Recently relocated Invermere resident played pivoted role in local women’s mountain biking scene

By Steve Hubrecht
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For the past six years, the Shred Sisters, a dedicated women’s mountain biking business, has been rolling in Invermere as well as in other mountain towns in the Kootenay region and the Rockies. The sisters are still wheeling strong here in the Columbia Valley this fall, but something is missing from the spin: longtime Columbia Valley coach Becca Wright.

Golden resident Audrey Duval began the Shred Sister business back in 2015, and Wright had been her Invermere-based coach since the beginning. Wright and her partner Byron Grey moved from the valley to Vancouver Island earlier this fall, and while the Shred Sister are out ripping the local bike trails just as much as they ever did, they are extending heartfelt thanks to their departed coach for more than a half decade of spinning spokes and good times.

Duval told the Pioneer that women’s mountain biking has grown steadily in the Columbia Valley during the past five or six years, and said Wright has been instrumental in that.

“Becca is amazing. She is an incredible resource and a great facilitator. She’s so passionate about biking, and she explains things so well. You can tell she just loves to teach. It’s no surprise she works in education, but it comes through just as much in the mountain biking sessions…She brings so much energy to each session,” says Shred Sister Columbia Valley coach Lindsay Glassford, who mentored under Wright and has, since Wright left, taken over the local Shred Sisters coach’s role.

“She helped me so much as a coach, and as a person. It’s a loss for the women’s mountain biking community here to have her gone. Of course, we wish her well, but she is certainly missed,” continues Glassford, adding Wright had a trademark playful riding style and could “find the smallest features in any trail, and make the most of it. Even on a green [trail], she’s having a blast.”

Wright, when contacted by the Pioneer, was characteristically modest about her reputation in the local biking community and the legacy she leaves behind for female riders here, saying she was simply doing what she could to help women in the sport.

Wright initially moved west to the valley in 1997. “It’s the classic story: I’ll go for one winter. And then, all of a sudden, a life began. The longer I stayed, the more it felt like home,” Wright told the Pioneer.  She met her future husband Byron Grey in 1998, when both worked at the Panorama Mountain Resort ski school. “We’re not the only couple to come out of that ski school. We joke it was the ski school of love,” says Wright.

Working as a ski instructor left summers open, recreationally speaking, and a friend got Wright hooked on mountain biking. “It pushed me out of my comfort zone, and I was intrigued. In 2001 I bought my own bike and, well, the rest is history,” she says.

Around the same time, Wright began working full time as a teacher in the local school district, ultimately spending two decades at both David Thompson Secondary School (DTSS) and the Open Doors Alternative Education school, teaching an impressive number of subjects: math, phys ed, learning assistance, leadership, English, social studies, psychology, library, and the graduate transition program. “I really enjoy sharing knowledge, and I like new challenges — that’s why I taught so many different subjects — and I like how raw and real high school students can be,” said Wright.

Her love of sharing knowledge found an outlet on the bike trails, as well as in her classrooms.

“I really like to spread the stoke. So many people did that for me when I started biking, and I wanted to do it for others,” she said.

Wright’s burgeoning interest in mountain biking led her to become involved with the local trail building community, and later from 2003 to 2006, she and Grey ran a mountain bike ‘school’ based out of Panorama. She particularly enjoyed the school’s kids rides, during which she gave many valley youngsters their first true taste of the flow and fun inherent in mountain biking. In 2009 she and Grey bought the Bicycle Works bike shop, which the couple operated for nearly a decade, both as a downtown storefront business and for several years as a mobile business. It was through Bicycle Works that Wright met Duval. Duval had already established Shred Sisters in Canmore and Golden and was looking to expand by hiring coaches in other Kootenay and Rockies communities. The pair went for a bike ride together, got along well, and just like that Wright became the Shred Sisters’ Columbia Valley coach.

Coaching for Shred Sisters was a perfect balance to teaching full time and helping run a business, Wright told the Pioneer. “I could be a little be more myself, a little more personal as a coach, than I could in a classroom or in the shop,” she says. “And it was great to be in a women-specific environment, where I could help women gain the confidence they sometimes are missing, to help them reach their potential on a mountain bike. It’s not just confidence in that particular sport either, it’s confidence in themselves generally. Women occasionally get so busy, doing everything for their families, and working on top of that. If you can give them one little boost of self-belief on a bike, sometimes you can see that transfer beyond biking. Their well gets fuller all day, in everything.”

It’s a topic Wright not just practically, as a coach, but also academically: for her Masters’ of Education degree she studied how and why adolescent girls drop out of athletics in much greater numbers than boys. “Girls participate at equal levels (as boys) until they are about 12 or 13 years old. And then it drops off significantly. I was curious as to why that is,” Wright told the Pioneer. “It was rewarding to study and has helped me a lot, not just at school, but in life generally.”

She added there was a silver lining to her study: a noticeable trend of women returning to athletics in their 20s. “And a lot of times getting that to occur is simply a matter of, let’s get the confidence back up, and then the skills can develop. In that respect, women’s-only environments can be helpful, because there’s less self-censorship from the women participating. They’re more willing to be vulnerable in terms of their learning.”

Wright moved to the Comox Valley-Campbell River area of Vancouver Island this past July, a relocation that wasn’t easy (“I haven’t yet taken both feet out of the valley,” she says), but was necessary for her partner Grey, who is closer to family and has found much better opportunities for year-round employment there, and which offered Wright the chance to develop even more professionally in a larger school district.

“Giving up what we had in Invermere was hard. Especially the Shred Sisters. It was pure joy. Even when I was dog tired after a difficult day in the classroom, I was always excited to get out on the trail with the sisters in the evening,” said Wright. “I truly love the valley. It’s a beautiful place. It’s where I found myself as an adult. I love the people there. I love the geographical hug the Rocky Mountain Trench provides. It’ll never leave my soul, ever.”