Resilience is a Collective Sport: How the 906 Adventure Team is Redefining Competition
In 2019, Todd Poquette , the founder of a youth biking program called the 906 Adventure Team , started working with an 11-year-old boy named Will. Unlike his peers, Will had never been taught how to ride a bicycle. He lacked the skills of t…
In 2019, Todd Poquette, the founder of a youth biking program called the 906 Adventure Team, started working with an 11-year-old boy named Will. Unlike his peers, Will had never been taught how to ride a bicycle. He lacked the skills of the other kids his age in the program, which helps kids and adults build confidence through outdoor adventure.
Other coaches wanted Will to join a group of six-year-olds, because the younger kids had the same biking abilities. But Poquette balked at it.
“That ain’t gonna work,” Poquette, 52, told Outside. “It’s demoralizing.”
Instead, Poquette worked with Will on a one-on-one basis for several months. Poquette’s personal philosophy for teaching kids to thrive in the outdoors involves pushing their comfort level, and helping them adjust to fear, setbacks, and doing hard things.
“He was so scared,” Poquette said. “He just needed somebody who wouldn’t let him make excuses, who would sort of give him that rough edge.”
Poquette said the tough-love approach went on for a year. But after that period, Will learned to ride a bike, and developed enough skills to ride alongside his peers. The mantra that came from the experience still echoes through the 906 Adventure Team today: Where there’s a Will, there’s a way.
How a Need for Cycling Produced an Adventure Team
The 906 Adventure Team is one of the most successful programs in the Midwest at getting kids outdoors. Founded in 2014 in Marquette, Michigan, the program now works with 1,300 kids spread across 17 programs in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Ohio. The majority of teams sell out fast and are limited based on how many volunteers sign up.
“I’ve always wanted to offer a well run, organized program that parents can feel good about signing their kids up for,” Poquette said. “Our first night is always an orientation to get people comfortable on bikes.”
After signing up, kids are assigned to different groups, and these groups ride for two-hour sessions each week. They’re monitored, but unstructured. “Kids get to do hard stuff, have fun, see wildlife, get stung by bees. They crash, they fall, they learn how to get back up,” Poquette said. “They belong outside. They are, in fact, very capable of handling anything the trail and nature wants to throw at them.”
Over time, the kids develop skill, grit, and deeper confidence to take on life.
Poquette says he started the program after leaving his 20-year corporate career in 2009. Poquette, who loved to lift weights, suffered a back injury soon after. His doctor recommended he take up cycling to stay fit. After starting to ride, he realized there was a lack of programs that help kids and adults get into cycling.
“That was all it was in the beginning,” Poquette said. “I just wanted to do something good for my community. That was my simple mission. And it all happened because I was on a bike.”
In the early years, kids rode solely on mountain bikes, taking on local off-road singletrack trails. But over time, that expanded to competitive racing.
“I thought we were doing a good thing, but we weren’t finding a lot of kids who wanted to do it,” Poquette said. Many of the kids in the area were stuck in traditional sports. And it was a challenge for Poquette to find adults who wanted to train them. “It just seemed that something was missing,” Poquette said.
In spring of 2016, Poquette heard about The National Interscholastic Cycling Association (NICA), an organization that provides essential on-the-ground infrastructure and world-class events for 1,055 teams across the country. “We didn’t have a league in Michigan, but there was a league in Wisconsin,” Poquette said. “I reached out and was like ‘Hey, I see your website. I’m reading your mission. Your mission seems to be in alignment with what we want to do. Can we come race in Wisconsin?'” Poquette was able to gather a team of 34 kids who trained for four months to compete for five weekends in Wisconsin.
What came of this race lead to the Adventure Club being officially established, and Poquette and his team of trainers finding two types of kids: those who wanted to race hard, and those who just wanted to ride their bikes in the woods.
“Let’s have two layers of the team,” Poquette thought up. “There’s going to be the race side, but if you don’t want to race, you can just be on the adventure team. We called it ABC or Adventure Bike Club.” He set the cap at 50 participants. After two hours of going live, the club was at capacity. “And all of a sudden my ability to recruit volunteers went from being on the struggle bus to everybody wants to be part of it, because the idea of adventure even as an adult, resonates,” Poquette said.
The club started as a subcommittee of the Ranger Area Mountain Bike Association (RAM), but quickly into its own nonprofit by 2017.
Bike Races that Dish Out the Punishment
Alongside the Adventure Club was the conception of three off-road races for adults: The Polar Roll, Marji Gesick, and The Crusher, known as The Triple Crown. The Triple Crown holds a growing reputation of being three of the toughest events on bike or foot, crafted by Poquette and course designer, Danny Hill.
Athletes who complete all three are granted lifetime entry into the Hall of Pain, and eligible to attend a secret event that Poquette holds.
The Marji Gesick, the most brutal of the three, is 90 percent singletrack. According to Hill, you can’t see more than 100 feet ahead of you at a time, and the trail takes in 12,000 feet of elevation gain. “There’s no way to get into a rhythm,” Hill shares in a video outlining the event. “It’s fun, but in a sick sort of way. It’s sadistic. We wanted it as tough as nails.”
Poquette has been called a masochist for the brutal nature of his races. Parents are sometimes hesitant to send their kids to the Adventure Club knowing that the man who tortures adults will be working with their kids.
“That’s always been the tension,” Poquette said. “If somebody doesn’t understand how we handle it, they’re like, ‘Are you talking like this around kids? Do you swear around kids? I don’t want my daughter around a guy like that.'”
But Poquette has attracted a following of adults who believe that kids should take on hard things, and finish what they start.
“There’s a lot of concern right now around the resilience of kids. I am a strong believer that life requires you to be a strong competitor. That is the ethos behind the bike club. These kids have no idea what they’re in for. Bike riding is just inherently hard,” he said.
A Facility to Honor a Fallen Instructor
On May 15, a public campaign began for the opening of Gluski Park, a first-of-its-kind adventure club in Marquette that will house the first asphalt pump track, an ADA path, a recreational area, and “The Hub” (where there will be a variety of jump lines and technical lines to help kids develop skills to take out on the trail). The park rules? Free entry from sunrise to sunset.
In 2023, at the time of its purchase, the 906 Adventure Team had two full time employees: Todd Poquette, who started the organization in 2014, and Tara Gluski. Todd and Tara, longtime adventure buddies, began to dream of what the space could become, and kept landing on the same conclusion: it needed to be a park. It needed to be a place for people to get active and find community—a place for bikers, hikers, runners, and folks of all ages to recreate together and to see each other as people, not just another “user group.”
But those plans screeched to a halt in January 2024 when Gluski’s car was struck by a truck on her way to a girl’s weekend in Michigan’s Craig Lake State Park. Gluski, who was in the passengers seat, died in the collision. That loss rocked the 906 Adventure Team community to its core.
“We were going into the year thinking we’re going to celebrate what we built together, and she gets killed,” Poquette shared.
“Instead of celebrating our tenth year, we were just trying to survive it. There was nobody who believed more deeply in community and children than her.”
The same community that Tara Gluski helped build became even more determined to make the adventure park a reality, and to honor her by giving the space her name, a vow to keep her mission at the forefront of all it becomes.
This year, 650 people volunteered from Poquette’s small town to care for the kids of their community, to use the sport of mountain biking to instill in them the confidence that they are intrinsically worthy, no matter who is cheering for them on the sideline.
“I want them to be sovereign individuals who understand the value of hard work so they can be a standalone people,” Poquette said. “They don’t need somebody else to value them to feel like they matter. They don’t need me or any of these adults to tell them they’re worth something, because they are.”
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