Huskies taking notice of mountain bike team

Hewitt-Trussville High School has a mountain bike team, and students are, slowly but surely, beginning to realize it.

In the hallway, there is a large banner of the 2015 team that is impossible to miss. After its second year of competition in 2016, more and more people are taking notice and becoming intrigued.

“More people are realizing, ‘Oh, we have a mountain bike team?’” said Rhonda Brittain, head coach and a teacher at Hewitt-Trussville. “We even did the homecoming parade and we would hear, ‘Oh, there’s the mountain bike team.’”

Word has spread, and the team is growing.

“We’re trying to get the word out,” Brittain said. “We almost doubled from last year to this year.”

Christen Deason races on the junior varsity level, and she has seen a spike in awareness from the peers she interacts with daily.

“We wear our T-shirts and teachers ask me about it all the time,” she said.

Brittain was approached about starting the team two years ago after it was discovered she raced mountain bikes competitively with her husband, Walt, when the couple lived in Oklahoma.

Since the sport is not sanctioned, all coaches are on a volunteer basis. Walt Brittain helps coach the team along with Frank Davis and Kurt Kristensen. There are a lot of hours put into the team, but Rhonda has not regretted it.

“These guys have been awesome. There’s a lot of really competitive kids and they’re really good at riding bikes.”

The team is full of riders with different stories. Some had prior riding experience and picked up the sport without a hitch. Many have funny tales about the travails of learning the ins and outs of mountain biking once they joined the team.

Deason falls into the latter category. She joined the team last year because the team needed someone to “just literally finish the race.”

“My first race was in Auburn, and I’d ridden a mountain bike twice in my life. I thought, ‘I hate mountain biking.’ But then they taught me how to actually ride a mountain bike, and eventually I just started to love it,” she said.

Brandon Weir joined the team this season, but he has been riding bikes since he was three years old.

He recalled, “I actually got a toy dirt bike from one of my friends and I started doing that. My dad made me learn how to ride a bike without training wheels before I got a dirt bike. He took them off and I started riding.”

Justin Wilson gave into the peer pressure, in a positive manner. He joined the team when it started last school year, because “all my buddies did it and I thought it looked pretty fun.”

He had no biking experience beforehand, and it took awhile before he felt comfortable with the fundamentals. After a slow buildup in his skills, he found himself to be much more competitive in his second season of racing.

Jackson Davis is the only kid on the team who races at the varsity level, and the competition is split up among several divisions: varsity, junior varsity, sophomore, freshman, eighth grade and seventh grade.

No matter what skill level a person is at, experience is the best method to improve. 

“In (practice), you can overemphasize, but once you get on the trails, the look and feel of it is completely different,” Brittain said. “You have to actually go out and experience it for yourself.”

The long season, which spans much of the school year and longer than any other sport, is full of practices at Magic Mountain and the Trussville Sports Complex. 

The team had five races this season at Tannehill State Park in McCalla, Munny Sokol Park in Tuscaloosa, the Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Oak Mountain State Park and Chewacla State Park in Auburn.

In scoring the competitions, the top four scorers from each team are added up to give a final score. The catch is that the scores have to have representation from both male and female riders. For a portion of the season, Deason was the only girl on the team racing. No pressure, right?

“Tons of pressure,” she said, while noting that coaches and fellow riders are usually pretty good about not making her feel the heat.

Brittain emphasizes that mountain biking is a sport for boys and girls, and if the sport continues to grow at the current pace at Hewitt-Trussville, Deason will be riding free and easy next year.