Where We Came From

I have loved mountain biking ever since my parents first took me down a mountain biking trail in Mammoth California at 6 years old just two weeks after I first learned to ride a bike.  Maybe not great parenting, but I was hooked. Although my hilly, rural neighborhood made it very difficult to ride a regular bike, for mountain biking it was and still is, idea.  I have always had the space to build rolling single tracks, pump tracks, table top and gap jumps without having to worry about tearing up the neighbor’s lawns.

I was enthralled with anything related to mountain biking.  I watched movies, watched videos, read articles, hung out at local bikes shops, assembled and reassembled bikes. I just wanted to always be around the mountain biking world, but I was still a freshman in high school, so I could not just quit school and live in Whistler (hmmm, maybe).

I decided to form a mountain biking club at my school to give me the opportunity to be around other people my age that also loved mountain biking.  My school had a process to create a new club, which involved putting together a justification and presenting it for approval.  I presented in the winter of my sophomore year and after my continued followed up, I was told two weeks after the year ended that I could not have the club because of liability issues.  However, they said I could form a mountain biking team as long as I could get a coach. This now seemed more like organized competition than a grass roots of enthusiast talking about and riding mountain bikes.  I also had no clue how to hire or pay for a mountain biking coach.

I put my mountain biking club plans on the back burner and decided instead to spend my summer riding and hanging out at the local bike shops.  School started back up and one day while I was posting a school film project onto YouTube, it hit me.  Why do I need my school as a place to talk about biking with students my age?  I can use the largest and most widely read medium for students – the Internet.  So this was my non-single-track path to launching the Student Mountain Biking Network (SMBN).  Enjoy!

Best Regards,

Justin Thomas

Chief Enthusiast Officer