Women of Freestyle was established as a grass roots movement in 1999 with the goal of getting more women to start riding freestyle BMX. In 2001 enough women were riding to hold the first ever Women’s BMX Jam. The jam was held at the Incline Club in New Jersey, and saw an unbelievable attendance of 14 female riders. This jam set the stage for a continuing trend of women’s jams and later women’s classes at contests that continue to this day.

The Women of Freestyle website has played a multitude of roles over the years. When first established it represented the only place for a women to be part of a community with other women riders, and the only place to showcase their photos and talents. Because of this, every known Women rider from the US and many other countries showcased their photos and talents on this site. Later it grew into the only source for world wide women’s riding news and the driving force between women’s jams and women’s classes at contests.

As the internet grew social networking sites such as Myspace and Facebook made the creation of Women’s bmx groups easy to create and manage and easy to join, requests to join started to slow and members began to drop off. As the number of women riding increased we also shifted from a small close knit group of riders to many smaller groups of people who do not always get along at times.

Because of this and also the immense amount of time the website took to maintain I considered closing the site down many times. Finally in 2006 I just stepped away from the website and left it mostly idle. Despite the website no longer being maintained the number of visitors to the site remained consistent, members continued to request membership, and emails kept coming.

In Dec 2008 I finished my time in college and took a fresh look at Women of Freestyle. After checking out what available online to women, and speaking to many girls it became apparent that Women of Freestyle no longer had a place with its current goals setup and purpose.

There is room however for something slightly new and different… the next generation of the website. We have come to far for the simple grassroots concept we started with, what we need now is something more organized, more professional and something that Myspace and Facebook can’t offer.

I am still working out the exact direction, but we do again have a direction

Kim Klisiak 10/18/09