Naomi Porter

Cedric Ebler (12) and Devon Harris (12) smile together after awards are announced. On Saturday, Aug. 23, the mountain bike team had their first race, the Cloud City Challenge, in Leadville.

The Manitou Mountain Monsters began the 2024-2025 season strong at their first race on Saturday, Aug 24. The team raced in the Cloud City Challenge in Leadville, Colorado.

The team is run by volunteer coaches who dedicate their own time to helping the athletes succeed. They are head coached by Kervin Quinones, who has been coaching the team for seven years. “I just feel like mountain biking is such a good sport,” Quinones said. 

Along with being a volunteer coached team, the team also collaborates together as one team with the Palmer High School and the Coronado High School mountain bike teams. “Our community is good,” Spencer Aldridge, a senior on the team, said. “It’s a lot of fun to meet new people from different places.”

The team starts out the year with a five hundred mile challenge that runs from Jan. 1 to June 30. This challenge is in place to encourage the athletes to practice in the off season so that they are better prepared to start practicing in July. 

Pre-season practices start around mid June where the team rides Tuesday and Thursday and then, once mid July hits, the team starts to have longer Saturday rides.  “With that we get around eight hours of practice each week,” Quinones said. “And then hopefully they continue to ride a little bit after that.”

The team has struggled with not being able to go to scheduled practices due to the weather. “We’ve canceled a lot of practices,” Aldridge said. “But we still try to ride as much as we can.”

At their first race, the team collectively got third place for division three of the Colorado Cycling League, and some riders placed higher than they were expecting. “I feel like the success of this past weekend and the first race was better than I was already expecting for the whole season,” Quinones said.

Behind any sort of stress there are always challenges that come from riding. Some of the challenges that come from riding are things that riders cannot entirely control, like the layout of a course or mechanical problems and injuries, and others are self-inflicted. “There’s a lot of internal dialog,” Quinones said. “If you feel like you’re not riding well, or you didn’t race well, or your bike is not working well, it can completely ruin your ride, or your race.”

Since people on the team know what it feels like to have things go wrong and to have off days, they try to be uplifting and positive. The positivity of the team helps to bring them together and makes the harder rides a bit more bearable. “The team really supports everyone of all ages and skill levels,” senior Cedric Ebler said. “The coaches we have are very skilled and helpful.”

Connectivity is something that the coaches on the team really push. They feel it is important that the athletes have fun and get along with each other because it makes rides and race weekends more enjoyable.

The team has a cookout the first night before every race where everyone brings something to contribute to dinner. “It gives us a chance to just rest and relax before racing the next day,” Ebler said. 

Quinones said, the relationships that develop from the team start from just being friends at rides and can turn into something that lasts even after high school racing ends. The athletes go on rides together, go to bike parks, and team bonding activities outside of practice. Athletes that ride with the team, even if it’s for a season or so, develop lasting friendships.

Quinones believes that biking is a sport that you can enjoy for even longer than just highschool. “I want to push onto these athletes that it is a lifelong sport,” Quinones said. “Hopefully they continue to do it after they leave high school.”