Close your eyes and picture yourself flying down an almost vertical dirt path, barely wide enough for yourself, at speeds close to that of cars. Imagine yourself doing this with only a small metal frame keeping you from the rocky terrain below. Now picture thousands of fans screaming from the sidelines and chanting your name as you fly down the track. This is the reality of Redwood alumni Matt Koen, class of 2016. Shortly after graduating, Koen went pro as a mountain biker for the manufacturer and company Marin Bikes. He now travels the world, racing in the men’s U21 division of the Enduro World Series.

Koen started mountain biking at a young age with his friends, from there his fuse was ignited and he became proficient but wanted more from the sport.

“Me and a couple friends from the neighborhood decided to bring our bikes up to [Ring Mountain]… I just really liked it and going really fast and seeing how far I could push myself, and it just turned into something from there,” Koen said.

Koen joined the mountain biking team at Redwood and soon his skills progressed and he started taking the sport more seriously, riding and training with pros like Marco Osborne. His passion soon turned more serious as he signed with sponsors and began to travel internationally for the sport. Koen said that despite his addition of smaller sponsors, he rode without a full sponsorship for many years, even when many of his competitors were riding on large teams.

“I was beating a lot of kids who had full sponsors and had I guess better bikes and then… [Kyle Warner] just saw me and asked me that winter if I wanted to be a part of Marin Bikes,” Koen said.

He then was presented with the opportunity to ride full time for Marin Bikes on the factory team and took it, hoping to eventually move up into the world-class levels of riding. Soon, however, Koen was faced with a new issue: where he wanted to go to college.

“I wanted to go to a four-year college but at that same time, I was looking at it realistically… I think that was a big challenge for me just like trying to figure out junior and senior year what I wanted to do and what kind of direction I wanted to go in,” Koen said.

Koen’s fears were met with relief when he went pro directly after graduating. Koen said that despite his drive to go to a four-year university, he decided to choose mountain biking while still attending a junior college here in Marin.

Koen explained how many of his peers’ judgment swayed him slightly from the idea of going pro.

“For a lot of people it may look like, ‘Oh you’re just chucking yourself off of cliffs and just riding down super gnarly stuff and just being daredevils I guess,’ but at the end of the day once you get to this level of riding you have to become an athlete…  to do that I would see as an accomplishment, you know really treat myself as an athlete and not some dude who likes to go fast on a bike,” Koen said.

Koen has been traveling across the world for a mountain biking series called the Enduro World Series (EWS). Recently, Koen visited Italy while racing, and he will continue to compete in the league for the rest of the year.