(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) BMX rider Hannah Roberts at COR BMX Park in South Jordan on Thursday, May 15, 2025.
Sports
How a remote Utah business park became the center of BMX Freestyle in the USA
Hannah Roberts has won just about every major women’s professional BMX freestyle title out there. Not just one of every kind. Closer to nearly all that exist.
Roberts, 23, won her sixth consecutive UCI BMX World Championship in December, making her the only woman to have ever won that event. She won gold at both Pan American Games in which the discipline was offered (2019 and ’23). And last year, when X Games first made women’s BMX freestyle part of its program, she won that gold medal, too.
This week, Salt Lake City will host the X Games’ BMX, skateboarding and motoX events, and Roberts can’t wait. It’s not just the prospect of winning more hardware that has her hyped, but also something much rarer.
“This will probably be the only event in my life,” she said, “that I’ll be able to sleep in my own bed and then go and compete.”
Roberts moved to Utah in March to train at a facility started by a local dad who wanted to give his daughter, an up-and-coming BMX racer, a better place to practice. In doing so, Roberts may become a BMX trailblazer once again. COR Athlete, the facility built last year by Joe Sirlin in a remote office park in South Jordan, has become the hub for USA Cycling’s BMX freestyle teams. Roberts was the first pro athlete to move to the area to train there, but Sirlin said he believes she won’t be the last.
“We have multiple other people exploring relocating here full-time to train and to live in Utah,” Sirlin said. “So our goal is to help get athletes like that here, but also help get the next generation a place to evolve as an athlete.”
Building a solution in South Jordan
The trip to France with the Team USA BMX squad was supposed to be a learning experience for Sirlin’s teenage daughter, Keir. Yet it was Sirlin who got an education.
A former construction foreman and facility and event manager for various major sporting events — including Formula 1 and Moto GP races, PGA tournaments, Super Bowls and X Games — Sirlin couldn’t help but notice the ramps at the 2023 World Cup Fise in Montpellier were much larger than anything he’d seen in the United States. He asked Ryan Nyquist, a BMX legend and Team USA’s coach at the time, about the discrepancy.
“When we first saw these big ramps, I asked him, just person to person, ‘Hey, why does the United States not have anything this big for the riders to work on?’ Because we don’t, and Europe does. Australia, Japan, China — all these countries have these facilities, but we do not. And I asked him how we could change that.”
This April 2018 photo provided by USA Cycling shows Hannah Roberts speaking at the UCI Freestyle BMX World Cup in Hiroshima, Japan. The 16-year-old Roberts, already one of the best BMX freestyle riders in the world, is helping blaze a trail for women in the Olympics. (Kyle Carlson/USA Cycling via AP)
Nyquist said USA Cycling had struggled to come up with the funding to build a World Cup-caliber course. So, Sirlin came up with a solution.
Calling upon his contacts in the construction industry, he facilitated the construction of a temporary course inside a newly built business park off the Mountain View Corridor in South Jordan, minutes from where he and his family had moved in 2021. He called in heralded BMX park builder Nate Wessel to design the course with input from the athletes who would represent Team USA in Paris, including Roberts, who was training in Nyquist’s backyard. She requested a spine — two ramps connected at their apex by a small ledge) and a step-over (where the landing area is higher than the takeoff area).
“Those two things freak me out most on courses,” she said. “So I’ve got to ride them a lot, I guess.”
More BMX riders are calling Utah home
At the time, the course was meant as a quick fix to prepare Team USA athletes for the Paris 2024 Olympics. When it opened in March 2024, Olympic athletes — including Roberts — traveled there from around the country for training camps every two weeks until the Summer Games began in late July. When they left France in early August, they brought back four top-eight finishes. That included a silver medal won by Perris Benegas in a women’s competition that saw Roberts, the favorite after taking silver with a broken foot in the event’s debut in Tokyo, place eighth despite breaking her hand and injuring her shoulder in a crash during warmups.
With those results, USA Cycling was in no hurry to see the course dismantled. In January, it extended its partnership with COR-Athlete for at least another year.
“This facility has been a game-changer for our BMX Freestyle program,” Jim Miller, the chief of sports performance, said in a news release announcing the extension. “The world-class facility and the partnership with COR-Athlete enabled our team to push their limits and perform at the highest level on the world stage. We’re thrilled to continue this collaboration and build on the success we achieved in 2024.”
Likewise, Roberts was reluctant to lose her favorite practice facility. So, she rented out her house in North Carolina to make a new home out West.
“When I finally pulled the trigger, I didn’t know X Games was coming,” said Roberts, now one of Clearfield’s newest residents. “So it was legit this. My whole focus was this park and trying to, one, help it succeed and be able to stay around, but also just be able to train here.”
Roberts has accomplished both.
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) BMX rider Hannah Roberts at COR BMX Park in South Jordan on Thursday, May 15, 2025.
She trains at the facility about three hours a day, she said, but she spends many more hours working behind the scenes. Sirlin pays her to be part office manager, part event director and part youth coach for camps hosted at COR-Athlete.
Others have since followed Roberts’ path. Angie Marino, a pro rider who performed a BMX stunt in the movie “Bad Moms,” also moved from North Carolina to Utah, Sirlin said. And Roberts said athletes like Nikita Ducarroz of Switzerland, who will also compete at X Games Salt Lake City, have used her home as a base camp.
Sirlin said he’d like to go beyond bringing in athletes for training and bring them in for World Cup-caliber competitions. The U.S. has only hosted one BMX freestyle World Cup stop, and that was in 2016. The course is expected to host the national championships next spring.
Considering her propensity for being on the cutting edge of the sport, Sirlin knows he may have been wise to get Roberts involved.
“She has accomplished more by a female in BMX freestyle than anyone in the history of the sport … and she’s only 23 years old,” he said. “I think she pushed the envelope of a very male-dominated sport that now is seeing 100% progression by countries all over the world and women all over the world, and she was the benchmark. That’s what I think Hannah has done for the sport.”
She says she’s nowhere near done, either. Next up is X Games Salt Lake City. Then, according to her long-term plan, every Summer Olympics through 2036. She expects to be based out of Utah for all of it, she said.
She just has to get that first title — to a house with a yard for her dogs — and let fate take it from there.
Updated Dec. 5, 2025, 11:15 p.m. MT
One step closer.
No. 2 seed Arizona State volleyball is back in the Sweet 16 for the second time in three seasons.
The Sun Devils defeated Utah State in four sets (25-15, 25-18, 22-25, 25-15) in the second round of the NCAA Tournament at Desert Financial Arena on Friday, Dec. 5.
“It was really special for me,” senior outside hitter Bailey Miller said. “I was one of the only ones last year when we got upset (in the second round), so I think going into it, all the girls just wanted to recognize all the girls who didn’t get to go to the Sweet 16 last year and took it seriously. It was really special.”
ASU’s return to the Sweet 16 offers a sweeter follow-up to last season’s second-round exit after the Sun Devils earned a hosting bid for the first two rounds. As painful as it was for coach JJ Van Niel, he chose not to let last year cloud the current success.
“I don’t reflect back,” Van Niel said. “That’s negative, but it’s just moving forward. Every year is a new shot, but last year was very painful. Mostly, because I didn’t think we played our best volleyball.”
With few players remaining from last year, Van Niel wasn’t sure how ASU’s season would go and if they’d repeat as Big 12 champions and NCAA Tournament hosts. But his team has done both and added more with a Sweet 16 berth.
“I really had no idea this year what we were going to look like,” Van Niel said. “It’s 100% a new lineup and I’m really proud of these kids because they’ve fought and they’ve scrapped. They’ve all gotten better through the year and they’ve earned this Sweet 16, it’s a really special group.”
What was key for ASU was their defense against a scrappy team that rarely went down in one swing. The Sun Devils were up to the task as they benefited from USU’s 21 attack errors.
USU’s strong offense forced ASU’s middle blockers to front the middle, exploiting their right-side players. While the middle blockers didn’t get as many kills as they did in the first round, it opened the floor for Miller, Noemie Glover and Tatum Parrott.
Miller led ASU with 18 kills on .471 hitting and two errors, a stark improvement from her first-round performance. Glover didn’t commit any errors and had 17 kills on .531 hitting. Parrott added 13 kills.
ASU was serving well again as the Aggies sided out 56.3% of the time, including less than half the time in the first set. Miller’s three aces helped ASU finish with a 7-5 advantage in service aces.
“They’re a great offensive team and their middle (blockers) were very active,” Miller said. “We haven’t really seen a lot of that, so it definitely took some adjusting. But in the end, that’s our bread and butter, being able to adjust and be ready.”
The Aggies got their first lead since early in the first set when they started with an 8-5 edge over ASU in the third set. Instead of putting them away like in the first two sets, ASU had trouble against USU’s attack.
As the third set neared the end, neither side scored twice for six consecutive points until USU got a 24-22 lead over ASU. The Aggies then scored off a bad set from ASU’s Sydney Henry.
The Aggies were strong to start the fourth set, but ASU’s 6-0 run midway through the set helped the Sun Devils gain the separation needed and eliminate them.
The Sun Devils will travel to Lexington, Kentucky, and play No. 3 Creighton in the regional hosted by No. 1 seed Kentucky, either Dec. 12 or 13.
ASU capped off an impressive season at home where it went 16-0, and only dropped eight sets in those games.
Reach the reporter at jenna.ortiz@arizonarepublic.com, as well as @jennarortiz on X.
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Olivia Babcock didn’t realize her performance during the first round of the NCAA women’s volleyball tournament gave her the Pitt record for most kills in a season. Babcock knew she met the previous record holder, Wendy Hatlestad, during alumni weekend.
Babcock recorded 13 kills during the Panthers’ 25-10, 25-17, 25-13 win Friday night at Petersen Events Center in front of a crowd of 4,240. Babcock now has 558 kills, going past the single-season record of 555 Hatlestad set in 2003.
“I was talking to her two weeks ago,” Babcock said. “That’s crazy I just met her. But I think it says a lot about how much my team trusts me to take those big rips, and it gives me the opportunity to score and get as many kills as I do.”
Everyone had a good night hitting for the top-seeded Panthers, who advanced to the second round of the NCAA Tournament for the 10th straight season.
The Panthers committed only four attack errors against UMBC (13-12) and finished with a hitting percentage of .551.
“It’s really good to start out and to remind ourselves to maintain high standards,” Babcock said. “Obviously, all of these teams have made it into the tournament because they’re an amazing team, and everyone’s going to bring their best volleyball. I think we just need to make sure that we’re playing our best, too, because, especially in these matches, we don’t wanna slip up and give away a set or a match.”
Pitt (27-4) hasn’t dropped a set in the first round since it beat VCU, 3-1, in 2017 at Penn State.
The Retrievers qualified for the tournament after winning the America East Conference for the fifth time in the past six seasons. Pitt setter Brooke Mosher, who finished with 34 assists, said the Panthers got themselves in system thanks to their good passing.
Blaire Bayless was second for the Panthers with nine kills, and Abby Emch contributed eight.
“That made it really easy for me to spread the ball around and get the middles involved,” Mosher said. “Then, I trusted my teammates to be able to put the ball away.”
Pitt lost the first point of the match after UMBC delivered on a kill by Jalynn Brown. The Panthers responded by scoring the next three points, capping the surge with an ace by Izzy Masten.
UMBC struggled to find holes in Pitt’s defense. The Retrievers hit .129 and were led by seven kills from Hannah Dobbs.
UMBC coach Kasey Crider was happy with how they played.
“We don’t have an Olivia Babcock slayer, so, bummer,” Crider said. “I’ve been to this tournament a few times as a head coach and assistant coach, and I’ve never walked away from the tournament thinking we were the best at the end until today. It still hurts, but there were no regrets.”
Pitt will take on Michigan in the second round Saturday. The Wolverines advanced by beating Xavier. The Panthers are 3-6 all-time against the Wolverines.
Pitt’s only meeting with Michigan in the NCAA Tournament came in 2018, when the Wolverines upset Pitt in five sets at Petersen Events Center.
Mosher, who previously played in the NCAA Tournament with Illinois, said she doesn’t feel any extra pressure playing as the No. 1 seed.
“I think just being in the tournament has its own weight in itself,” Mosher said. “Every game your season is on the line, which is the same no matter who you are.”
Josh Rizzo is a freelance writer.
Dec. 6, 2025, 6:03 a.m. CT
Kansas State volleyball survived and advanced, and now it will take on the No. 1 team in the country in the second round of the NCAA Tournament.
The Wildcats and Nebraska Cornhuskers will face off at 7 p.m. in the Bob Devaney Sports Center in Lincoln, Nebraska, on Saturday, Dec. 6.
Watch K-State volleyball in NCAA Tournament
Nebraska enters the match 31-0, seeking its first championship since 2017. The Huskers cruised to a three-set win over Long Island.
K-State’s win over San Diego to advance was more dramatic. The Wildcats (18-9, 10-8 Big 12) pulled it off in five sets, while needing to win the fourth to make it possible.
What channel is Kansas State volleyball vs Nebraska on today?
- TV channel: None
- Stream:ESPN+
Kansas State volleyball vs. Nebraska will be available to stream on ESPN+.
Watch K-State volleyball in NCAA Tournament
Kansas State volleyball vs Nebraska time today
- Date: Saturday, Dec. 6
- Start time: 7 p.m. CT
Kansas State and Nebraska will begin at 7 p.m. CT on Saturday, Dec. 6.
Wyatt D. Wheeler covers Kansas State athletics for the USA TODAY Network and Topeka Capital-Journal. You can follow him on X at @WyattWheeler_, contact him at 417-371-6987 or email him at wwheeler@usatodayco.com
MINNEAPOLIS, Minn. – The St. Olaf College women’s track and field team turned in 13 performances that ranked on its all-time performers’ list at the season-opening M City Classic on Friday at the University of Minnesota Fieldhouse.
First years accounted for 11 of the 13 performances that ranked on St. Olaf’s all-time list at the unscored meet, which included teams from the NCAA Division I, NCAA Division II, NCAA Division III, National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA), and club levels. In addition to the top-10 list performances, senior Ella Landis posted St. Olaf’s lone first-place finish at the meet by winning the one-mile run in 5:17.28.
In her first collegiate meet, first year Evangeline Sappington broke onto the program’s all-time performers’ list in both the 60-meter dash and 200-meter dash. Sappington was the top Division III finisher and was 10th overall in the 200-meter dash (26.84), while also taking second among Division III competitors and 16th overall in the 60-meter dash. Sappington’s time in the 60-meter dash ranks second on the Oles’ all-time list – just four one-hundredths of a second off the record – and her time in the 200-meter dash is fifth.
Sophomore Izzi Jaeckle clocked in with St. Olaf’s No. 4 time in the 60-meter dash by placing 17th (8.10), while first year Ellie Semple also broke onto the list in 10th with a time of 8.28 seconds to finish 27th. Sophomore Logan Paulsen moved up to seventh on the Oles’ list with a sixth-place performance in the shot put (12.48m, 40′ 11 ½”), while first year Abigal Frei cleared 3.26 meters (10′ 8 ¼”) for a No. 5 all-time result and an eighth-place finish.
First years Svea Frantzich and Claire Stein recorded St. Olaf’s No. 8 and No. 10 scores in the pentathlon by finishing seventh (3,005) and eighth (2,993), respectively. Frantzich tied for third in the long jump (5.44m, 17′ 10 ¼”) and was sixth in the 60-meter hurdles (9.47), which both ranked on St. Olaf’s all-time list. Stein also tied for third in the long jump (5.44m, 10′ 10 ¼”) to highlight her day. First year Annika Walsh was the runner-up in the high jump (1.62m, 5′ 3 ¾”) – fifth all-time – and was seventh in the 60-meter hurdles (9.48) – ninth all-time – as part of a ninth-place finish in the pentathlon (2,881).
St. Olaf will be back in action in 2026 at the Ole Opener at 10 a.m. on Saturday, Jan. 17 at Tostrud Center.
At the 2025 JM Eagle LA Championship, IRCODE debuted Player Profiles, a new LIVE+ capability to bring fans closer to athletes without prompts, QR codes, or static triggers.
In addition to offering an on-site fan experience, IRCODE, as a Technology Partner, introduced an interactive viewer experience for fans at home. When players appeared on-screen, viewers used the IRCODE app to scan their screen and instantly accessed a full, interactive profile for shopping their favorite players’ gear, diving deeper into their stories and learning more about the causes that are meaningful to them.
Player Profiles leverages IRCODE’s patented EXACT Match technology and proprietary computer vision, and applies real-time visual recognition to usher in the next generation of second-screen entertainment.
BEREA, Ohio – Fans can follow or watch Saturday’s Baldwin Wallace University basketball and indoor track and field action via live results, statistics or video.
The men’s and women’s indoor track and field teams open the 2025-26 season when it travels to Cleveland to compete in the Spartan Alumni Holiday Classic hosted by Case Western Reserve University inside the Veale Convocation, Recreation and Athletic Center at 11:00 a.m.
Live Results:
https://bwyellowjackets.cc/3MlDQcr
FloCollege On Demand Live Video:
https://bwyellowjackets.cc/3KFq6st
The men’s basketball team travels to New Concord for the first game of a men’s and women’s Ohio Athletic Conference and Hoops for Hunger Food Drive doubleheader against Muskingum University on Performance Court inside the Anne C. Steele Center at 1:00 p.m. Fans can receive free admission to the game with a donation of canned food, a non-perishable item, or a monetary contribution.
Tickets:
https://bwyellowjackets.cc/3WGuwll
Live Statistics:
https://bwyellowjackets.cc/493Gehq
FloCollege On Demand Live Video:
https://flosports.link/47hSw2V
The No. 21 nationally ranked women’s basketball team travels to New Concord for the second game of a women’s and men’s Ohio Athletic Conference and Hoops for Hunger Food Drive doubleheader against Muskingum University on Performance Court inside the Anne C. Steele Center at 4:00 p.m. Fans can receive free admission to the game with a donation of canned food, a non-perishable item, or a monetary contribution.
Tickets:
https://bwyellowjackets.cc/3WGuwll
Live Statistics:
https://bwyellowjackets.cc/49Ist7Q
FloCollege On Demand Live Video:
https://flosports.link/4qu1Fyr
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