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Adam Croft riding in his first varsity race.
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Adam Veners competing at Woodberry Forest.
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Autumn Bartels competing in her first race.
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Jarren Schaner competing at the Miller School of Albemarle.
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Colonial Revolution team members.
Mountain biking: so cool even the kids are doing it, thanks to Williamsburg lifelong cyclist Rick Bartels.
He and a few other coaches are participating in the movement that calls for mountain biking to be recognized as an interscholastic sport in every high school and middle school in the Williamsburg-James City County School Division (WJCC), and York County School Division (YCSD) and, hopefully, eventually, in every school division across the state.
But when you read the words mountain biking, it’s not what you think.
Kids aren’t doing backflips off giant boulders and flying off wooden ramps that follow seventy-two-foot drops.
Instead, picture a high-school, 5K, cross-country course. Now picture a fourteen-year-old kid riding her bike through it, zipping around switchbacks, climbing arduous hills, pedaling furiously down dirt roads, and flying through the mud and rain. It’s tame but challenging, and anyone can do it.
“If you know how to ride a bike, within three months, we can get you mountain biking and get you prepared,” says Bartels, whose two daughters are members of Colonial Revolution, the co-ed composite team that consists of eight schools in the area. His entire family is big into cycling, so when Bartels heard about the National Interscholastic Cycling Association (NICA), he knew he wanted to bring it to Williamsburg. With leagues in each state, it was just a matter of starting a team in the area that would then compete against other, already-established teams in Virginia.
The biggest challenge for Bartels? Recruiting. How could he get kids normally interested in football, basketball, or soccer to try something different, something that would get them out in nature?
With the help of the local bike shops and the connections he had with other parents and other cyclists, he was able to get sixteen middle-school and high-school students onto the team in 2015, the inaugural year. Surprisingly, many of the students came from the swim team.
In its inaugural year, Colonial Revolution competed in four events. Most recently, four riders—including two of Bartels’s daughters—competed in the USA Cyclocross National Championships in North Carolina.
The team practices twice a week from July to September, meeting up at one of the local parks (York River State Park is a favorite of Bartels) and doing a ride and then a skills clinic.
And fear not, skeptical parents. These practices and races are extremely safe. Bartels and the other coaches spend hours teaching kids the mechanics of the bike and how to ride safely through the course.
“We try to empower the kids to be self-sufficient,” Bartels says.
He’s incredibly grateful for what he calls the “gateway trails” in Williamsburg: smooth, relatively flat, safe, and beginner-friendly trails—more than eighty miles of them between all the parks, Bartels estimates—that “don’t physically crush you.”
He’s hoping these trails—and the myriad benefits that come with cycling, from building stronger minds and bodies to teaching kids how to be independent and trusting—will lead more WJCC and YCSD students to come out for the team next year.
To get on Bartels’ recruitment radar and to learn more, visit colonialrevolution.com.