Starting an official running club is more complicated than it needs to be but it is. To do things properly and to be officially recognized as a running club look at this link to see what we need to do http://www.rrca.org/club-directors/start-a-club/ In addition to creating an RRCA recognized organization, we also need to register to be a USATF recognized team in order to In addition, we need more members to make it worth doing all this work b/c to score as a team we need at least 4 of each gender just to field an open team....
Ok, so my suggesting is starting in 2014, we begin recruiting people to join us at races. Meanwhile you guys should join USATF in JANUARY officially so that you are part of the race series and eligible for awards that are awarded to USATF runners only. ($30 per year, register online, they take Visa so you can use the gift cards for this if you want)
Next we can spend the next several months organizing all the paper work and details needed to be an official club and by Sept of 2014 we can look into submitting the paper work and make things official for 2015.
In the meantime, I recommend you consider joining a race team. I race for the Do Run Runners and we need younger people. They are an older runner's team but they are good people. Membership is free and they need runners. They do have organized free group runs as well, that are approx 28 minutes from Lyons campus on Saturdays. I don't train with them, but if you guys are going, I can try to get to at least one per month. You guys are welcome to come train with me and my Team in Training runners, but I do that in Monmouth County and that is kind of far from you guys. Clifton Road Runners is also another good team. You can join more than one team. For $20 you can join Clifton and then attend their group runs. They meet Saturday mornings as well and they sometime run Sundays in the Palisades which is really pretty (and HILLY).
If we are going to train for a 50k in March, we need to get you guys to LONG RUNS and group make this easier.