When Michelle Williams started mountain biking with her grandson in the late 2010s, she saw it as an opportunity to spend more time together. Williams had been biking the Natchez Trace Trail and surrounding areas in Madison County, Mississippi, since 2000, and she enjoyed sharing her hobby with her grandson and watching him progress.
“He and I would just ride on our own,” Williams, who took up road biking in Ridgeland two decades ago and transitioned to mountain biking around 2016, told the Mississippi Free Press. The pair would spend hours exploring new trails and mastering familiar ones, she recalled, and their outings often culminated in stops for ice cream and other sweet treats.
It wasn’t until her grandson began riding with the state’s first interscholastic mountain-biking team—the Mississippi Blues—in 2019 that the then sixth-grader truly found his calling. Williams joined the Blues as an assistant coach that season, and she remembers watching her grandson forge instant friendships with his new teammates and embrace training and competition.
“That’s when I could tell he fell in love with it,” Williams said, describing how a group of older team members took her grandson under their wing. “It was just that magic of kids embracing each other and (saying), ‘Hey, come play with me.’”
Williams has spent the past six years spreading that magic to other parts of the state. In 2023, she helped form the Mississippi league of the National Interscholastic Cycling Association, a nonprofit organization working to promote mountain biking among children and teens. The league has grown exponentially since its founding, ballooning from three to 10 teams in the span of three years and attracting student riders from neighboring states.
To Williams, the league’s popularity is a testament to its culture of inclusivity and a collective buy-in from athletes and parents. It also reflects young people’s desire to find community and spend more time outdoors.
“Once you get these kids out there in the woods with peers that they can ride with, they (will) ride for hours,” Williams said. “They’ve gotten to the point where they are bored with their phones and their video games, so (the) passion for me is just knowing that we have a sport and an organization where our kids can get out there and be kids again.”
A Family Affair
Williams was drawn to NICA in large part because of its multigenerational approach to mountain biking. Local leagues are open to students in grades five through 12, and parents are encouraged to ride with their kids and complete the necessary online training to become team coaches.
“It’s amazing to watch the parents become active,” Williams said, noting that roughly 75% of the league’s current coaches have family members on teams. “It really does get the entire family involved.”
This emphasis on family is especially apparent during race weekends, when teams gather at mountain biking courses across the state for two days of friendly competition and intraleague bonding. Parent volunteers arrive early on Saturdays to help set up the course, and teams spend much of that first day doing practice laps and familiarizing themselves with the terrain.
“We do the two-day event for risk-management purposes,” Williams explained. “We don’t have a ton of technical (terrain) like you would find in a traditional mountain bike state, but we have enough that it is better for our student athletes to go out and see the course ahead of time.”
The rest of Saturday has an almost festive feel, featuring non-biking activities like chin-up contests and scavenger hunts that encourage mixing between teams. Families can buy snacks from food trucks parked around the course, and some even bring picnics from home.
By the time races begin on Sunday morning, parents and athletes from different teams have had numerous opportunities to mingle and form connections—a process that Williams says increases camaraderie and sportsmanship during competition.
“One of the things that we pride ourselves on is that you’ll get out there (on race day), and your student athletes and your parents are cheering on everybody,” she said. “You’re not going to see any major rivalries.”
Growing Inclusively
Williams had no idea that she would one day co-found a league of more than 130 student athletes when she began coaching the Mississippi Blues seven years ago. Since becoming affiliated with NICA, however, she and other league leaders have strived to further the nonprofit’s mission of inclusion and equity in their home state.
This includes championing NICA’s Girls Riding Together (GRiT) program, a nationwide initiative to get more girls involved in mountain biking and increase female representation on local teams. Earlier this year, NICA’s Mississippi chapter organized a ride featuring more than 50 female students, parents and coaches.
“Through this program, we’ve been able to recruit some girls who are really enjoying being part of teams,” Sarah Lea Anglin, a former Mississippi NICA coach who currently serves as the league’s GRiT program coordinator, told the Mississippi Free Press. “It empowers them to go out in other parts of their lives and be a little more courageous in what they do.”
Anglin credits Williams with driving the Mississippi league’s expansion in recent years, highlighting her boundless energy and enthusiasm and efforts to ensure that students around the state have opportunities to ride. The league now has teams from North Mississippi to the Gulf Coast, even adding a squad based out of Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
“Her leadership is what has gotten us here to this point,” Anglin said of Williams. “She’s the spark that ignites the fire behind the people who are willing to take the time to start a team.”
As mountain biking continues to grow in popularity among Mississippi youth, Williams hopes to build on the league’s composite model and begin establishing club teams at individual schools. This would bring the sport further into the mainstream, she explained, allowing more kids to experience the joy that her grandson did when he first rode with the Mississippi Blues.
“These are students looking for their niche,” Williams concluded. “And so they get this sense of belonging from (joining a team), whether it’s the racing, whether it’s the games, wherever they fit in.”
For more information on the Mississippi Interscholastic Cycling League, visit mississippimtb.org.
