The Story of STKD (!!!)
Lisa H takes a cruise on her first ever road bike
I’ve always felt very fortunate to have found bike racing in Chicago. We have a large and extremely supportive community of folks who have made a dedicated effort to making bike racing both approachable and fun for everyone. Many of the Chicago women I’ve spoken to started bike racing because someone asked them to try it out. We have a strong community that calls people in and makes sure they’re ready to be successful and supported in their first season. As I started my own journey from “I’m never going to race bicycles” to “oh my god I love road racing” Anna was right there with me, showing up to races, racing hard, and getting better. Anna upgraded to category 3 the season before me, but I was not long after. What happened next was a shared experience that drew us closer together and lit the same fire underneath us.
Being completely spit out of your first 1/2/3 race seems to be a rite of passage. While most of us had raced 3/4 races before and were already comfortable in that space, racing your first big crit as a category 3 rider, or your first 1/2/3 tends to be the same experience: there are brand new rules to this and you have to relearn how to not get completely destroyed every race, only this time there are fewer people to mentor you. The longer I spent as a cat 3 cyclist, the more sure I became that there were steps and pieces that I was missing about how to get to the next step. I knew if I could get to cat 2, there were development opportunities available, but after my first season as a category 3 rider, cat 2 felt like it may as well have been on the other side of the galaxy and I had no clear plan or steps to take to get there.
These were the conversations Anna and I shared. We both had a strong desire to keep progressing, but faced similar barriers in not having a clear path to do that. It seemed that people upgraded to category 3 and either had raw talent to propel them forward or eventually started racing less and less until life eventually led them down other paths. While we definitely sought input locally, we faced the same reality that most women cyclists face: extremely limited funding for support and development. Going into the 2019 season, it was still pretty clear we’d be mostly on our own.
Suddenly, the most amazing thing happened. Through a lot of hard work leveraging connections, Anna was able to start the seeds of what would eventually become STKD! In 2019 we put together an all start Midwestern squad to take on one of the most exciting crit series in the region: Tour of America’s Dairyland (ToAD ). We gathered our resources, created our kits, landed amazing host housing, and secured race planning advising from an amazing team of current and former pro women riders. We started out as 8 women who had never raced on a team together and in some cases barely knew each other and ended the 11 day series as the overall victors with several different riders getting a turn on the podium. We may have come out of nowhere, but we left Wisconsin a force to be reckoned with. Needless to say, we were hooked.
That fall brought on going conversations with Anna about how we could make this amazing experience we’d just had bigger. After all, we’d set our sights on ToAD to “be competitive” and ended up with the grand prize and one of our riders as a freshly minted cat 2. If we had managed to put that together in a matter of months, what could we do if we committed to a full season? It finally felt like we had a clear path forward. Race together, get stronger, execute progressively more advanced tactics, be ready for cat 2. Unfortunately, by the time we were fully committed, we were already behind the ball on seeking sponsorship. Nonetheless, we managed to find some amazing partners willing to work with us for the 2020 season. We set our race calendar, vetted our riders, and got down to business on the trainer all winter long, ready to make it happen in 2020. However, the COVID-19 pandemic soon had other ideas.
While we can definitely say that COVID-19 completely derailed everything we thought we were going to do in 2020, it also provided us with an opportunity to take time we hadn’t had leading into the 2020 season to set intentions and think very carefully about who we wanted to partner with to help us meet our goals of putting together a super strong and intimidating cat 3 women’s road team that actually had the resources to support all of their riders to success at some of the US’s biggest races. We were careful in selecting brands that had a commitment to showing up for women’s cycling. In these discussions, we eventually came to our biggest partner for 2021 and something I honestly never thought would happen to me.
STKD Racing Squad is now sponsored by Schwinn Bicycles who have set our team up with team color matched custom Fastbacks for 2021. Having the opportunity to ride one over the summer has made me super pumped for my racing future on my Schwinn. Anna and I often joke about being the best sponsored cat 3 team in the US (and we almost certainly are) but we certainly hope that this is the future for women’s cycling. We’re so excited to see brands stepping up to invest in women’s cycling to help take down some of those barriers that have kept more women from progressing to the pro level. Schwinn has bet on women in a big way and we are sure this is just the start of more amazing things to come.
