My 7yo daughter is on a youth mountain bike race team. The team organizes group rides over the winter on zwift with the kids on the grandfathered in U16 accounts. I was super disappointed to see that these accounts are no longer available.
What are my options to join them with my daughter? I would just be riding casually for exercise but she’s definitely into being competitive.
I just bought our first trainer (the Kickr V6 with Zwift Cog) from the zwift store for this, and if there’s no way for her to ride it’s probably going back, or I’ll have to use a different platform that I can ride with my daughter on…
Currently your supported option within Zwift is to buy a monthly membership for the winter months since there is no longer a U16 free account, you can cancel when the team moves outside and restart it next winter if you don’t want to do an annual sub (they will keep their badges/achievements etc. when they start paying again the next year). It’s unfortunate that those child accounts were removed, and there is a large request thread for a family plan that would reduce the cost of two or more subscriptions, but that is not currently available.
I wonder if the mountain bike team can possibly sponsor the membership in some way? The U16 accounts going away is going to be a bigger problem as more members age out and new members join, so they will either expect folks to buy a subscription as part of the team, or move to a different platform… Maybe do a team bake sale to support Zwift memberships for the team
Anyhow, it’s unfortunate the U16 accounts no longer exist, but my understanding is it was due to the complexity of supporting the regulatory requirements for child accounts in various markets etc.
Not sure if this is the case or not. What I know is the free U16 account is not available, not sure what happens if you create a paid account and set the age to under 16. Someone else who knows will have to chime in on that - it’s possible you have to do something special via Zwift support to set the age correctly once the account is created.
I forget whether it was garmin or strava, but I had the same issue with one of my kids on one of those platforms where if I didn’t set their age above 16 they couldn’t use a lot of the basic features.
Well, after some discussion with the team it sounds like there’s some momentum to move the team events off of zwift since this will be a bigger and bigger problem going forward. Some families have 3 riders and just can’t afford $60/month to participate.
Zwift for sure just lost my family as a potential customer and maybe many more on the team.
Yep, u16 accounts are unfortunately a thing of the past and the new policies state that riders need to be over 16 years old to sign up for a Zwift account. So yes, you’d have to set up a paid account and set the age to 16 to ride on Zwift. I believe MyWhoosh and Rouvy probably have similar age restrictions (13+ I want to say but don’t quote me on it) but are definitely more budget friendly options, especially if you’ve got a family full of riders. Regarding your set up, it will work with either MyWhoosh or Rouvy. Both support virtual shifting.
