I’ve been thinking about community through the lens of giving back, as in giving back to my community. I read sometime back that when you reach your 50s, one of the things that commonly happens to people is they develop a desire to be of service to their community, however they define it.
I’ve experienced this phenomenon in a big way. I think possibly because up until recently, most of my efforts at community building occurred through my work as a writer, which isn’t always all that visible.
My efforts with NICA and the A-Team, on which my son Philip briefly rode, were, uh, brief precisely because Philip only briefly rode on the team. At a certain point he refused. The combination of early mornings (9 am starts), and steep hills weren’t to his taste. But I very much enjoyed working with the kids.
More recently, I’ve been taking a hard look at the local club, The Blue Tailed Skinks. Their founder, Matt Fritzinger, was the guy who founded the NorCal league, which has grown into NICA. Back then, he wasn’t a dad. He now has two sons and he wanted to get them out on bikes and to get them out on bikes with friends, so he started putting out the word for additional families to ride with him. In 2025, the program worked with 270 kids. Every year they have grown by 100% over the previous one.
So the basics are: The Blue-Tailed Skinks are for kids from kindergarten through fifth grade. Sixth graders can ride in the NICA Devo program. On rides, they break the kids up into two-year age groups. They go out for rides that are fun. They stop lots. They kick over rocks. They skip rocks on ponds. They stop for snacks.
Perhaps the most defining feature of the Blue-Tailed Skinks is that this isn’t a sport. It’s about getting outside and having fun with friends. The emphasis is fun. Bikes are the conduit, the medium. Think of it as an outing, not sports practice.
I’m so in love with the program I’ve fantasized about starting the first franchise, if you will, in Seattle. I would like to see the Blue-Tailed Skinks, or something like it, grow into a national program.
One thing I want to stress is that, yes, I like this program because it is bike-based, but that’s not why I want to see it replicated elsewhere. I like it, hell, I love it, because it allows the kids to be kids. There are no little league parents, no zero-sum outcomes, no getting it wrong. This is loser-proof.
Getting involved in this is a real chance to make the world a better place.