December 2025

Starting Line

The Maroons joined Texas NICA at the first annual Central Regional Championships in November. Austin High's Dash O'Neill secured Texas' only regional Championship! Let's GO DASH!!!
- AHS's other athletes went 6-7 in their respective races.
We are 2 months away from our first race! Now is the time to lock in, do work, and crush it out of the gate on February 1st!
Travis Country Jingle Bell Ride is December 20th. Mark your attendance and plan to be there. This is a huge outreach event for the team. AHS coaches and senior athletes will be responsible for helping guide small PODS of upwards of 200 residents on established routes through the neighborhood. This is a fun event and goes a long way to ingratiating us with the neighbors we ride around every week. Furthermore, it's a NICA Team Trail Corps event and it's 4.5 hours long. Thus, if we get just half of our coaches and riders to assist, that's > 100 hours AHS will log towards TTC in one fun night! Finally, you can win prizes and your family is invited if you volunteer!
With the holidays approaching, be sure to go into TeamSnap and mark your availability for the coming weeks/months. We'll need to cancel practices if we don't have enough coaches to meet ratios, so we absolutely need to know who'll be around over the next 40 days.
We are working on T-shirts, Hoodies, Beanies, and Socks. Purchase forms coming soon! Here's a sneak peek of one of the designs to get you hyped!

Central Regionals Recap

The inaugural NICA Central Regionals event was awesome. It was incredible to see all the other states and riders having a great time on bikes!

Pre-ride day the weather was beautiful, 70s, sunny. The course was great and our team was well suited to the rocky, punchy terrain. Race day was extremely cold with 20+ mph North gusts pushing the wind chill below freezing.

Texans brought home 8 podiums in total:

Varsity - Norah Clayton (2nd)
JV1 - Bryce Dietz (2nd)
JV2 - Dash O'Neill (1st)
JV2 - Roman Gonzalez (2nd)
JV2 - Lucas Stanley (3rd)
JV2 - Lee Cleveland (4th)
JV2 - Grant Drummond (5th)
JV2 - Nabila Stallmann (5th)

See here for summarized results from NICA Central Regionals.

Some take homes:

Texas will have a tough time locking down podiums at this event if it stays a fall contest; hopefully it'll move between spring and fall depending on the host state?
Texas needs to make sure we're moving riders by rule. For example, Texas JV2 boys won 6 of the top 7 spots. If we'd had our top 2 JV2 in JV1, they'd have taken JV1 podiums and we'd still have had 4 JV2 podiums.
Feedback from other teams was that Texas' pit looked awesome and we really seemed to have our "stuff" together. Folks loved the hats...
There are many states that do not ride mountain bikes on any sort of rocks at all. Like, just dirt, maybe some roots. Zero rocks.
It really seems that, even under the umbrella of NICA, each state has made NICA their own.

Practice Pulse

We started the season with our traditional time trial. It was a fun day and we had some riders turn in some great times. Check out the video - thanks Coach Matt!!! While you're there, be sure to subscribe to the channel.

Practices are going great this season. We're seeing good attendance with Monday averaging 16 riders, Saturday averaging 18 riders and Wednesday practices averaging 22 riders!

Zeke Davis is leading the team with 15 practices attended, followed closely by Arturo and Hugo with 13. The more you ride, the better you get, the better you get, the more fun you have, the more fun you have, the more fun you are.

SHEGWAT Spotlight

To quote the 90's rap visionary, Ice Cube: "You better SHEG yo' self, before you wreck yo' self"

This month, we’re spotlighting ‘E’ - Eyewear.

Eyewear is required on every ride. With Christmas coming up, get your parents to drop some sunnies, clears, or photochromics in your stocking. The local boys from Ridelens have given the Maroons their own discount code. See some ideas here!