REGIONAL—Local youth mountain bikers from Team BOREALIS kicked off the fall race season on Aug. 29 and 30 in Shakopee as nine middle- and high-schoolers from Ely raced the course at Xcel Energy Mountain Bike Park at Quarry Lake.
The team is now up to 22 members, and has been training at Hidden Valley since mid-July. Team BOREALIS races as a part of the Minnesota Cycling Association (MCA), which organizes race events for 6-12th graders throughout the state of Minnesota. Races have a festival-like atmosphere with two days of racing each weekend.
“At these MCA races, every weekend has almost 50 teams and 1000 riders. This makes every race almost like a state meet in other sports, where we see the best riders from all over Minnesota come to race,” said Team BOREALIS head coach Mark Sponholz.
This is the first year the team has had a rider qualify to race in the varsity field. Unique to most high school sports in Minnesota, mountain biking requires that riders need to qualify to race in junior varsity and varsity levels by meeting performance standards in the previous years. The varsity field has only about 100 boys in the state that have qualified to race. Typically, only 60-65 percent of teams in the state have even a single rider who has qualified to race at the varsity level. George Sponholz is Team BOREALIS’ first rider to ever meet these standards and race at the that level.
Leading Team BOREALIS in the results was Addison Kannas, who finished thrid among JV2 girls. Also racing were James Townsend (19th, 7th grade boys), Sawyer Kannas (24th, 7th grade boys), Porter Franciskovich (47th, 7th grade boys), Mason Lee (64th, 8th grade boys), Carrington Kosinski (55th, freshman boys), Beck Sponholz (8th, freshman girls), Siiri Nelson (26th, JV2 girls), and George Sponholz (52nd, varsity boys). 
This was the second week of the fall race series organized by the Minnesota Cycling Association, and Team BOREALIS’ first weekend of racing for the season. Team BOREALIS riders will race again in two weeks at Whitetail Ridge in River Falls, Wis. Additional races this season will be at Theodore Wirth Park in Minneapolis and Cuyuna MTB Area in Crosby, with the season finale at Redhead MTB park in Chisholm.