The Eureka Springs Highlander Mountain Bike Team wrapped up its second season with a fifth-place overall finish at Centennial Park in Fayetteville, beating much teams from larger schools like Bentonville West, Fayetteville Composite and Russellville.

All of the Highlanders performance points were won by younger students on the team.

Eureka Springs’ Winona Milwagon became the ninth-grade overall state champion. She was undefeated in four races this season and earned the distinction of wearing the leader’s jersey in every race. Milwagon worked hard to overcome knee surgery in March.

Sophomore Dakota Lewis-Brentlinger finished third overall in the competitive JV2 division. Sophomores Rowan Beattie and Amber Kirk finished fourth and fifth overall in the JV2 girls division. Kirk lost her chain at the start of the race but kept her cool when putting it back on and then had to put in extra work just to catch up to the pack. Jennavieve Erickson finished second in the eighth-grade girls Level 1 division, narrowly missing first place.

Centennial Park was built specially to host international bike events. The Eureka Springs crew was particularly excited to get to race on the same course as the World Cyclocross Champions and international mountain bike races. The team volunteered to help set up the course on the day before the race — which might have been an easier task in warmer weather. Instead they were met with frigid temperatures and the difficult task of setting up thousands of posts and miles of plastic fencing with frozen fingers. There was a lot of grit built that day, but at least the students got to know the course well before racing on it.

Many of the Northwest Arkansas bike teams use Centennial Park as a home course and race conditions were perfect on Nov. 6 so race times were expected to be faster than on other courses. In addition, the trail was almost entirely either up or down — with not much level in between. New to this year was a steep uphill start. Right out of the gate students had to climb hard before traveling into a fast downhill in the woods. This helped to thin out the pack and allowed the Eureka Springs riders to show off their climbing skills.

The governing body of scholastic mountain biking, the National Interscholastic Cycling Association (NICA), ranks teams based on both performance and volunteer hours. Eureka Springs team members logged 397 volunteer hours during the season. The students worked on bicycle trails, taught kindergartners how to ride bikes and cleaned up trash at area bike events. They were consistently in the top two teams in the state for hours logged.

The team members truly became more community-minded and came to realize the difference that they could make by looking outward. In overall scoring, the Eureka Springs team came in fourth at the Hot Springs and Mountain Home races and fifth at the Barling and Centennial races. In NICA, there are no school divisions so all teams in Arkansas compete against each other at each race.