Sweet Stomping Grounds @ Supercross HQ

February 19, 2012 by BMXNEWS.COM Editors

The Playground at Supercross BMX HQ

We first started hearing about the concept for Bill Ryan’s private “Playground” track/trails…gee…about a year ago or more, when Supercross moved in to its new offices and warehouse. In touring local space in and near Apple Valley, Bill set foot on the property, and knew the search was over. It had it all: much-needed expansion for the Supercross BMX, Speedline and most recently, Anarchy empire, and yes, ample “yard space” (which industrial properties sometimes have to park big rigs and store raw materials.

In the SX scenario, the “Big” would come in the form of Big air, and a great private playland for Supercross-affiliated riders. It must have been a “field of dreams” moment for Bill…looking out over this wide expanse, and enivisioning the possibilities. Very cool.

Fast-forward 18 months. “The Playground,” as they have taken to calling it, is coming together in a big way, and we hit up Bill for a little backstory on how it all came together.

The Idea for the Playground came about about a year an a half ago, at that point we had some riders such as Bubba Harris, Dani George, Jeremy Rommel, Nate Padilla etc… That were all looking at the Olympics in their future but couldn’t get the track time they needed on the big hills and big tracks to really fine tune their skills. So we got thinking that if we built our own, they could practice whenever they wanted to, we could change obstacles as needed to fit the changing needs of the tracks and it also provides the best testing ground possible for our products.

So as we were looking for a new building as we had outgrown our last one, land was a major consideration and we settled on an older building that had three acres of land so we could build our Playground. Originally we wanted to break ground on it a year ago, but getting dirt proved to be a problem, with the economy and construction on the downslide, there was not good clean fresh dirt anywhere we looked without paying a huge premium. So it took us just under a year to get the 270 dump truck loads of dirt we needed to build this 6 straight 4 turn monster.

When it came time to do the layout, we did an impromptu round table discussion with Bubba, Dani, Kenth, Jeremy, Nate and Austin Hiatt about what obstacles needed and what would be the best to build as a training center. And once we had a consensus of what everyone wanted, we gave Austin the measurements of the yard, he did a quick sketch and then put it into a CAD program so we could tell the tractor driver where to start dumping the piles.

From that point, Jeremy became the master builder and I became the voice of reason. And now we have the monster that is the playground!

(Above) We still have to finish the start hill, at the current time we have a 15ft high temp hill for testing the lips of the jumps , but we will be taking it up to full UCI height.

It starts out with a 40ft double, then a 25ft double, a 38ft triple going into the first turn, and as you exit the first turn you have two straights to choose from, on your right is the gnarly side, it has a 22 ft step up, a 22 ft step down and a 25 ft step up, to the left you have a 20ft long and low into a 28 ft Banzai step up to a 14ft long and low to a 38 ft Banzai Berm jump over the first second turn. As you exit the second turns the gnarly side has a typical rythym set of Step up, roller, roller, roller, step up, roller roller roller, step up in to the last turn, the Super Gnarly side has a step up, Double, Roller, Lip to Box, to Box, to roller, into the last turn, then as you exit the last turn you have a 28ft step hip that goes to a 44ft quad.

All in all a pretty fun place to ride, and help our riders hone their skills.