Like chicks from the nest, these baby birds have spread their wings and joined the pro ranks.
JAM Fund Cycling Alumni
Featured
Current Career: Custom Bike Painting
Hometown: Wilmington, North Carolina
Nickname: T-dog
Trent raced with the JAM Fund from 2016 to 2020 and was a regular top-10 finisher in UCI cyclocross races. T-Dog raced two summers in Belgium developing his road racing skills in the blisteringly fast elite kermesse races-- a challenging European warm up that benefitted his U.S. cross seasons. He was always a hard-working member of the team and a consummate community volunteer. He started a custom bike painting business to keep his hands in the sport of cycling.
Squid Bikes
Hometown: Feeding Hills, Mass.
Motto: Siiiiiick!
Hobbies: skateboarding, tinkering with autos, driving fast and "wananana."
Social Media: @tweakn101
Jeremy Powers found a young Anthony Clark on the road one day and couldn't drop him on a tough climb, despite the fact that Clark was in cutoff shorts and riding a 35-pound bike with platform pedals. Clark talked the whole way up the hill, and even though Powers kept pedaling harder and harder, he couldn't shake Clark off his wheel.
Clark raced for the JAM Fund from 2011 to 2015 and then joined the pro team Squid Bikes based out of California. Today, Clark is still talking non-stop while tearing it up on his home roads. Siiiiick whaaaaaat!!!@#$@@!! ;)
Photo by Vicky Sama.
Hometown: Westhampton, Mass.
Hobbies: golfing, gardening and raising chickens
Website: http://www.team-awesome.cc/neon-velo/
Social Media: @jeremydurrin
Jeremy Durrin was one of our first JAM Fund grant recipients. He raced with the JAM Fund from 2009 until 2013 when he graduated from the program to race for the professional cycling team Optum Pro Cycling p/b Kelly Benefit Strategies. In 2014, he and his wife Gabby founded Neon Velo Cycling Team. From 2014 to 2017, at the height of his cycling career, he landed 23 elite men’s podiums and was selected to represent Team USA at World Cup races and World Championships.
"JAM Fund was more of a family for me than a bike racing team," he said. "The team provided me with mentors who pointed me in the right direction. They not only helped me get good at bike racing, they really worked with me on anything I needed with my daily life. The team provided me with opportunities I could have never dreamed of, and I owe a lot to Jeremy, Alec and Mukunda for shaping my life to be what it is today. If it wasn't for them, I would have never raced cyclocross and eventually met my wife Gabby. These guys are great friends and great people and the JAM Fund will always be a huge part of my life."
Today, the Durrins raise chickens at their lovely home in Western Massachusetts.
Kona Maxis Shimano
Hometown: Concord, New Hampshire
History: Grew up riding horses and motorcycles, running track and triathlons
Social Media: @gofahr
Becca raced with the JAM Fund from 2013 to 2015, earning UCI points her first season on the cyclocross circuit. She graduated to the Amy D Foundation team in 2015. By 2019, she was one of the top American pro cyclocross competitors, winning 10 races while racing for Kona Maxis Shimano, and ranked 16th in the world. She has a dedicated number of fans and you can also see her as the leading female ingénue in her teammate Kerry Werner’s Vlogs.
Original Hometown: Milton, Florida
Titles: Three-time U.S. National Cyclocross Champion and Two-time Pan Am Continental Cyclocross Champion
Hobbies: Country music, birding and swimming holes
Website: http://www.stephen-hyde.com
Social Media: @stephenhyde
Stephen Hyde is a three-time U.S. National Cyclocross Champion, two-time Pan American Cyclocross Champion and 2017 USCUP overall series champion. He raced with the JAM Fund from 2012 to 2015. His first elite race in the JAM Fund kit was at Baystate Cyclocross in November 2012, where he finished just outside of the top ten. By the following season, after a year under the tutelage of JAM Fund’s Alec Donahue and Jeremy Powers, Hyde was on the podium or in the top ten at almost every race in 2013. Eventually, he landed a spot on Cannondale/CyclocrossWorld.com, one of the strongest pro cyclocross teams in the country that sponsored the likes of Ryan Trebon and Tim Johnson. This is where Hyde became a household name in cyclocross. He credits JAM Fund with helping fulfill his professional cycling dream.
"JAM wasn't just a cycling development team, they didn't leave it at just that," he said. "I was never allowed to be average or just okay with being a good racer. JAM pushed me to be a better person every day. It was never about winning races, it was about leaving whatever situation we entered better than when we got into it. I learned how to trust my team and myself. I learned how to be responsible for myself and others, making hard decisions knowing that I had the best possible safety net. I learned to accept bad results on the premise that I learned from them and made the necessary changes to leave them in the past. I am confident in myself as a professional racer now and it's because JAM made me this way. I will forever be grateful for that."
Today, Hyde is a husband and father living in Western Massachusetts, tinkering in black and white photography. He is a cycling coach at USA Cycling, guiding America’s cyclocross team to future success.
Photo by Meg McMahon.
Hometown: Tiburon, California
Cycling Strengths: Technical riding
Hobbies: Playing banjo and sax
Jack Kisseberth graduated JAM Fund in 2018 to join Garneau Easton Cyclocross alongside Canadian National Champion Michael Van Den Ham. Kisseberth's move to the pro ranks followed an incredible 2017 cross season where he landed 11 podiums, including winning HPCX day one and finishing third at the KMC Crossfest and Northampton International.
His breakout career ride was at the 2017 Cyclocross National Championships in Hartford, Connecticut where he finished fourth in the elite men's field stacked with outstanding talent on a technical course of frozen, cement-hard ruts covered in slick snow. Kisseberth represented Team USA at the World Championships in Luxembourg later that month. His impressive race record also includes winning his first UCI race at Supercross Cup in November 2016 (pictured). His undying volunteer spirit was evidenced during the Cycle-Smart International where he stood for hours in the cold cooking sausages for all the racers. He hardly got to warm up but raced and still got 10th.
Photo courtesy of Supercross Cup.
Original Hometown: Atlanta, Georgia
National Championship Title: 19-29 Marathon Mountain Bike National Champion
Real Life Skills: Runs her own jewelry and metal-smithing business Rhys May Jewelry.
After two seasons with JAM Fund, Rhys May graduated in 2018 to share her passion and rad bike-handling skills to start her own team, RMJ Cycling, which includes mentoring junior and beginner women riders.
She came to JAM in 2016, driving from Georgia to Western Massachusetts with all of her belongings stuffed in her 1997 Volvo. One month later, she won the Marathon Mountain Bike National Championships in the 19-29 category. She was a bartender in Athens, Georgia when she started racing bikes on a singlespeed steel Univega and quickly fell in love with cyclocross. Later, she drove 1000 miles to attend Cycle-Smart Cross Camp, started a shop team, moved up the categories, and eventually migrated north to dedicate herself to the sport. She now lives in Portland, Oregon hammering sterling and brass into bike head badges and creating jewelry. She continues her belief in daily wheelies.
Read more about Rhys May.
Hometown: Kennebunkport, Maine
Titles: Four-time U.S. Cyclocross National Champion, Pan Am Continental Champion, World Cup Champion
Hobbies: Vanilla-frosted cup cakes and puppies
Social Media: @ellenlikesbikes
Ellen Noble is a four-time cyclocross national champion, who holds world cup and Pan Am championship titles. She raced with the JAM Fund from 2014 to 2016, and then moved up to join Jeremy Powers on his professional Aspire Racing Team. In 2018, she joined one of the strongest women’s pro teams in the world, Trek Factory Racing. Noble had a successful racing career, winning the U.S. National Championships in U23 three times and once as a junior 17-18. In her second and final season with JAM Fund in 2015, she won the U23 Pan Am Continental Championships and Verge Cycle-Smart International Series U23 title. Her wins put her in the top 20 U23 women in the world and qualified her for World Championships in Zolder, Belgium, where she was the best finisher of all Americans, getting 6th in the inaugural women's U23 Worlds race in January 2016. The following year, Noble became the U23 World Cup Champion and won the silver medal at World Championships in Luxembourg. She is a dynamic role model for young riders, challenging the patriarchy and becoming one of the first women to bunny hop the barriers, showing other women that the most difficult feats in life can be done. She earned a degree in public health from UMass Amherst.
Photo by Vicky Sama.
Current Career: Manager, MIT Bootcamp
Hometown: Bellingham, Washington
National Title: 2018 U.S. Collegiate Cyclocross National Champion
Jane raced with the JAM Fund from 2019 to 2020 after an already successful career in collegiate cyclocross racing. She is the 2018 U.S. Collegiate Cyclocross National Champion. She represented the JAM Fund well in the elite women’s field and served as a mentor to the younger female riders in the JAM Fund team. She uses her leadership skills in her career as a marketing and admissions manager at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Bootcamp, an immersive leadership program in innovation and entrepreneurship. She graduated with a BA in Fine Arts in Industrial Design from Rhode Island School of Design.
Our program runs on your generous donations. Without them our van would run out of gas and we'd never make it to the races! Thank you for supporting tomorrow's cross pros.
Current Career: NASA Astronaut
Pro Cycling Gig: USA Track Cycling Team
Titles: 11-time U.S. track national champion
Hobbies: Coffee chemist
Christina Birch got her cyclocross roots racing with the JAM Fund from 2011 to 2015 before becoming a pro track cyclist and 11-time U.S. Track National Champion. During her cycling career, she also won two gold medals at the Pan American Games and a spot on the 2021 Tokyo Olympic long team. Now, Birch is a NASA astronaut and is poised to be one of the first Americans to go back to the moon in more than 50 years.
“There’s really no one path to becoming a NASA astronaut,” she said at the NASA announcement on December 6, 2021. “You might think that my path as a bio engineer and a cyclist is a little bit out there, but it was really all of those skills that I gained from those experiences that helped me get here.”
Birch graduated from the University of Arizona with bachelor’s degrees in mathematics, biochemistry and molecular biophysics. She earned her doctorate in biological engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.