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How our company began by accident. |
There have been some astonishing things that happened to all of us at the Rise Above BMX Team since it began just about 4 years ago. I was 20 when I started the team, and I started it with my friends Matt Carmichael and Eric "Vinny" Vasquez. We had just 8 days of performances in our first season; spring of 2005. Now, as the fall of 2008 comes to a close and our 200+ performances end on a great note, I would like to take a minute to write about a few of the great things that have happened to us, the Rise Above family, a family that seems to be growing by the day.
It was never my goal to start a BMX "stunt" or "show" team originally. I toured with a couple of other teams for just over two years directly after high school and after a couple of pretty severe injuries, I wasn't sure that BMX was for me. So instead of continuing to ride BMX, I returned to my hometown of Wyandotte, Michigan and began to work as a plumber and residential contractor. I was 20 at the time. I was working like crazy, all night at times, and in the process was able to save up just over $10,000. My original plan was to buy a house that needed work, then fix it up and sell it but that all changed one day at the skatepark. I hadn't ridden in about a month, but some friends of mine talked me into going up to our local public skatepark, a place where we all used to ride together every day. Well, that day I ended up learning a dream trick of mine, no-handed 360's. To all of the adults reading this that have never ridden a bike, this may be hard to understand but to anyone out there familiar with the feeling of learning a trick on a bike, skateboard, whatever, that you never thought possible for yourself; you know exactly what I mean. I couldn't sleep right for days after I learned that trick. I am a passionate, hardworking person and a fire had been lit inside me! All I wanted to do was quit my job and ride!
But I had a problem. We had a local skatepark, but honestly, it wasn't very good at all. Aside from a short hiatus, I had been riding for about 10 years at this point and I needed something bigger, something better than what our local park or any skatepark in Michigan had to offer at the time if I wanted to push things to the next level for myself. So I decided to take all the money that I had saved for a house and use it to build ramps at my mom's house where I was living at the time. But since we lived in the suburbs of Detroit, they couldn't be in the yard permanently. I was forced to build all the ramps out of steel and make them collapsible so that I could put them away at the end of the day when I was done riding them. Without a second thought, I borrowed a welder, drew a design, bought the materials and started building. 6 months later, when all was said and done, I had spent nearly my entire savings on two ramps. But they were entirely mobile and thatÃs when a light bulb went off in my head: I could book events to make that money back. So I borrowed my sister's truck and through some contacts I had made during my years touring, I was able to piece together an 8 day tour. I realized that this work, this entrepreneurial spin on BMX was much more fulfilling to me than any of the construction trades so I out the pedal to the medal, or better the rubber to the ramps, and Rise Above Entertainment was born.
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