Personal History
Grew up trail riding with my Dad since I was 5, it was never taken seriously it was always a fun thing. We just had steel tube mini bikes no suspension and a tecumseh motor so needless to say racing wasn’t anything we were doing. When I was 14 I finally was able to buy a bike with suspension (drz125L) I put about 1,000,000 hours on it chasing my friends at the local woods tracks who all had 85s/150r/80s so that was fun but frustrating since I was impossibly underpowered, regardless I still loved riding so much that I just was happy to be out there. Skip ahead to 17yr old me I’ve got my license,old pickup truck, job, now it’s time to get a real Dirtbike. I go and find the first bone I can afford on Craigslist it’s a 1986 kx250 that’s missing most of the plastics, has no life in the suspension, bald tires, and 40 other things. I could not be happier because it ran and it was fast. I realize pretty quickly that it’s not fun to ride at all because of it needing one of everything, I decide it’s probably just me so I keep at it. One day I’m riding at the local sand track and the transmission blows itself out of the bottom of the cases at the top of 4th gear. After 15 minutes of trying to remember how to breathe, 35 minutes of pushing/dragging the bike back to the truck, and 2 hours on eBay/whole internet I realize that I can’t afford to fix it and/or none of the parts exist. I think I got about $19 at the scrap yard when I dropped it off, so I ride the drz for another few months. 18 years old after all that, newer truck now, a bit better paying job, I’m gonna get another big bike but I’m certainly not buying another hunk of crap. I find a gorgeous 2004 rmz250, it’s the right price it’s very clean, and it was built within a decade of when I was currently buying it. I get about 3 rides on it (4-5 hours) and it locks up (thankfully on the landing of jump and not the face) and now it needs a rebuild. I spend a month tearing down/ buying necessary parts/re-assembling engine and bike and ride it till end of the season (southeastern pa we get winter) the first ride next year it decides to eat a valve, lose a month and a half for that one. I had that bike for 4 years and it had something major go wrong about every 25 hours like clockwork. So i fox it one last time, sell it on Craigslist and I’m pretty much done with Dirtbikes. From 21-25yrs old I gained over 100lbs developed a bit of an alcohol issue, and lost one the most enjoyable things I had ever done. Enter a the cousin of a friend, he rides , we talk, he convinces me to get another bike. 2 weeks later me and him are driving 2 hours for a 2005 rm250 that swears will be amazing and good, we show up and it’s literally still dirty from being ridden that day, the guy is a bit squirrely (hard enduro guy) and the bike has about 5 main things that I would like to address (cut down bars,1” taller seat, flywheel weight, oversized 4.5 gallon tank, and I’m at this point 280lbs so suspension feels Terrible) but it runs 100% perfectly. SOLD. so my good friend Mathew seeing as how now I have this great running bike and have riddin a lot and am clearly in amazing shape says to me “you should come to the track with me” and I say no because while I have spent 100s of hours riding the woods tracks in the pine barrens, I’d never been to a real mx track ever. After one trip out to the trusty pines where I manage to loop out and break a foot peg, tweak my bars and rip the rear fender off, the next weekend we’re packed up and driving to budds creek mx park. I might be exaggerating if I say I did 12 laps that day and was terrified the entire time. Feeling bad about the whole thing Matt says “hey let’s try another track in a few weeks, get that thing to where you like it and try again, we get me a normal seat, set of renthal 962 bars, pull the flywheel weight off, ditch all the enduro armor it had and get. Fresh set of tires on it, we go to snake creek in de, it’s a dust bowl, terrible day, not even one positive to be found, so on the way home I’m pretty well done with dirtbike tracks and ready to be another guy that puts around the woods with no purpose. For 3 weeks he pesters me to try one more track he just learned about, it’s in wv and “it looks like something you could like” so again… I take him up on it. We shook up to tomahawkmx in West Virginia and I have one the most fun days riding I can ever remember, so we go back 2 weeks later and now I’m riding more and more improving by leaps and bounds. September of 2019 I go to tomahawk and they happen to be having a Kawasaki test day for the 2020s, I’m not interested per-say but curious to say the least, the suspension on my rm decides to be exceptionally terrible this day and I end up putting roughly 20 laps on a 2020 kx450 over the course of the day (I should mention that by this point I had lost about 50 lbs) so alll the way home were both buzzing about how much I ended up loving the kx450, and at some point he convinces me to race the next season. I drop another 15 lbs over the winter and am back in the gym for the first time in years riding is progressing nicely and the first signs of spring 2020 start to show, me n matt go to rocket raceway for a practice day and my rm decides to shear the stator key within 400 of getting in the track for our first practice session, among a few other things that had started to nickel and dime me with the bike I was beginning to mistrust it for the impending race season, so I get my mind set in the way home and take off the next Friday to drive 5.5 hrs away with my dad to buy one of the last 2020 kx450s left in a showroom on the East coast.
Riding Goals
My riding goals for 2023 are admittedly pretty steep, that said I’ve been/will be training as much as possible during this winter
1. I’d like to defend my 25+c title in the mastersmx series (possibly win open-c and 250-c as well)
2. I’m going to enter a few MAMA and D6 mx races and see how I place (those are slightly bigger series locally)
3. My 3rd goal is gonna be a big push to qualify for the Loretta Lynn ama championship, I’ve never been and it’s something I’ve steadily been working towards for the last few years
Competitive Highlights
2021
25+c 3rd in points in a 10 round mx series
open-c 4th in points on a 10 round series
251cc-500cc open c stump jumper harescramble 21st place
first overall win at budds creek mx
2022
25+c 1st place in a 10 round mx series
open-c 2nd place in a 10 round mx series