Yesterday, was a never-done-before: my first high school mountain bike tournament.
With my two sons, I drove 70 miles due east of Los Angeles out into the desert to Lake Perris, a man-made reservoir full of the water that makes life in southern California possible. Spread along the shore were tribes of high school families. We gathered around pop-up shade tents, brightly emblazoned with mascots and logos: Cubs and Toros and Knights. (Our tribe is Cubs, Loyola Cubs) Kids wore team jerseys and parents had supportive t-shirts. Ice chests abounded. Tables overflowed with snacks. Camping chairs unfolded. And everywhere–hanging, propped, being ridden, and lying on the ground–were mountain bikes.
Being a parent is always introducing me to something new.
We had no mountain biking when I was in high school. In east Texas, we had no mountains. Plus mountain bikes hadn’t been invented yet. So this is all new to me.
The scale of SoCal life still shocks me. This tournament included over 1,500 kids from 100 different schools. Coming out of Covid, registration is up. This was the first race of the season, the President’s Day weekend launch.
The atmosphere was family-friendly-festival fun. The public address system played music and periodically announced flights of activities, keeping the day on schedule. Blue ribbon tape with the Shimano logo lined the race course. Taco trucks and coffee stands provided extra food and caffeine. People walked dogs. Strollers were strolled. Kids were everywhere. Grandparents peered out quietly from shaded seats under the tents.
This was my son Jackson’s first race. He’s a freshman. The team formed in the fall semester and he’s been riding training rides on the weekends. This was his first experience. There were four races scheduled: JV 1, Freshmen, Girls, and JV 2. Each race had three sub-categories, northern, central and southern. Each race featured a rolling start, with the peloton following a volunteer parent until everyone was rolling.
Complexity. Organization. Details. Parents volunteering time and talent and energy. Running the event. Bringing all the tents and food and drink and bikes and kids. Volunteerism pulsing in the background to make this day for youth.
“We need marshals,” said the public address system early in the morning, in between songs. “To run the races today, we need twenty marshals along the race route. We cannot begin the races until we have marshals. Please come volunteer. We will have to delay all the races today by 15 minutes as we don’t currently have enough volunteers.”
That sounded serious so I went to volunteer, asking if there was a spot that was not too far away. As I also was responsible for my nine-year old younger son, and I’ve never done this before, could I be a marshal closer by so I could also keep an eye on him? An older volunteer heard my request and swapped locations with me. A marshal I became.
Yellow reflective vest. Bright orange flag on a stick. Cool walkie-talkie. All were given to me along with a ten-minute orientation into marshaling: prevent kids from “cutting” to shorten the race distance; watch for accidents and call them in quickly and provide basic first aid; offer mechanical support if bikes break down; and be eyes and ears out along the 5.2 mile race route.
My new location was “Marshal Point 18” and close to the main gathering area. Christian, my nine-year-old, could run around and enjoy the day and I could keep an eye on him while marshaling. (My wife Marisa wasn’t with me. She is Florida, attending the wedding of her nephew and godson. He and his bride have chosen “Tuesday 2/22/22” for their date.)
My “MP 18” spot was an intersection at a break in the blue tape that traced the race route. Here people could walk through when there were no bikers coming. My job was to stand on one side in my yellow vest with my orange flag and to hold people when the bikers were coming. We didn’t want any collisions.
The ground was sloping up to MP 18. Kids were naturally slowing down as they pedaled uphill. We were just behind the finish line so when the kids got to us, they’d already completed the first 5.2 mile loop. Freshmen rode two loops for a 10.4 mile race and older kids rode more loops.
I had a marshal-buddy across the lane from me. Her son is a senior. This was his first race since breaking his neck last May, not mountain biking exactly, but bike riding with friends and goofing around. He lost mobility for a scary period of time. He had neck surgery and two vertebrae fused together. He recovered mobility and healed and was on the race course again for the first time today. His healing was a miracle in their family. I got goose bumps listening to her, imagining what she’d been through as a parent.
Together, we gated traffic. When the uphill-pedaling kids crossed the finish line, we’d raise our orange flags and stop traffic. The kids came up the hill at varying speeds. Sometimes they were looking up. Sometimes they were head-down, panting and pedaling. We didn’t want crashes. No strollers or dog-walkers or grandparent or little-brother / little-sister collisions. No crashes was our goal and we were successful.
We had breaks and other parents jumped in to relieve us. I had a break and got to watch Jackson’s race. It was exciting and exhausting both. I was tired watching him pedal his best.
I was back on duty at MP 18 for the last race of the day, the JV 2, which included the varsity. The varsity launched first, and would ride four laps. The JV 2s came next, but raced three laps.
1500 kids. Only one of them is your own kid. In this last race, none were my Jackson. No one to cheer for, right?
I’m from Texas. I grew up in Friday night lights in Denison and Saturday afternoons at Kyle Field in Aggieland. I know how to cheer. I wasn’t big enough, nor strong or fast enough, to play football, but I could cheer.
So I started cheering the riders coming by.
“Good job!”
“Doing great!”
“Way to go rider!” (I cheated and copied ‘Way to go rider!’ from some of the seasoned parents. This was apparently a clued-in thing to say.)
“Whoop!”
A ‘Whoop’ is a loud noise we love to make at Aggieland. You find the sweet spot where you have maximum volume but you’re not blowing out your vocal chords. I can whoop all day long.
Because the kids do the rolling start, and because there are three waves, north, central and south, and because the varsity ride four laps while the JV 2 ride three laps, I had no idea who was “in the lead”. So I whooped and cheered for everyone.
The skinny-strong varsity kids in great shape, built and trained for this, came flashing up the hill, determined and looking like they were enjoying the pain. The majority of the kids wore faces marking the exertion, sweaty and serious, like the future adults that all their parents are dreaming they will become, able to shoulder their responsibilities and carry their weight in the world. And then there were the slowest kids. They got cheers too. Even with all the mixing of the north, central and south waves, you could tell some kids were going at a different pace.
A forgotten memory came back to me. I remembered the one time I ran cross-country, my junior year of high school, and I came in dead last at the district track meet, embarrassingly slow as I crossed the finish line. No one really noticed (most of the crowd had probably already left I was so slow) but I was harsh to myself, burying that memory just as soon as I could get off the cross-country team at the end of the semester and forgetting that low-light until decades later, until yesterday.
Yeah Dylan, you can cheer these kids. Maybe you can balance out the universe a tiny bit, pay it forward to a stranger. You got a voice so use it. Maybe it won’t matter. But maybe it will. Look at all the volunteer work that went into this day for these kids. Our head coach doesn’t even have high school kids any longer–they’ve graduated–but he’s still volunteering his time because he loves cycling, and what it can do for kids and adults. You got a yellow vest and an orange flag. Might as well yell! I thought all these thoughts and more. And I cheered and I whooped and I prevented accidents.
1500 kids. Lots of waves of riders, but still, maybe only 1 out of 100 would be a “winner” and stand atop a podium.
We love winners in America. We just finished the Olympics and we report the medal count, especially the gold medal count. We just had a Super Bowl last Sunday. We cheered the winning Los Angeles Rams, and they got a parade in downtown. Fine. Nothing wrong with that.
But parenting. Hum. When do we cheer when parenting? If we cheer too much, our kids don’t believe we mean it. If we hold back and don’t cheer enough, then they think they can never win with us. It’s maddening trying to get the cheering ratio “right” with our own kids.
But other people’s kids? Dressed in logo-laden spandex. Pedaling their best and pacing themselves and knowing they had one, or two, or three more laps left. Uphill. Sweat dripping. Hearts pumping. Hands slippery. Changing gears. Breathing in gulps of dusty-dry desert air.
I’ll cheer for these kids, even though I never met them and don’t know their high schools.
These little humans-in-the-making, every single one of them someone’s beloved, I’ll cheer for them.
What’s a dad’s job?
To give courage. To en-courage. To be there at the increments of growth in my kids’ lives, especially at the breakdowns, to en-courage.
That’s what education can do. It can guide. It can introduce. It can instruct. And it can give courage. It can offer each of us the chance to grow, a little bit more into who we could be, if we stuck with it. If we gave our best for ten of fifteen years and became an adult capable of adulting.
Maybe one of those kids yesterday heard me whooping and cheering. Probably not. Probably I was background noise.
But that’s ok. People cheered for me my entire life that I never heard. Teachers and friends and family in the foreground I heard. But principals and policemen and custodians and groundskeepers in the background, I probably didn’t hear their cheers. But they were all cheering anyway, for me and for all of us. That’s what being an adult means. That’s what we do for youth.
No one wants kids to fail. And all kids need someone cheering in their corner.
Want something fun to do, that will make you feel better?
Find a kid who’s not your own.
And cheer for them.
[It’s still Monday morning of President’s Day weekend. I’m off to do some projects with my sons. Thanks for reading. Please forgive the typos.]
Dylan Stafford 
thanks for reading