One Wheel, Many Uses

The Arizona Unicycle Club meets at 7:30 every Tuesday evening to play basketball while balancing on one wheel and pedaling furiously. On this day, players range from their teens to their 40s, and all are men with the exception of Heather La Bonte, who joins the boys mid-game.

Her husband, Chris, is the club’s organizer.

“Heather planted the seeds in our minds to get (a unicycle),” says Chris. “She was working at a bicycle store and said, ‘Let’s get one.’”

While Heather La Bonte holds her own on the court, more popular among women is unicycle freestyle riding, an artistic practice which looks a lot like dancing or ice skating.

Speaking of ice, Heather is from Minnesota, where unicycle hockey is popular. They played on indoor courts, of course: unicycles and sheets of ice are too tricky for even the finest riders.

Unicycles and mountain trails, on the other hand – now, that’s a natural combination. The club usually meets weekly at South Mountain Park or Dreamy Draw to tear up the trails on their one nubby tire.

They like “shuttle rides,” where they can park cars at the top and bottom of a trail, ride downhill and then get a lift back up.

But a mountain biker at the National Trailhead off of Guadalupe and 48th Street said he once saw a unicyclist on the Mormon Loop. In case you’re not familiar with it, many a skilled mountain biker has to walk that trail in places, and it’s notorious for spills.

What it Takes

It’s no secret that unicycling takes practice and patience.
Uni-Formity
by Geri Koeppel

A group of eight men are sweating it out on the basketball court at Indian School Park in Scottsdale.

The competition is fierce. One tries to block a shot; nothing but net.

“Nice shot, Chris,” one calls out.

The game shifts to the other end of the court.

“Behind you, behind you!” a player yells as another player passes the ball back.

“Nice, Dave! Go, go, go!”

Another pass and a miss.

While this may sound like any ordinary pickup game of hoops, this game has a definite twist…

...the players are riding unicycles.

“It took me a week to ride in a straight line,” said Chris Rosenkrans of Phoenix. “It’s very intimidating.”

Watching the basketball game from a neighboring court, Gage Kelly of Scottsdale said, “I think it’s crazy hard looking.”

But it also takes practice to ride a bike, Kris Holm, a unicycle manufacturer contends – it’s just that most of us have forgotten, because we learn when we’re so young.

Anyone can learn to ride, he said. Couch potatoes to extreme athletes are on the same playing field when they begin.

But it helps to be in shape.

“It’s a full-body workout,” Heather La Bonte said, adding that core strength is necessary. “It’s a very intensive workout in a short amount of time.”

The way to learn is to go to a tennis court to try riding while hanging onto the fence. Make sure no one is around so you won’t get scared off by people laughing at you when you fall off – and you will fall off.

On the other hand, “It’s easy to walk out of a fall,” Rosenkrans said. “We don’t hurt ourselves a lot when we’re learning how to ride.”

The basic unicycle seat is only a few inches higher than a bike seat – you don’t start on a “giraffe.” When someone blocks a shot on the court and knocks another player off his bike, he typically can jump off and land on his feet. There are a few wipeouts after especially aggressive blocks, but no one is injured.

Besides scrapes and bruises, sprained ankles and wrists are the most common unicycle injury, Holm said, but even those are rare. It’s much easier to get hurt on a bike, he said, because you go so much faster.

Unicycle riders can only go as fast as they can pedal, because it’s single-speed. With one caveat: Holm recently started selling geared hubs for an extra $1,200 on top of the cost of a unicycle.

“With a two-speed hub, you can gain speeds that were never possible before,” he said.

Who Rides?

Two “unimoms” – Lisa Kool of Phoenix and Cristi Swan of Ahwatukee – sit on a bench at the park watching their sons, Bennett Kool, 14, and Connor Swan, 13, play unicycle basketball.

“I didn’t know he knew how to play basketball,” Lisa Kool says.

“I did it once in P.E. (physical education) because I was forced to, and I wasn’t good,” Bennett said, “and I never got the ball.”

The better you get, the more fun it is and the more things you can do with it, Bennett says.

“Soon I’ll be able to do jousting, golf, polo,” he said. “A lot of neat but useless skills.”

Unicycles seem to appeal to, shall we say, geekier types.

“I don’t think you mind being a nerd, right?” Kool asks her son.

“Right,” he answers.

People with “problem-solver” personalities gravitate toward the unicycle, Holm claims: “You see a lot of engineers, computer scientists.”

La Bonte thinks it appeals to “people who are not afraid to be laughed at,” he said. “It’s (for) people who have a very high persistence ratio. You need to be willing to try and fail and try and fail and try and fail a lot.”

In other words, stubbornness helps.

Back at the basketball game, the careers of the participants vary widely. Rosenkrans is a pilot. Chris La Bonte is a high-school principal and Heather La Bonte is a tutor and life coach.

Holm’s academic background is in geology, and he works part-time for an engineering firm.

Unicycles continue to be a tough sell, even though they look like a heck of a lot of fun, likely because people aren’t willing to stick with it.

Cristi Swan said she tried once. “I don’t have the balance at all,” she said.

This makes Holm nutso.

“People will say, ‘I tried that once. It’s impossible; I’ll never do it,’” he said. “Can you imagine going up to a violinist and saying, ‘I tried that once?’” m

Every Tuesday at 7:30 p.m., the Arizona Unicycle Club plays basketball on one wheel at Indian School Park.