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Photo by Erin Nelson Sweeney.
A Hoover Bucs Mountain Bike team member rides the trails at Black Creek Mountain Bike Park in Hoover during practice.
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Photos by Erin Nelson Sweeney.
Members of the Hoover Bucs Mountain Bike Team ride the trails at Black Creek Mountain Bike Park in Hoover during practice.
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Photos by Erin Nelson Sweeney.
Left: One of Spain Park High School’s mountain biking team members on a practice trail ride at Oak Mountain State Park.
David Crossman and his two sons were mountain biking at Oak Mountain State Park around a decade ago when they ran across a mountain bike team from Hoover High School.
His sons, Parker and Caleb, were in elementary school at the time and too young for the team, but the high schoolers encouraged them to keep riding and join the team when they got in middle school.
Fast forward to the present, and now Parker is a senior at Hoover High, in his seventh year on the mountain bike team and hoping to ride on the team at Auburn University next year. Caleb is in ninth grade and in his fourth year on the Hoover team. And David Crossman, their dad, has become the head coach.
It’s become a passion for the family, so much so that they’re always looking for a place to ride when they’re on vacation.
The Crossmans are not alone. Mountain biking is a growing sport. In 2011, there were about 7 million people in the U.S. participating in mountain/non-paved bicycle riding, but now that number is closer to 9 million people, according to Statista.
When the Crossmans got involved with the Hoover mountain bike team, there were maybe 400 or so riders in grades 6-12 competing in the Alabama Cycling Association youth competitions. Now, there are more than 700 youths on 30-plus teams, Crossman said. “It has grown exponentially.”
Both Hoover and Spain Park have had teams for about a decade, and the interest has been growing, he said.
The Hoover team peaked with 62 team members in the 2021-22 school year, when some kids temporarily dropped out of other sports due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Crossman said. Last year, some of those kids returned to their other sports and the team dropped to 41 members, but this year about 50 riders are expected on the Hoover team, he said.
The Spain Park team typically has between 20 and 30 riders, said Kristine Toone, who is the team director and one of the coaches. She has a 12th grade son and an eighth grade daughter on the team, and her husband, an avid cyclist, coaches as well.
Toone had never been a mountain biker but decided to try it because the rest of her family was into the sport, and now they all do it together, she said.
Photos by Erin Nelson Sweeney.
Left: One of Spain Park High School’s mountain biking team members on a practice trail ride at Oak Mountain State Park.
SPORT FOR ANYONE
Mountain biking is a great sport because just about anybody can do it, Toone said. There are some super-athletic and very competitive riders on the team, but it’s also a good activity for others who may not thrive in other team sports, she said.
There are some students on the team who have never ridden before but find a lot of success in competing against themselves, Toone said.
“Inevitably, you see improvement,” she said. “We always see improvement, whether they’ve ridden before or not.”
Crossman said his family is a perfect example of the different types of riders. While Parker is in it for the competition, his brother Caleb just races because it’s fun and he likes to see how many people he can pass, David Crossman said.
Some kids just love the challenge of navigating roots along the trail and jumping rocks, he said.
Jase Tabor got started on the mountain biking team in his freshman year at Spain Park and raced all four years. He was new to the sport but thought it would be something fun to try, he said.
At first, he was a little apprehensive about the races because the mass starts can be crowded, but after his first race, he really got into it, he said.
“I love the races — the adrenaline rush going through my body every time I was riding,” Tabor said.
He graduated from Spain Park this past spring and is taking classes at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, but he and two other former Spain Park riders are coming back to help coach this year.
“I just want to come back and coach and share with everybody else my love for mountain biking and why it’s such a great sport,” Tabor said. “This is like one of the best sports at Spain Park.”
Tabor would love to see mountain biking become an official sport sanctioned by the Alabama High School Athletic Association, he said. Now, it’s considered a club sport. Teams are formed based on the schools riders attend, but the races are run by the Alabama Cycling Association.
Photos by Erin Nelson Sweeney.
Members of the Hoover Bucs Mountain Bike Team ride the trails at Black Creek Mountain Bike Park in Hoover during practice.
MORE GIRLS WANTED
Most of the participants in the mountain bike teams are boys, but girls also participate. Hoover’s team this year has about 45 boys and five girls.
Girls tend to be more scared they won’t be able to control the bikes, Crossman said.
“That’s the hardest thing — trying to recruit girls,” he said. “Some teams have a magic button, and the girls just come. … I don’t know the magic trick to get them to come.”
While the boys and girls race separately, both play an integral part in team scoring. At the high school level, team scores are based on the top eight finishers on the team, including the top two girls, Crossman said. At the middle school, team scores are based on the top four or six finishers but must include one girl.
Last year, Hoover’s team didn’t have any middle school girls and therefore couldn’t be counted in the middle school team scores, he said.
Zoey Hewitt, a senior at Spain Park, said she’s one of about six girls on the Spain Park team. She had ridden recreationally in the past but had never done mountain biking until she decided to join the team, she said.
“I was really anxious I wouldn’t know how to control a different bike,” she said. “It was surprisingly easier than I expected, but still a little challenging. It was another thing to learn and figure out. … It’s exciting. I really like it.”
Hewitt isn’t into cut-throat competition, she said. She does it for fun, and if she has success competitively, that’s just a bonus, she said.
Overall, Hoover has a very competitive team. In the last three years, Hoover has placed among the top four teams, and last year, they won second place behind Oak Mountain High School, Crossman said.
“We’d love to become state champs this year,” he said. However, “I’m not in it to collect trophies. I’m in it to make sure they’re having fun.”
Spain Park generally places around seventh or eighth place and in 2019 finished in fifth place, Toone said.
“We’re not a very results-driven team,” she said. While they have some competitive individual riders and support those riders to help them improve and place as well as they can, the team as a whole is in it more for the fun, Toone said.
Some of the senior riders go at it pretty hard and have grown tremendously, she said, and it has been fun to watch them grow. There also are a couple of great middle school riders coming into the high school team soon that should add to the team’s competitiveness, she said.
SIX COMPETITIONS
This year’s practice season officially began Dec. 1, but the first race, which is time trials, won’t be until Feb. 24-25 at Munny Sokol Park in Tuscaloosa. There are four other regular season races in Spanish Fort, Auburn, Huntsville and Montevallo, and the state championship race is set for May 4-5 at Tannehill Ironworks Historical State Park in McCalla.
At the time trials, riders take off one at a time every 10 seconds and are racing against the clock, with electronic chip timing on their bikes, Crossman said. The time trials help determine where riders start the other races during the season. In the rest of the races, everyone in a given grade level starts at the same time, with the fastest five riders on the front row and other riders behind them, also in rows of five.
But if there are more than about 50 riders, the riders are divided into waves to cut down on crowding. Each biker still is timed by electronic chips, Crossman said.
Last year, the varsity boys went four laps on the trail, with the trail loops being 5 to 6 miles, while the varsity girls went three laps, Crossman said. The middle school trail loops typically were 4 to 5 miles each, he said.
Because of the time of year and early sunset during winter, practices can be challenging, the coaches said. Hoover’s team tries to practice three to four times a week, but most of that is riding indoor on spin cycles at the Hoover YMCA, he said. The team does longer outdoor rides for three to four hours on Sundays, either at Oak Mountain State Park, Tannehill or Cahaba River Park, he said. Once spring arrives and there is more daylight after school, they’ll spend the afternoons riding the trails at Black Creek Park in Trace Crossings and then make their way back to Hoover High, he said.
Spain Park’s team typically rides 10-15 miles on Sunday afternoons for practice, mostly at Oak Mountain State Park, Toone said. During the week, the team does spin classes twice a week at Crunch Fitness.
Like any sport, there are sometimes falls, but coaches try to minimize injuries by making sure riders don’t take trails beyond their skill level, Toone and Crossman said.
Parker Crossman is one of those who has taken some nasty tumbles. In his ninth grade year, he went flying over the handlebars one day and was completely knocked out. He had to be rushed to a hospital and then airlifted to Children’s of Alabama, where doctors determined he had broken the base of his skull. He was out for the season, but “he was anxious to get back on his bike when the doctors cleared him,” his dad said.
Then this past summer, Parker broke his collarbone while riding in Colorado. He healed up, and “he was back on his bike like there was no tomorrow,” David Crossman said.
Several members of Hoover’s mountain bike team have gone on to race in college at Auburn, and there also are mountain bike teams at schools such as the University of Montevallo and University of Alabama at Huntsville. Several Hoover team members went to a prestigious mountain bike team at Fort Collins College in Durango, Colorado, and have done well there, Crossman said. One of Hoover’s girls went to race at Brevard College in North Carolina.
Keep up with the latest developments for the Hoover and Spain Park mountain bike teams on their Facebook pages: “Hoover Bucs Cycling Team” and “Spain Park Mountain Bike Team.”
