DRILL: The Freeride Event Built on Community, Not Sponsors

On November 8th, a crowd of veterans and mountain bikers came together on the University of Health & Performance campus outside Bentonville, Arkansas, for the Veteran’s Future Festival. The goal was simple: honor the veterans who have served and protected this country, and bring some of the world’s best riders to what’s being dubbed the biggest dedicated freestyle bike venue in the United States. While the output came off as seamless, there was a small but dedicated crew of riders and visionaries behind this event, and only through countless hours of hard work and dedication did DRILL become a unique experience for riders and fans nestled in the Ozarks.

From the outside, DRILL looked like a fully formed, big-budget show—complete with helicopters, fighter-jet flyovers, a packed venue of fans, and elite-level riders. But just a little over a month before the event, it was a half-baked idea and a task list a mile long.

DRILL started as a conversation between two friends: Griffin Loop, an artist and builder whose background is in snowpark design and large-scale sculpture, and Carson Graham, a dedicated rider and filmmaker who works full-time at UHP creating content around the school’s mission of helping veterans transition to civilian life.

“We’re creatives first,” Griffin told me. “What we care about is creating pure space for people to do what they do—whether that’s an athlete or an artist. DRILL is just that idea applied to freeride.”

The opportunity came through UHP, a veteran-focused training and education campus in the hills outside Bentonville that uses fitness, health, and purpose-driven education to help military veterans transition into civilian life and new careers after their time of service. UHP was all-in on the idea, and thanks to the support of veteran and entrepreneur Matt Hesse, Griffin and Carson were given the freedom to turn an empty hillside into a unique venue that was part earthworks art installation, part immersive envronment, and part freeride jump line—an environment built for riders and spectators alike.

“This was the second thing out of dirt I’ve ever made,” Griffin laughed. “We picked an empty slope and asked, ‘What can we build here?’ We knew we wanted to go big, but we also realized we could make a completely different kind of venue." Something that put riders and spectators together in the experience rather than separating them.

The other major choice was philosophical: year one of DRILL would run without traditional industry backing. No big-brand title sponsor, no event company parachuting in with a playbook. And while that sounds terrifying on paper, it became DRILL’s superpower.

“With no outside deliverables, nobody was telling us, ‘It has to be done this way,’” Carson said. “That meant we could make this truly rider-oriented from the beginning. Every decision, we were asking the athletes, ‘What do you need? What do you want this to feel like?’” It was truly a rider-first event and put the people involved at the heart of the operation.

One of the most notable people involved was freeride legend and modern-day mountain bike superstar Carson Storch. Storch caught the vision early and was the legitimate anchor the crew needed. He helped seed the roster and gave other riders confidence that this wasn’t just another sketchy first-year experiment, but something truly worthy of their time.

From there, things started to snowball. A compact timeline turned into a “ferocious, locked-in effort,” as Griffin put it—20 straight days in the machine, plus hundreds of texts a day between New York and Arkansas as the pair bounced between roles: builders, event producers, hospitality leads, marketing department, and logistics. And still, by the time the athletes arrived, nobody had put a full run down the line.

“They showed up and were like, ‘Yo, this gap is big,’” Carson said. “We could have easily had a moment where everyone went, ‘This isn’t going to work.’ Instead it was immediately, ‘Okay, what do we need to change?’ Everyone rolled up their sleeves and got to work.”

“They wanted it as much as we did,” Carson said. “These are guys who were my heroes in the sport. Five days later, they’re digging, testing, pitching ideas for year two. They didn’t just show up to ride; they joined the build.”

Somewhere between that first day on site and the flyovers on event day, a phrase emerged: founding family.

Rider Daniel Ruso was the first one to say it out loud, but everyone seemed to feel it. The inaugural DRILL roster isn’t just a start list—it’s a core group that has ambitious goals for the future of this event. As Carson put it: “If they catch the vision, we can do anything from there.”

Camaraderie was built among the riders in record time, thanks in large part to the one thing UHP doesn’t have: cell phone service.

“There’s basically no service on campus,” Carson explained. “At first everyone’s like, ‘Oh no, what am I going to do?’ But then they’re throwing footballs, doing golf-cart laps, hitting the gym in the mornings. You can’t disappear into your phone, so you end up actually hanging out.”

That tech blackout is intentional for UHP students, who spend three weeks on campus working through health-and-performance-focused programs aimed at helping veterans rebuild purpose and community. For the DRILL athletes, it compressed that same arc into six very intense days: train, eat well, ride hard, sleep, repeat—all together, all in one place.

“By the end, the thing everyone kept saying was ‘community,’” Griffin said. “You could feel that we’d built more than a line. We’d built a team.”

The vibes of the session were more than special and the athletes decided unanimously to split the prize purse evenly, and to donate $10,000 to Adolf Silva's Road to Recovery campaign that has assisted him following his crash at Red Bull Rampage. It shows the love these riders have for the sport and for eachother, as much as riding is an individual sport, more than anything its a team effort. Drill epitomizes that, and from start to finish it was the community that built and sustained this event. As I’ve learned over the years, the team is the dream, and this was no exception. The people involved are what make mountain biking what it is, and it's times like those that remind us all why we should be proud to call ourselves mountain bikers.

“New perspectives are everything,” according to Griffin. “The riders got to see what UHP is doing for veterans. The veterans and corporate partners got to see what these athletes do. Somebody in a suit who’s never watched freeride in person suddenly sees a flip in front of them, and their whole idea of what’s possible shifts a little. That’s the good stuff.”

For the athletes, being part of a Veterans Day-oriented event created its own ripple effect—new conversations, potential sponsors, and a clear example of how pairing riding with a larger purpose can unlock support.

“It became really obvious that it’s not going to be one rider, or one brand, or one event that ‘saves’ the bike industry,” Carson said. “It’s going to be that mesh of all those parties coming together. DRILL was a little snapshot of that—veterans, local community, riders, organizers, partners—all pulling in the same direction.”

As for what’s next? Griffin and Carson haven’t laid out a roadmap. Much like riding itself, the best moments happen when the possibilities are left open and intuition takes over. “The second you try to over-dictate what something is, you put a glass ceiling on it,” Griffin said. “DRILL is about exploring potential. As long as we can keep providing pure space for riders to do what they do, there’s no ceiling.”

Short-term, that means leaning into the “founding family,” using what they learned in Arkansas, and getting year two on the calendar with more testing time and an even more refined line.

For all the talk about machinery, venues, and visions, both of them keep coming back to one simple idea: earnest effort.

“It’s just earnest effort,” Griffin said. “Two people believing in each other and giving it their best shot. That’s what attracted everything else. The athletes felt it as soon as they landed. That’s why they dug, that’s why they stayed late, that’s why they’re already talking about next year.”

Carson shared a similar sentiment: “Failure is the big fear any time you push into the unknown,” he said. “But if you’re coming from a pure place and you’re actually doing the right thing—treating people well, taking care of your crew, going all-in—then it’s not really failure. Even if it blows up, you learned, you grew, and the people who were there will know exactly what you were trying to do.”

“We now have a team and a force,” Griffin said. “We’ve got a founding family that understands what this is. We’ll all go back to our own lives for a bit, but we’re carrying that energy with us until we meet up again and keep exploring what DRILL can be.”