Albany Primary School to receive Great Southern’s first beginner mountain bike trail

Albany Primary School will soon be home to the city’s first mountain bike trail on school grounds.

Outdoors Great Southern is partnering with the school to help create the 330m mountain biking track that will be located behind the school’s basketball and volleyball courts.

Outdoors Great Southern trail maintenance supervisor Brett Pengelley said the school’s track would be the first of its kind in the region.

“Currently the Great Southern doesn’t have a beginner mountain bike trail to support this type of riding, beyond the Munda Biddi Trail,” he said.

“The trail we have got planned will consist of drop, berms and other technical features to develop and hone students’ bike handling skills.”

Albany Primary School physical education teacher Paul Carron said mountain biking was already popular with students and the new track would allow them to build confidence to tackle more serious trails in the Great Southern.

“There’s some nice trails around here but they’d be a bit intimidating for kids who haven’t biked much before, so this will be a nice kind of starting out experience,” Mr Carron said.

“We’ll train them up on this to get their skills up and then they can go join some groups that go biking and enjoy that a bit more, because otherwise it’s a bit inaccessible unless they’ve got some skills.”

Principal Cathy Willis said the new trail would give the school an opportunity for students to try something different.

“They participate in a lot of sports outside of school and this is a way for them to start thinking about mountain biking as a sport,” Ms Willis said.

“There’s no other place that they’ll get an opportunity to do this, so it makes us quite unique in being able to offer that to the kids.”

The track has been partly funded by a Connecting Schools - Your Move grant from the Department of Transport and the Department of Education.

On Saturday March 26 a busy bee will start the main construction, with members of the Albany Primary School community and Albany Mountain Bike Club joining in.

The wider community is also being encouraged to volunteer their time to help on the day.

“We’re hoping to make a day of it, with a communal effort for the benefit of children at Albany Primary School,” Mr Pengelley said.

Volunteers will undergo a brief induction on the day and are asked to wear suitable clothes and boots to work in as well as bring tools such as steel rakes, shovels, wheelbarrows and gardening gloves.

If you would like to volunteer, register at: https://events.humanitix.com/albany-primary-school-mtb-track-build