WOODWARD -- Forty-five minutes east of State College -- past miles of rolling Pennsylvania countryside and horse-drawn carriages -- Andrew W.K.'s "She Is Beautiful" blares from overhead speakers.
Below, watching his counterparts challenge the upper limits in this cavernous building situated in the middle of Amish farmland, State College resident Keith McElhinney sits atop an indoor half-pipe on his bike.
Inside Cloud 9, as this building is known to locals, the 38-year-old father of two says riding with Jamie Bestwick "can either pump you up, or make you cry."
Bestwick may just be the best BMX rider this side of the stratosphere -- and judging by the height of some of his airs, it's even questionable that his reign as the BMX king ends there. There's a significant portion of the action sports community that has no qualms admitting so, and he certainly has the hardware to prove it.
He's won BMX Vert 11 times on the 3-year-old AST Dew Tour. There have been only 15 tournaments -- and he missed one of those because of injury. He's won all three season titles. He's conquered the X-Games for years now. There's not a single major competition Bestwick hasn't won.
So maybe you'll feel fellow pro -- and fellow local resident -- McElhinney's pain when he points out after a few sparkling Bestwick runs, that "today, is a crying day."
Bestwick and McElhinney are part of a growing number of professional action sports athletes, some with families in tow, flocking to central Pennsylvania. They're joined by names like Chad Kagy, Kevin Robinson, John Parker, Daniel Dhers and Anthony Napolitan -- some of BMX's biggest stars -- in calling the Centre Region home.
Why?
A 400-acre specialty sports summer camp called Woodward Camp. To many, it's action sports Mecca.
With enormous indoor skate parks like Cloud 9 approaching 20,000 square feet in size, it's easy to see why. For a sporting sub-culture that's been generally detested for years, it's been called "heaven on Earth." Outside Woodward's gates, action sports athletes are often seen as nuisances.
"They [police] see you riding a small bike like this and they think that you're goofing around, you're causing trouble, being a pain in the ass, or you're the kid that wrecked the back of some business downtown," State College resident Kagy says about BMX's public perception.
"I don't think they put the pieces together and realize, 'Wait a second. He's a grown man with a family and makes a living off of this stuff and my kids the ones that watch him on TV.' "
For some -- including Kagy and McElhinney -- the search for a place to ride has led to court and back again. In the end though, action sports' struggle remains the same.
"The general view of these kids was that they were bad kids," says Woodward boss Gary Ream. "That was wrong.
"They're good kids, they just didn't have a place to go."
In 1969, the only buildings on the land were a barn, a house and four small cabins.
Approached with the idea of turning the farm into a gymnastics specialty camp, former Penn State All-America gymnast Ed Isabelle jumped on board that year. After a year of fixing up the place and converting the facilities, Woodward opened in 1970 as a gymnastics camp operated out of the barn.
For the next decade, it remained a gymnastics-only camp. The action sports programs weren't added until the Cold War and the United States' Olympic Games boycott decreased gymnastics enrollment.
In an effort to stabilize its numbers, Woodward opened its doors to a BMX racing program in 1983. From there grew the BMX Freestyle, skateboarding and in-line skating programs many associate Woodward with today.
Every summer since, young skateboarders, in-line skaters and BMX riders from all over the country are transplanted here from areas where actions sports still carry poor reputations.
"I think half of the time it's just kids don't have anything to do, and they don't have anything to channel that boredom or focus their efforts in some other way," says the 36-year-old Bestwick, who has been riding BMX since the age of 10.
"That's the stereotypical look of how the younger BMXers are, but it's not different from anybody else when they were kids. Kids are always looking for something to do. If they weren't on a BMX bike, what do you want them to do? Are you going to sit them on a corner with a Rubik's Cube and do a couple puzzles every night and then go home? It doesn't work like that, you know.
"Kids need stimulation, and I think that bikes and skateboards are pretty stimulating."
Still, kids or not, the struggle remains the same.
Like Ream said, they're good kids, they just need a place to go.
That search ended in State College -- a place Bestwick jokingly calls a "booming metropolis."
To Woodward operations director Steve Hass, the reason behind that decision is simple: Woodward has world-class facilities where access is mostly limited to pros nine months out of the year.
"As the facilities back in their home areas either got shut down, closed down or moved, they basically said, 'Why don't we live at Woodward,' " Hass says.
Embraced and appreciated at Woodward, pros from across the nation -- and the world in the cases of the Venezuelan Dhers and British Bestwick -- were left to focus on riding.
With near-perfect ramps along with foam pits -- and other cushioned landing surfaces transferred from gymnastics by Woodward -- the relocated athletes have been at the leading edge of the sport's progression.
"Ninety percent of what you do and see would not be done without [the cushioned landing surfaces]," McElhinney said. "You try throwing double-whip flairs off of a box jump for the first time, and you're going to die. On the other hand, if you do them all day in the foam and learn them, that's really why you see the explosion of the big gnarly stuff."
Bestwick landed in America to pursue riding full time in 1999 after leaving his day job inspecting airplane engine blades back in England. That was before heating systems were installed in the buildings, and he often rode in his winter jacket with only his wife watching.
But his hard work paid off.
That year he won the Gravity Games. The next summer, he took the X-Games.
"The proof was in the pudding," Bestwick said. "I had sort of gone from being a very good rider, but I was just missing the mark by one or two tricks, then all of a sudden I had an abundance of stuff that I never even thought was possible, and they were contest-winning tricks.
"People saw how well I was doing through riding at Woodward Camp. ... They sort of saw that there was actually a benefit to being here and that's why a lot of guys started moving out here. They saw that rate of progression could be accelerated very fast. It was proved that all this stuff works."
The athletes came, and State College gained perhaps its most famous residents not named Joe Paterno.
In the years since, Woodward riders have dominated the scene.
Dhers has won the last two AST Dew Tour BMX Park season titles. Napolitan won BMX Dirt last year. Before this year, when Kagy missed significant time because of injury, Bestwick, Kagy and Robinson had swept the top three spots in Vert. Kagy and Robinson swapped second and third in 2005 and 2006.
"Having a camp such as Woodward is enormously important," said Kagy, a camper in 1992. "It's simply proven by the fact that you can watch the X-Games or the Dew Tour, and most likely find that half of the guys in the finals are most likely campers in the last five to 10 years. Campers. Not visiting pros. Now they're visiting pros, but these are people that a few years ago weren't even 18 yet."
When Street & Smith's Sports Business Journal listed the 10 most influential people in action sports, Woodward boss -- and father of Penn State women's volleyball player Kelsey Ream and former Penn State punter Brandon Ream -- Gary Ream was included as "the only person over 40 that the athletes actually listen to."
"Gary Ream is a visionary," Bestwick says. "He wants to see the sports progress. Regardless of what it is, whether it's snowboarding, motocross, BMX, skateboarding, in-line, it doesn't matter. He just wants to see action sports grow."
The X-Games, action sports' most visible stage, didn't originate until 1995. Woodward, though, was always ahead of the curve. The in-line skating program was the last to be added to Woodward's menu. That was in 1993.
"In the early '80s with BMX and later with skateboarding, it was a bit of a reach into the imagination jar," Gary Ream says. "With the X-Games starting in '95 and growing into the huge event that it is, obviously this was a whole different lifestyle blowing up in our face."
As athletes began to push the limits of physics to come out on top, it was Woodward that literally caught them as they fell back down to earth. By transferring those technologies from gymnastics, Woodward allowed the sports to continue growing.
Proof?
Directly above a sea of blue foam cubes, on the white ceiling of Woodward's first major indoor action sports facility, there is a black mark from where Dave Mirra hit the ceiling while developing the double backflip.
"[The foam] is the biggest thing that we're probably known for," Hass said. "This is what's revolutionized BMX bike riding. It's revolutionized in-line skating. To a certain extent, it's done skateboarding, just not nearly as much. This was our goal."
Hass says he's seen the sport evolve here. Among the tricks pioneered on the property are Mirra's double backflip, Bestwick's signature downside tailwhip flair and McElhinney's front-flip flair.
And at X-Games 12 in 2006, Robinson landed his double flair -- a trick he developed for almost three years at Woodward -- to the delight of Ream, Hass and the rest of the Woodward family.
"[Action sports] have blossomed into a dream for these kids," Gary Ream says. "One day it was a lifestyle and now it's their livelihood."
As the tricks evolve to bigger and better things, the sports continue to grow.
In 2003, Ream presented BMX, skateboarding and in-line to the heads of the International Olympic Committee. All three sports are being considered for addition to the Olympic Games.
And with the growth, Woodward has been featured in video games, national ad campaigns (see: AT&T Dave Mirra and Carrot Top ads), movies, television shows and the list goes on.
"The bigger that we get, the more we'll get rid of the labels that have followed us around for years," Bestwick said. "You just have to look at all the other sports. I'm sure they never start out as big as they are. It took time, and it will take time, but I definitely think with Woodward as the driving force behind it, it's going to help us get there sooner rather than later."
