Durango's Devas
Girls high school mountin bike team makes first tracks

SideStory: Big Brothers gets in the saddle

Mountain bikers Alicia PAstore, left, and Kaila Hart, right, brave the elements to navigate a trials course set up by DEVO Coach Chad Cheeney at the fairgrounds on Monday. The girls are two of eight members of the DEVO Girls High School team, the only one in Colorado and one of the biggest in the country./Photo by David Halterman

by Missy Votel

Although the letters on their jerseys relate to something else, on this particularly wet and miserable September day, the “DEVO” should stand for “devotion.”

As the rain slows to a bearable drizzle, Durango High students Alicia Pastore, Kaila Hart and Joan Walker don their cycling gear and head off with boys coach Chad Cheeney, as well as a smattering of DEVO boys, for an afternoon of “dryland skills training” in the Rec Center parking lot. Although the Durango Development (DEVO) mountain bike team training season officially ended with the beginning of the school year, the riders are still training on their own in preparation for this weekend’s State High School and Middle School Mountain Biking Championships, to be held in Durango.

With the singletrack too soggy to ride, Cheeney sets up a relay/obstacle course to work on basic bike-handling skills, and his young protégés waste no time getting to work.

“It was amazing the amount of effort everyone put into it,” he said of the unorthodox training session. “Mountain biking usually isn’t a team sport, but they all pulled together to really compete, not against each other, but to dig deep and give everything they had. Everyone was riding at 100 percent.”

Not only are these girls giving 100 percent on the practice loop, but they, along with fellow teammates Sarah Autry, Paige Elliott, Madeline Meigs, Hannah Madden and Nora Richards, are making a name for themselves on race course throughout the state. They are the DEVO Girls High School Racing Team (or Devas, if you will) – the only female high school mountain biking team in the state and one of the largest such clubs in the country. And, as one would expect coming from Durango, they are shaping up to be a force to be reckoned with.

“We dominated the podium this summer,” said DEVO Girls High School Coach Sarah Tescher. “All the girls are very talented in their own way.”

Tescher, a former coach for the DEVO boys team, said the decision to form a separate, all-girls team was made the summer of 2006 once it was realized that girls wanted to join in on the action. “Obviously, as soon as we started, we needed to figure out what to do about the girls who wanted to join,” she said. “So I decided to branch off and coach a girls-only team. I figured even if we had just three, we could make a go of it. But we ended up having eight, we had a whole team.”

Starting last spring, Tescher and the team attended five of the Mountain States Cup Series races held throughout the state. They posted impressive finishes at all, including a state championship (Meigs) in the Super D, a Lemond-style start that has riders elbowing their way to the downhill. “Most of them raced at the Junior Sport level, and we always finished in the top five.”

One rider, Pastore, a freshman with a Nordic racing background, raced as a junior expert even though she is only 14 and riders in that class technically need to be 15. “Alicia was racing against girls three years older than her and was always in the top three,” said Tescher. “She’s probably going to dominate next year, and then we won’t know what to do with her, because that’s as high as it goes at that level.”

Local pro racer Shonny Vanlandingham leads the pack up the Nature Trail earlier this summer with the DEVO girls high school team./Photo by Kennan Harvey

Tescher said although some of the girls, such as Pastore who started racing in 6th grade with the Miller Middle School team, had previous racing experience, for most, this summer marked their inaugural season of racing. “They all did so well, there are some significantly tough races in the Mountain States Series. There are some huge climbs, and they did such a good job hammering it out and finishing exhausted but happy.”

Now with five races under their belts, the girls say they are confident in their abilities to perform well this weekend, especially given the home-track advantage. “My first race, I wasted all my energy on the first lap, and I still had two laps to go,” said Hart. “I didn’t know how to race, it was just me surviving. Now, it’s a lot more fun. I know how to pace myself without getting absolutely exhausted.”

In addition to pacing, Tescher said she has worked hard with her girls on their downhill skills. “The focus is to be strong, get to the top and then be confident about the downhills, maybe even excited about the descent,” she said.

Tescher, herself a pro racer, said female riders generally tend to be intimidated about the downhills, which typically should be the “reward” for a tough climb. “I love riding my bike fast downhill, it’s one of my favorite things to do,” she said. “It’s a shame not to be excited about it.”

However, with plenty of “do-overs” and breaking the tough sections down, Tescher has turned her riders into capable downhillers. “They’re probably the only girls in the state who can clean Anasazi, and that’s saying something.”

Furthermore, Tescher said she has had a lot of help in the coaching department from the local cycling community, which includes such mountain biking heavyweights as Shonny Vanlandingham, Todd Wells, Ned Overend, Tom Danielson and Travis Brown. She said it is not unusual for pros to come out and accompany the teams on training rides. “That’s one thing about living here – it’s like having Wayne Gretzky show up at your hockey practice.”

She also credited Trails 2000 for ensuring access to a wide variety of trails and terrain. “It’s a big part of why the program is so successful,” she said. “In other areas, there are access issues or the kids have to be loaded in a van and driven to the trails.”

With most of her riders sophomores or younger, Tescher is confident about the future as well. “It’s been really cool to see how much they’ve all grown, just this summer,” she said. And while lots of trail time definitely helped, they all admit there’s something to be said of the female camaraderie. In addition to twice-weekly group rides, the girls camp together at races and even camped out for a night near the top of the Telegraph Trail this summer. “Riding with girls any time is just fun,” said Tescher. “We’re always cracking jokes and practicing sections over and over. We’re out riding super hard but still having fun, encouraging each other and laughing.”

And in the eyes of a 15-year-old Durango girl, it doesn’t get much better than that, says Walker with the nodding agreement of her teammates. “Biking. It’s just what we do. Period.” •