McFarland inducted into HOF

By: 
Ron Burtz

While the Custer High School Class of 2022 was celebrating its graduation from high school on Saturday evening, May 21, a past CHS grad and one of the town’s favorite sons was celebrating a graduation of sorts himself. That night Ryan McFarland, a member of the CHS Class of 1987, was being inducted into the South Dakota Hall of Fame in Chamberlain in recognition of his success as both an entrepreneur and a philanthropist.
McFarland is the inventor of the Strider balance bike and the founder of Rapid City based Strider Sports International which over the past 15 years has produced over four million of the unique pedal-less bikes that help children learn how to balance on two wheels as soon as 18 months of age.
“Sometimes you think ‘hall of fame,’ that’s like after you retire,” said McFarland following the induction ceremony. “I feel like I’m still in the trenches, still pushing hard every day. It was a very fun call to receive and a great honor and I guess it puts some pressure on me to keep working hard and make sure I earn it and keep earning it.”
“It was a very fun night,” said McFarland of the ceremony held at Cedar Shores Resort with nine other inductees and more than 500 spectators in attendance. “My whole family was there and a good number of the Strider staff came over for the event.”
While McFarland helped put his home state on the map with the success of Strider bikes, he believes his greatest contribution has been through the non-profit organizations he started to get more children riding.
After retrofitting a bicycle to get his own young son on two wheels at an early age, McFarland recognized there was a need in the marketplace for bikes that would help preschoolers learn to balance on two wheels, so in 2007 he started Strider. It was soon a huge success.
Then in 2017, on the 10th anniversary of the company, McFarland started the Strider Education Foundation, a non-profit organization independent of the company. The very next year the foundation settled its focus on a kindergarten PE learn-to-ride program called “All Kids Bike.” The goal of that enterprise was, in McFarland’s words, “to reach the greatest amount of kids in the shortest amount of time at the youngest age possible to make the biggest impact.”
In addition to developing a curriculum for kindergarteners, All Kids Bike also created a continuing education piece for teachers to help them learn how to teach the children to ride. In addition to the curriculum and training, participating schools also get a supply of Strider bikes and all the rest of the equipment they need to teach the course. McFarland says the mission is to make learning to ride a bike a part of kindergarten education for all kids.
“That’s a major shift from where society is right now,” said McFarland. “Bike riding’s been on a steady decline along with active outdoor play.”
McFarland says he is concerned about the fact that today’s children are more sedentary than ever, with statistics showing many children are staring at screens over seven hours per day. He also notes that obesity and related diseases are at all-time highs among children in the U.S.
“This is really a push to get kids off the screens, off the couch and get them outside and active,” said McFarland, “and I believe teaching them to ride a bike is really the key to making that happen.”
McFarland credits much of his business savvy to having grown up in the Chief Motel in Custer which his parents Joe and Sandra owned at the time. (Joe was a Custer County commissioner for many years and Sandra was a long-time teacher at Custer schools.)
“I really learned much about business growing up in small business there in Custer,” said McFarland.
He says he loved growing up in Custer and the tourism business was “a key part” of his education.
While McFarland says the business of Strider is still “charging forward and growing,” he is most gratified by the fact that the foundation continues to grow as well. There are now pilot programs of All Kids Bike going in all 50 states and the program has expanded to other countries as well. There are currently over 100 schools in South Dakota using the program in kindergarten and McFarland is pushing to eventually get every school in the state on board.
“I’d love to make South Dakota the first state in the nation that graduates every kid knowing how to ride a bike,” he said.

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