Pizza. At an Italian restaurant in a strip mall just outside an idyllic town in the Blue Ridge Mountains, seven teenage mountain-bike racers and two coaches crowd around a table. It was a busy Saturday in May 2022 at Virginia’s interscholastic mountain-biking series, known as VAHS.

　　The team, the Richmond Cycling Corps (RCC), consists of sixth-to-twelfth-graders who attend a variety of schools, but all have lived in or near public housing in the same part of Richmond, Virginia. I’m seated near the far end of the table. To my right, two eighth-grade boys talk excitedly: Chip, with his closely shorn hair and dimples, and Knowledge, a big, curious kid who’s somewhat new to mountain biking. Chip’s trying to persuade Knowledge to participate in a highly competitive racing series that’s part of the National Interscholastic

　　Cycling Association, or NICA.

　　Chip is serious about the idea. “Bro,” he says. “NICA?”

　　Knowledge enjoys mountain biking and loves being part of the team, but he’s on the fence about racing. “There’s college recruiters at NICA races. And I’m not going to college,” he says. “I’m going to do four years of high school, then another four years of college?”

　　Chip’s giggling, twisting his soda straw. “Bro?”

　　Knowledge: “I’m. Not. Racing NICA!”

　　Chip: “Bro. Bro. Bro. Bro. Bro.”

　　They both crack up.

　　Kamari, also in eighth grade and Knowledge’s longtime bestie, looks up from her pizza crust with light hazel eyes and whispers to me, “Where all have you been?” She’s shy—her sibling, Tawante, an RCC alum, told me, “She’s even shy with me, and I’m her brother!”—but she’s eager to explore the world beyond her home. Kamari described a favorite trip she’d been on with the RCC. “We went up to Bryce”—a skiing and mountain-biking resort about two and a half hours northwest of Richmond—“and we made a campfire. We played this game centipede. It’s kind of like hide and seek. The next day, we rode the bike park.” They did downhill runs with big jumps and took the ski lift back to the top.

　　The older boys are squeezed in together on the opposite side of the table. One of the team’s three coaches, 36-year-old Brad Kaplan, is across from me. He used to be a scout for the Oakland Raiders, but after 12 years he left pro football and decided to raise a family. In 2020, he and his wife and their new baby moved from the Bay Area to Richmond, closer to his wife’s family, where their money would go further. Brad took graduate classes in nonprofit studies. Before working for the RCC, he knew nothing about mountain biking. But he’s comfortable working with young athletes.

　　Between greasy bites, Brad turns to Wop, a slender freshman with tightly twisted locks that fall just below his ears. “I heard you lost someone this week,” Brad says.

　　“Yeah,” Wop replies. It was his older brother’s friend, Keshon.

　　“How old was he?”

　　“Twenty. He’d just gotten out of jail.” Keshon was shot in Creighton Court, the projects where Wop used to live, near a convenience store where a lot of kids get shot or shot at.

　　Wop doesn’t know if he’ll go to the funeral. It’s May, and he’s already been to four this year.