The Long Game: 20 Years of Durango Devo

Winter, 2005. A small handful of Durango bike families got a call, told to meet at the Durango Arts Center. They sat around a few small tables and in walked Chad Cheeney after co-founder Sarah Tescher’s introduction,, barely past 20 years old, wearing a Fort Lewis Football jersey, fake tie clipped loosely against his collar, hair slicked over, clipboard in hand. Like a coach from the movies. He was here to make a pitch. “The parents thought I was a little loose,” he says now, laughing. “And I was.”

Within a day or two, nearly all of them were in. And Durango Devo was born. 

Twenty years later, the seed of a program that launched on that chilly night has grown into one of the most influential youth cycling organizations in the country. Roughly 1,000 kids move through Durango Devo’s programs every year, roughly one in every 25 Durango residents. Its alumni have stood on podiums at the Tour de France, won the Vuelta a España and the World Championships. They’re also aerospace engineers, doctors, community leaders, and parents. The mission has never changed: Devo isn’t here to build champions, but to build lifelong cyclists.

Building champions, it turns out, keeps taking care of itself.

The spark

Cheeney had been sitting on the idea for years. Literally, he kept a diary of it, sketching out team names and logos, scribbling down the names of kids he wanted to coach, picking apart other youth programs to figure out why they fizzled. In 2005 he was working at a thrift store around the corner from Second Avenue Sports, pulling in just enough to cover rent, riding bikes as much as he could. 

The diary sat in a drawer. The idea sat in his head. He watched junior teams bloom and wither around Durango and told himself he’d get around to it.

Then he heard a rumor. A prominent local cyclist, one with a history Cheeney knew about and didn’t want anywhere near young riders, was allegedly going to start his own junior development program in town.

“That lit a fuse,” Cheeney says.

He called up Sarah Tescher inside of a week.

Tescher was a natural and vital co-conspirator. A former professional mountain bike racer, she’d been running an after-school riding program at Miller Middle School, where she taught, and had been quietly hitting the same walls as Cheeney. School rules wouldn’t let her drive kids to a state championship on a Sunday. Her program could only go so far tied to a school district. Something more independent was needed; she just needed a collaborator.

“Chad had the vision,” she says. “The name, the tagline, all of it. What I knew was that we needed a board, a budget, a website, and a registration system. So I got to work.”

Their styles were complementary in the best possible way. Cheeney was and remains a source of near infinite energy, the sort that shows up in a fake tie and convinces kids and their parents to follow him into the woods. Tescher was the infrastructure, filing the nonprofit paperwork, wrangling the board, and building the systems that would let Cheeney’s vision survive contact with reality. She sacrificed her own professional racing career to do it. Neither could have done it without the other.

“We were both shredders,” she says. “That was the common ground. But we needed both of us.”

The early years

Spring 2006. Durango Devo launched with a handful of kids, two practices a week, and a financial infrastructure that could charitably be described as informal. There was no bank account yet. Parents wrote checks. Tescher cashed them and handed most of the money directly to Cheeney.

“I cleared about nine thousand dollars that first year,” he says. “Paid rent, did all the trips, and I was like, this is beautiful.”

By year three, the program had a full board, 501(c)3 status, and over 100 kids. By years four, five, and six, enrollment had shot past 400, then 500. The growth was fast enough to get hectic, and fast enough to attract scrutiny. Growth like that quickly begins to pressure test an organization’s founding principles. 

In year two, a group of riders, led by a particularly motivated teenager, called a formal meeting at the Rec Center to demand more structure. More intervals. They showed up with four kids on a panel, ready to make their case. 

Cheeney found it funny. He also took it seriously.

“I was like, I’ll give you an interval — you ready?” he recalls. “But you also have to understand: what you just did at that short track was an interval. I just didn’t tell you.”

This was the whole point. Cheeney came up in a cycling culture that treated training as an end in itself. All structured plans, measured efforts, and a relentless focus on the motor. He’d arrived at Fort Lewis College as a teenager already beginning to burn out on a sport he loved, having been told that the only path to improvement ran through suffering. He wanted something different for Durango’s kids.

The models he’d been quietly researching pointed the same direction. He’d been reading about European development programs, like the Swiss system, which kept kids off race results until they were 15 and focused instead on skills competitions. He’d looked at Norway, where the country’s approach to youth sport kept structured training at arm’s length until athletes were well into their teens. He’d watched what NorCal’s nascent high school league was doing with consistent team-based practice, borrowed from the structure of ball sports, and saw how much of a difference just having the same coach show up twice a week could make for a kid trying to figure out where they fit.

“There was no mountain bike team practice back then,” he says. “You’d just show up at a trailhead and split into groups. Being a ball sports guy, I was like, that’s not how you build something.”

What Devo was building, from the beginning, was something closer to a lifestyle than a training program. Cheeney would lead rides the way he rode himself: moving through the terrain like he owned it, trusting that the kids behind him were absorbing more than he could ever impart with words. Showing them, rather than telling them. 

“I could talk all day to kids and it goes in one ear and out the other,” he says. “But when they see you do what you were telling them, that’s when it clicks. That’s when the skill actually happens.”

The philosophy required constant defense. Parents wanted structured training. Ambitious kids staged interventions. Cheeney and Tescher kept pulling the conversation back to the same core idea: if riding becomes a grind before a kid turns 17, you’ve lost them. All the intervals in the world don’t matter if the kid quits.

“Never forget the feeling” was a motto and a coaching framework, a key part of Devo’s secret sauce. 

The Sauce

Twenty years on, the question of why Devo works gets asked a lot. It gets asked by journalists, by youth program directors from other cities, by coaches trying to replicate what Durango has built in places with better weather and bigger budgets and far less to show for it. 

The honest answer involves a lot of moving parts, and some of them aren’t replicable.

Start with the trails. Durango has over 300 miles of singletrack rideable from town, the result of decades of hard shoveling from local access organization Durango Trails. That’s remarkable, almost unmatched density. You can leave a front door in most neighborhoods and be on dirt in minutes. For a youth program built on the idea that bikes should feel like freedom, not obligation, that geography matters enormously.

Add something like nine local bike shops, most of them eager to have their name on a Devo jersey. Add a Fort Lewis College cycling team that delivers a rotating cast of young, talented, bike-obsessed young adults who treat coaching junior riders as a natural extension of their own riding lives. Cheeney has been struck, visiting other programs around the country, by how often that last piece is missing.

“In a lot of places, the people who are really into riding and the people who want to work with kids just aren’t the same people,” he says. “Here they are. And that changes the experience completely.”

Nate Greason, Devo’s current executive director, describes the result as a flywheel, self-reinforcing in a way that’s almost impossible to manufacture from scratch.

“Why do kids do Devo?” he says. “Because it’s fun, of course, but also because all the other kids do Devo. Because all the older kids did Devo. It’s been going long enough that it’s just part of what you do here if you’re a kid who likes to ride their bike.”

The deepest ingredient might be the least visible one. Amy Haggart, who has been part of Devo’s leadership in various capacities for over a decade, spent years trying to explain the program to potential sponsors and community partners, searching for the right frame.

“The secret sauce,” she says, “is that no one knows they’re learning, but they’re learning a lot. They come back every day because they’re having fun. The coaching is just happening underneath all of it.”

She coached 25 push-bike riders the week before this story was reported. Kids two, maybe three years old, navigating grass and mud and the depths of puddles, doing things their parents might have steered them away from. Getting comfortable being uncomfortable. Not knowing that was the lesson.

“It’s not always about the bike,” Haggart says. “The bike is just the thing we’re using to introduce them to confidence. To the outdoors. To the idea that they can do hard things. They’ll carry that way longer than they’ll carry anything we taught them about technique.

The growth

By 2013, Devo was growing fast enough that its seams were starting to show. Enrollment had climbed to over 500 riders. Yet the work of keeping it all running was starting to outpace the people doing the running. 

Haggart saw it from the outside first. A parent whose own kids were in the program, with a background in outdoor education and a sense of what Devo was doing for kids in Durango, she approached Cheeney and Tescher and asked what she could take off their plates.

“I was like, I can help,” she recalls. “Just tell me what you need.”

Within weeks, she was effectively running the organization. It quickly morphed into a 60-to-80-hour-a-week job with pay that put her closer to volunteer status. Her training was in outdoor education and she taught herself the rest.

“Devo does that to you,” she says. “You get sucked in because you know it’s real, and you don’t want it to go away.”

Haggart’s tenure as director stabilized Devo’s finances and built the sponsor relationships that would allow the program to professionalize further. Multiple directors followed over the years, each moving the organization forward, and each, at some point, experiencing the particular exhaustion that comes with running something that demands this much. The pattern held until Devo’s finances and infrastructure had grown to a point where the role could be adequately supported, an effort largely led by former Executive Director, and Devo Alumni, Levi Kurlander. 

Today, Greason and a core team of eight staff lead a coaching roster that swells to roughly 100 in peak seasons.

Accidental champions

Durango Devo’s mission statement — creating lifelong cyclists, one ride at a time — says nothing about professional racing, national championships, or the Olympics. This is not an accident.

And yet. Olympians Christopher Blevins, Howard Grotts, and Riley Amos came up through Devo. Ellen Campbell, now a gravel pro, and mountain bike pro Bailey Cioppa came through and still coach with Devo. Quinn Simmons came up through Devo and became junior world champion in 2019. Sepp Kuss came up through Devo. A few weeks after he rode into Madrid as winner of the 2023 Vuelta a España, Durango threw him a parade.

The program that explicitly does not try to make champions keeps making champions.

Cheeney’s explanation is straightforward: fun is a mechanism, not a distraction.

“When you make things fun, you’re more likely to do it again,” he says. “You care more. You’re emotional about it. And when you actually care about something, you get good at it.”

The riders who have gone furthest share a quality that has less to do with early structure than with early love. They’re the ones who figured out relatively young that bikes were something they genuinely wanted to do, and kept riding long after any organized program would have released them. 

For every Kuss or Blevins, there are hundreds of Devo alumni racing recreationally on weekends, commuting to work, or simply spending their Saturdays on trails with their kids. Greason is clear that these are the mission, not the consolation prize.

“The goal is lifelong cyclists,” he says. “Not lifelong Olympians. A lot of people in this town, whatever their jobs are, they’re lifelong cyclists. That’s what this is about.”

Twenty years in

Today, as Devo celebrates its 20th anniversary, it operates across every age group, from toddlers on push bikes through high school racing teams. It employs roughly 100 coaches in peak seasons, has influenced programs across the country, and is increasingly embedded in Durango’s civic life. Devo hosts events, partners with schools, and has built out scholarship programs that reach families who might otherwise never find their way to a trailhead.

Among those: a new program, developed in partnership with a local organization, which brings Spanish-speaking kids into Devo with full scholarships and Spanish-speaking coaches. Women’s programming has expanded to include all-ages, all-girls groups and a dedicated all-women’s “town series” race night. The preschool programs fill up faster than anything else on the calendar.

None of this was in Cheeney’s diary from the thrift store years, or Tescher’s early non-profit filings, or in the pitch delivered at the Arts Center in a fake tie. What was there, from the beginning, was a tagline and a mission, four words they’d already decided on before the first kid showed up, before the board, before the bank account, before any of it.

Never forget the feeling.

“When I go out and ride my bike, I still get the same feeling I got when I was ten years old,” Cheeney says. “That’s what we’re trying to protect, for every kid that comes through here.”