McDonald County Schools' mountain biking team wrapped up its practices for the year on Sunday at Morse Park in Neosho.
Coach Greg Capps, principal at Noel Primary School, said the McDonald County team meets together with a Southwest Composite team made up of members from Joplin, Neosho, Monett and other towns. The two teams are part of NICA -- the National Intercollegiate Cycling Association. NICA has been around for nine years, but it is the inaugural year in Missouri, he said.
Coach Adam Lett, principal at Pineville Elementary School, said it has taken time for Missouri to get infrastructure and race venues in place.
Capps said grades 6 through 12 are invited to participate in NICA. Also, any adult can be a coach. They just have to pass a background check and be trained. NICA provides all the tools for training.
He said, normally, the teams would have done a race series, but because of the covid-19 pandemic, they were unable to do that. Instead, they continued to have practices. At Morse Park, a mountain bike trail was recently completed in September, he added. Seven miles of top-notch mountain bike trails have been added to the park, he said.
Lett said on Sunday the teams were doing individual time trials. Students were racing against their own times on a three-mile loop and, then at the end, coaches would look at the overall times to see who was fastest.
Some of the students had not ridden a mountain bike before the beginning of the season, Capps said.
"They've shown so much growth," he said.
He added any mountain bike is acceptable. The courses are specifically picked to be easy to navigate so that participants do not need an expensive mountain bike.
The teams have done different rides during the season on trails in places like Bentonville, Ark., and Bella Vista, Ark., Lett said, as well as practicing basic skills on flat areas with cones, balance beams and other obstacles.
"Covid kind of hampered our recruitment efforts," he said. "We're hoping, once we get some normalcy, we can get efforts going and have a race in Neosho now that we have brand-new trails."