Founder of 'Blue-Tailed Skinks' is the county's Bike Champion of the Year
May is bike month, and Matt Fritzinger of Graton is Sonoma County's Bike Champion of the Year
The Sonoma County Bicycle Coalition has named Matt Fritzinger the 2025 Bike Champion of the Year for founding and organizing the Blue-Tailed Skinks, a mountain biking club for kids up through 5th grade.
Fritzinger, who lives with his family in Graton, has long been a champion of getting more kids on bikes. He is well-known in the mountain biking community as the founder of the NorCal High School Cycling League, which he formed in 2001. Following that league’s success, he helped form the National Interscholastic Cycling Association in 2009, which brought student mountain biking leagues to states across the U.S.
His recent efforts with the Skinks, named for a lizard a group of riders once found under a log in Forestville, have a more personal motivation behind them: the opportunity to ride with his two young sons.
“For myself that’s always been the draw, to be able to do a sport together with my kids,” Fritzinger said. “It’s a dream come true.”
The club began casually about four years ago, with maybe 10 kids and their parents showing up to ride at Howarth Park in Santa Rosa and Riverfront Regional Park in Healdsburg. By last fall, the group, co-founded by Jeremiah Price, was drawing up to 150 riders, with 75 more on the waiting list. Now an incorporated nonprofit, the Skinks have a formal schedule and a growing roster of parent volunteers who assist as ride leaders and help coach different skill levels.
As much as the club gives parents a chance to ride with their kids, Fritzinger said, it also gives kids a chance to ride with their friends. The club also helps set the stage for participation in team mountain biking opportunities as the kids get older.
Fritzinger was inducted into the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame in 2016 for his work in high school mountain biking. A former math teacher at Berkeley High School, he is now a solar designer and salesperson for Michael & Sun Solar in Graton.
As he sees it, in forming the Skinks, he simply saw a need and decided to do something about it. Now, as the club has been bolstered by growing interest and a more formal structure, Fritzinger considers that it could become one of the top youth mountain biking programs in the country. Given the passion for cycling across Sonoma County, he sees no reason why that can’t happen.
“This is the best place in the USA to be a cyclist, so I know we can do this,” he said.
Find out more at bluetailedskinks.com. Listen to an interview with Matt here.
The Sebastopol Times thanks the Sonoma County Bicycle Coalition for this article.