Over the last couple of months, as I've shared my vision for this project with you, some of you have been really excited about it and have asked for a video where I tell the story of the history of Rooted Action Park and outline the vision I have for this facility so that you can share this video with your friends. So, that's what this is. You can watch the video on YouTube or you can read the written version here in this blog. Enjoy!
This specific project started about six months ago. But really, the idea started almost 30 years ago. That's the story I want to tell you I’ll try to keep it short, but it is three decades worth of history and there are some really cool stories. I hope this will be encouraging for you and I hope it gets you really excited about what we have planned with Rooted Action Park. Let’s jump right in.
It was 1996, I was 20 years old, I was two years out of high school and four years into running my own BMX bike shop. As a junior in high school, I started a bike shop and by 1996 I had customers all over the country, actually all over the world.
I was mailing BMX parts, safety equipment and gear to people all over the world. The shop was primarily mail order, this is before the Internet, so I actually printed catalogs and then people would request those catalogs by calling or sending a letter and then I would mail them a catalog, They would take out the order form, They'd fill it out and mail back with a check, and then I would ship them their stuff.
Very different than how the whole online shopping thing happens today. But, that's the way we did it back then. So anyway, I was doing a lot of mail order sales and I was trying to promote the whole BMX scene in southern Minnesota where I was living and where I was based out of.
I started building ramps in my backyard, partially because I wanted to promote BMX, but mostly just because I wanted to place for my friends and I to ride. After I had built a few ramps in the backyard and crazy thing happened. People from all over Minnesota, Iowa, South Dakota, Nebraska, Wisconsin, were all coming to this small town in southern Minnesota and wanting to ride my ramps.
And it was super cool time, with a great community building around those ramps. Then at some point I felt like God told me to take what was happening in my backyard and move it inside, move it into an actual facility. If you've ever been to Minnesota, you know, you only get a couple of months out of the year where you can actually ride bikes outside. Other than that, you're battling cold and snow and the Minnesota weather. I was excited about the prospect of having a place to ride year round and excited about the idea of having a space where the community that was happening in my backyard could develop 12 months out of the year and could grow. I started sharing the idea with a bunch of people and they got excited about it. I had somebody who was going to donate land, I had people who were going to donate building materials and money, and all those donations were hinged on whether or not I could get all of the funding in place.
So, I went to the bank that had helped me get my bike shop started. I had a good relationship with them and I approached them about getting a loan so we could secure all the funding. The banker I talked to thought it was a good idea. He was excited about it, but when he took it to the loan committee and they decided a 20 year old opening an action sports facility in southern Minnesota was not a risk they were willing to take. Looking back, I totally understand that. But at the time, I was really frustrated and upset because the whole thing kind of just fell flat. I had invested a bunch of time and energy into it and I felt like God told me to do something and then it just kind of fell apart. I didn't really know what to do next. Then a weird thing happened.
While promoting the facility project, I had built some portable ramps and was traveling around with some friends doing shows at town celebrations and county fairs just to get the word out and promote what we were working on. About the same time, X Games became a thing and the Dew Tour became a thing and action sports were all of a sudden in the front of people who had never seen it before. Overnight the general public was exposed to skateboarding and BMX. Prior to that, nobody had even heard of it. Suddenly I started to get phone calls from all over the place from people asking me to bring my ramps to their events and do BMX shows and so that's what we started doing.
That was the birth of Chaos on Wheels. At first we started just in the Midwest and then pretty soon we were traveling all over the whole country. We ended up going into Canada and even sent a team to Taiwan at some point. I spent the next decade doing bicycle stunt shows, just traveling around all over the country. It was a really fun time. It was amazing. There were hard things about it, but for the most part it was just a really good experience. But during that whole season in the back of my mind was always this question, “what if we could just start a facility and have people come to us rather than just having to go to them?”
In the early 2000’s a Youth for Christ chapter and Southern Minnesota approached me about helping them develop an action sports ministry. We built a ramp in a barn and were taking kids there, which was really cool. Then we built a ramp at the campground they had there in Southern Minnesota. I thought, okay, maybe this is what God was showing me back in ‘96. This is what God was telling me to do. But it never really panned out or grew into kind of the vision that I thought God had given me for the whole indoor facility thing. So, I just kept focusing on doing shows.
I met my wife, Jenn, at some point in the middle of that season and she started touring with us and then we had two kids and then we were bringing them with us. By 2005, which was kind of the peak of Chaos on Wheels, we had two teams on the road full time. I was personally on the road around 280 days out of the year, and my wife and our two boys were traveling with us along with two or three other BMX guys. We were just on the road, living in a van, setting up ramps in parking lots, doing BMX tricks and telling people about Jesus and then moving on to the next city and doing the same thing.
We got to be part of some really cool events. We did a show for the Presidential Inauguration in 2005. We were part of a bunch of great music festivals and were on a few tours with bands. We met lots of great people and were part of a lot of great outreaches at churches and in parking lots. We were also doing shows at fairs and town celebrations. It's a season in my life that I look back on and it was a really good time. It was fun. I got to experience a lot of things. We shared the Good News about Jesus with thousands of people and it was really good. But like I said, in the back of my mind was always this like, what if? What if, we can do this facility? There were a couple of times I tried to rent a warehouse and build ramps and nothing ever panned out. Then toward the end of 2005 a phone call came that would change everything.
Through Chaos on Wheels we become friends with a Christian illusionist out of Nashville. In the Fall of 2005 he was on his way home to Nashville from Montana. He and his wife had been doing events in Montana, and they were traveling through Iowa heading to Nashville to get home. It just so happened at the same time we were actually home. At that time rarely were we ever actually at our home in Iowa. But that weekend we happened to be home. So, they stopped to have a meal at our house and just hang out. As he was sitting on the couch in my living room in Northern Iowa, heading to Nashville, a guy from Joplin, Missouri, calls him. The guy says, Hey, I'm working on opening an indoor youth facility, part of it is a ramp park and some of my contacts here in Joplin said you might know a guy that could run a skatepark. Our friend was like, “Yeah, actually I'm sitting on his couch right now”.
That facility that was getting ready to open in Joplin is what some of you would know as the Bridge and Autumn Ramp Park. As they were getting ready to move into their new facility in 2006, they were looking for someone to run the skatepark. Through that phone call, we got connected with the Bridge. Over the next few months, my wife and I made the decision that we would move the home base of Chaos on Wheels and our whole family and everything to Joplin to help run Autumn Ramp Park. We still had BMX teams that were out touring. My brother ran a lot of that stuff and managed the teams doing shows while I was based out of Joplin and running the ramp park.
Another part of Autumn was the big contest we did every year, the JoMoPro. The whole thing was a good season. Working at Autumn and with the Bridge and running the JoMoPro. I had the opportunity to meet lots of people, I talked to lots of people about Jesus and invested in the lives of hundreds local teens.
When all that happened, I thought this is finally the thing, what was happening in Joplin with the Bridge and Autumn was very similar to the vision that God had given me in 1996. In fact, I found some of the blueprints that I had drawn up in ‘96, and they were the same type of things that the Bridge and Autumn Ramp Park were offering. I was sure, this is finally it. I was really excited about that.
I spent the next six years with the Bridge and Autumn and, and then in 2011, the tornado happened here in Joplin, which impacted so many people. It damaged our house. Some of those kids that I had invested in, passed away in the tornado. One of our daughters, was actually born the night before the tornado. That whole season was just really, really hard. The whole last half of 2011 into early 2012 was really difficult for our family. I was kind of getting burned out. Things were changing at the Bridge and Autumn as part of the tornado. I had decided to shut down the JoMoPro, the big BMX contest, we had been doing. Some of the pros that were coming into town were introducing our local kids to things that were like totally opposed to what I was trying to do with those kids on a day to day basis. One kid told me he couldn’t wait for JoMoPro, because that was when he got to hang out with pros and smoke weed and get drunk and guys were going to strip clubs and the whole thing was just like really hard. We spent most of our time during the year trying to introduce these kids to healthy life decisions and healthy lifestyles and ultimately wanted them to find Jesus, become Christians and the stuff that was happening in conjunction with the contest was totally opposed to all of that. So, I made the decision to shut down the contest, which made a lot of people mad. There were other things that were happening too, and it was just a hard time.
Toward the end of 2012, I heard God tell me to quit, “quit the Bridge”. I was like, okay, well, if you want me to quit, then what? That was my income. That's how I was taking care of my family. He said, “Just wait”. Which wasn't particularly helpful. But, that's what I did. I quit and we waited. I was basically unemployed for a couple of months. Then in early 2013 the church where we were attending approached me and offered me a full time job working with youth and doing some other things for the church. That's what I've been doing for the last 11 years. Working full time at the church and helping with leading small groups and discipleship stuff and youth stuff and doing whatever needed to be done.
Over the past decade many of my connections in the BMX world had died off. I haden’t really been a part of that world at all. About two years ago, some of those kids and they're not kids anymore, but they were kids at Autumn and the Bridge, and now they're young adults and got their own families and they're married. Anyway some of those guys started reaching out to me. One of the conversations that would always come up every time we got together was, “When are you going to open another state park?” To which my answer was always, “Never, I'm never doing that again”. I just thought God told me, do that back in 1996. That was 30 years ago. I lived in that world with Autumn and the JoMoPro and now I'm ready to move on to a different chapter of my life.
I had no intention of pursuing anything like Rooted Action Park and honestly was really trying to avoid it completely. But, over the last two years, God just kept putting more and more people in my path and more and more things just kept changing and it got to the point where I felt like God was telling me to pursue this thing again. That's when my wife and I started talking about it and praying about it and really felt like God told us to open a facility that is family friendly, where people can come in and feel like they're coming home.
We want to create a space that is very hospitable centered around action sports, because that's what I know. That's the world that I grew up in. That's just what I know. I know there are benefits for kids participating in action sports. It's good for them on so many levels. There’s this epidemic happening in the teens right now with anxiety and depression and screen time and all the craziness of the world that we live in right now, which is totally different than anything I ever grew up in. Just technology and the anxiety that it’s creating, kids are missing out on being active, of actually going out and riding a bike or skateboard or scooter on a ramp and taking risks and actually accomplishing something and seeing your hard work pay off, all of that stuff is so beneficial to the health of teens.
Then creating a space where families, where moms and dads can come in and skate or ride bikes alongside their kids and build memories. Working in youth ministry, I’ve seen so many times when kids become teenagers, they “fire” their parents. Unless parents have really invested in relationships with their kids, they don't have a whole lot of input during the teen years. It's really sad to see. So, we want to create a space where parents can really invest in the relational capital with their kids, so when they become teenagers, they still have that relationship where parents can still parent and where teens are willing to be open and honest with their parents. We just want to see strong families really develop and to see people choose healthy lifestyles. And at the end of the day, ultimately, I want to see people come to know Jesus as their Savior. That's really the ultimate answer.
Creating a space like this where someone who would never go to church, would feel comfortable walking in because they want to skate or they want to ride their bike, or they want to climb the rock wall. Then as they're here, getting to develop relationships with them and friendships with them, and at some point, hopefully having a conversation about what does it mean to follow Jesus, and if nothing else, just having the opportunity to love people and support them and be a community for them. I think that's something that our society really is missing right now, people feel alone and they feel isolated and they feel like everyone's against them. Depression and anxiety, it's just raging right now. People need a place where they can go and be accepted and loved and where there's no agenda other than people who care. That's the whole heart behind Rooted, as Jenn and I were talking about it, the word that kept coming to mind as we decided to do this was hospitality. We want Rooted to be a place where people come and just feel loved and feel like they're part of a family. That's why we decided to build this facility right next door to our house. We mortgaged our home so we could pay for this. We're to the point right now where the facility is almost completed. But we need help. We need the community to step in and to get behind this and support this.
That's the story. It's something that God put on my heart almost 30 years ago and over a crazy string of events over the last 30 years I think God has really prepared me for today. I think back, if God would have allowed me to open that facility in 1996 when I was 20 years old, how big of a failure it would have been because at 20 years old I was so immature. I had no idea how to run a business. I was a Christian, my dad was a pastor, so I grew up in the church, but I had no idea how to disciple people. These years working on the road and touring and meeting all kinds of action sports people in the Chaos on Wheels years helped prep me for this. The years that Autumn Ramp Park taught me things and helped prep me for this. And the years spent at the church have equipped me and help me clarify what God really wants, his heart. The picture he gave me in 1996 I think is more clear today than it's ever been.
Thank you for sticking with this all the way through the end. I hope it was encouraging to you. I hope you're getting excited about the prospect of how beneficial a facility like this can be for our community. We want to see families strengthened, we want to see kids to be able to enjoy action sports alongside their mom or their dad.
We want to see adults come out and find community and find supportive friendships. One of the testimonies that I hear from the guys who grew up at Autumn is those friendships that developed on the ramps are still going strong today, even though some of them don't even ride bikes or skateboard anymore. Those friendships are still there, lifelong friendships. Whether it's around action sports or not doesn't really matter.
If you would like to learn more about Rooted Action Park please spend some time on our website www.rootedactionpark.org. There you can learn how to become a member, you can donate to the project, you can watch videos of the construction progress and so much more.
The Rooted Action Sports Foundation is a 501c3 non-profit organization, so all donations are tax deductible. Donations of any size are helpful as we move toward completing the building project and launch into being open to the public. We are also offering the opportunity for local businesses to partner with us through banner sponsorships. If you would like to learn more about that send me an email at rootedactionpark@gmail.com
Thank you!
Jeremiah Anderson
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