races charging competitive runners to be competitive

[Ed]

Those trophies are not very expensive and I am considering dropping the gender designation and giving one to the winner of each the 10K and 5K.  I am also considering changing the age group 1st place medals to ribbons.  This would save some money - but not really that much.
 
Our big costs this year were the certification of the two courses, sanctioning and the printed materials. 
 
Certification is good for 10 years as long as we keep the course exactly the same.  So we will not have that expense for the near and mid future.
 
Also, I thought I would mention that most of the gift certificates were meant to go to pledge raisers but there was very little of that as well.

[Andrew A.]

Those trophies are not very expensive and I am considering dropping the gender designation and giving one to the winner of each the 10K and 5K.  I am also considering changing the age group 1st place medals to ribbons.  This would save some money - but not really that much.

If I may suggest, keep gender designation and perhaps even go a little deeper (top three? top five?) in those and cut the age group awards and simply announce the age group winners at the awards ceremony, if anything.

[Ryan]

I wouldn't drop the gender designation. Age group awards are a tough call because a lot of people will be disappointed if you don't "spread the wealth". I like Andrew's idea but I'm not sure how popular it would be overall.

One thing to think about, you can get some nice paper and there are incredible things you can do with a good computer program and printer. I have a couple of certificates from races that did those in place of trophies, medals, or ribbons. If you had access to a laptop and a reasonably small printer and you had a power supply at your disposal, you could even come up with a template that would allow you to print names and maybe even times on the certificates before the awards ceremony. I'd want to take a few dry runs with cheap paper/ink to ensure you have it down and can do it quickly but that might be a way to cut costs and hand out something that would be pretty unique. I'm not sure what the cost would be but I'd guess less than trophies and medals, maybe even less than ribbons.