building resilience
Each Girls Mountain Bike Program session includes a “race experience” with a competitive opportunity for our riders to challenge themselves and explore their skills and potential. This story of a race experience comes from our newest full-time staff member - Summit County Manager, Erin.
“Our coaches are so great. Today we agreed to meet earlier than usual to set up for our session 2 race experience, but as we arrived the clouds overhead were DARK. Coach Makayla noted lightning just a couple miles away, so we reluctantly decided to postpone our race and instead came up with a plan to work on skills in the parking lot.
As our athletes arrived, we delivered the news, and could see disappointment in some of their faces. The coaches did an excellent job of relating to and holding space for this disappointment, then shifting to our plan B. While Coach Makayla was speaking to the girls about our agenda, I noticed Coach Mitch run to the van to grab our skills cones. He sprung into action setting up cones throughout the Summit Cove Elementary School parking lot so that we could practice rock dodging.
Coach Mitch ran us through a beginner level rock dodge, which all of our athletes (and Coaches!) rode through several times. Athletes were still quiet at this point and seemingly going through the motions, but I could see Coach Mitch was on a mission! He ran to another section of the lot and set up a slightly more challenging course–some girls followed–and then to another area of the lot for an extra challenging course, where more followed there. Before we knew it, we had athletes across 3 levels of rock dodge courses, all engaged, smiling, laughing, challenging themselves and cheering each other on.
Though parents were called for an early pick-up as it started to sprinkle during drills, we pressed on and continued with a slow race. This was promptly ended by a downpour of rain, which resulted in all of our girls ditching their bikes, running and screaming for shelter. Here we enjoyed what would’ve been our finish line cupcakes. Our mouths were messy from the treats but we used the rain to wash our hands and faces. As parents started to arrive, I noticed Cora tuck herself behind her friends saying (with a huge smile on her face), “No I don’t want to go yet!” It was wonderful to see how our coaches and athletes created such LIGHT and thrived on a dark and dreary day. I’ll never forget my first TCE race experience!” -Erin Buena