LAKEWOOD — Mayla Herrick’s first ride on a motocross bike was the ultimate red herring.
Long before the Thornton teenager became a motocross wunderkind, the 6-year-old Herrick got atop her first bike. She promptly ignored a key instruction from her dad, zoomed off into the cul-de-sac in front of her house, lost control and crashed, breaking her hand.
“All I remember is sitting on the bike for the first time, and my dad told me, ‘Don’t go wide open (on the throttle), and the first thing I did was I whiskey-throttled and crashed,” Herrick recalled with a laugh. “Just completely dropped my elbow, full throttle. But even though I broke my hand, that didn’t push me away from the sport. Ever since that day, I don’t remember ever not wanting to do it.”
A decade later, there have been very few crashes and tons of impressive wins showcasing generational speed as Herrick has set herself up for a chance to be the next face of the , which is in its first official season as a pro circuit.
Herrick was in attendance this weekend at the Thunder Valley National in Lakewood as a spectator on the precipice of her professional debut. Riders must be at least 17 to compete in WMX, and Herrick turns 17 on Friday. So her WMX debut will come on her birthday at the High Point National in Pennsylvania this coming weekend, the third leg of WMX’s six-stop circuit.
While the age minimum has Herrick wishing she was born a week earlier so she could compete on the track she grew up riding — plus, missing the first two stops of 2026 likely puts Herrick out of contention to win the WMX season championship — her recent achievements suggest she’ll make up for those lost opportunities in short time.
Herrick won an Amateur National Motocross girls championship at 14 at Loretta Lynn Ranch in 2023, and made more waves this year. She was the youngest rider on the Team USA squad that , and also became the first girl to qualify for Loretta Lynn’s in the Schoolboy 2 class, where she’ll compete again in August.
picked Herrick for the FIM Oceanic Cup team despite not having previously seen the Coloradan ride in person. Herrick did not disappoint.
“It’s so technical. It’s smooth,” Denney said of Herrick’s riding. “It was so effortless, and her performance came on tracks she’s never been on … it blew us away.”
‘You can’t set a limit’ on Herrick
While Herrick’s rise in motocross has been a lifetime pursuit, the catapult to national prominence came from a decision five years ago, when she and her younger brother, Eli, 13, began working with Robbie Reynard. An accomplished former pro, Reynard owns , that features eight tracks across 165 acres.
When Mayla was 11, the Herrick family was in Ponca City, Okla., for a race. Ponca City is about 90 minutes from Wellston, and Mayla’s dad, Jeff Herrick, called and texted Reynard a few times to try to organize a visit to his complex.
When Reynard didn’t answer, the Herricks rolled up to his property unannounced.
“I told the kids, ‘I’m just going to drive there and hope for the best,” Jeff Herrick recalled. “So that’s what we did. Dropped off the RV, then we rolled the bikes down to the track, and (Reynard was sort of like), ‘Who the hell is this?’ (Laughs).
“I introduced us and was like, ‘Hey, this is Mayla. This is Eli. We’ve heard you’re the best at training, and this is where we want to be.'”
So began the Herricks’ dual-state lifestyle.
The year before connecting with Reynard, Mayla and Eli started homeschooling. So the siblings were in position to make motocross their full-time pursuit, and that’s what they did. Over the last five years, the family has commuted between Thornton and Oklahoma, spending a few weeks at a time in Wellston. There, they live in an RV, and the Herricks are currently having a house built about five minutes away from Reynard’s complex.
“They’re on what we in motorsports call the program, and the program is mom and dad are all in,” explained Mark Kite, the owner of Sun Powersports and one of Mayla’s longest sponsors. “They’re riding six, seven days a week, they’re in the gym, they’re cross-training and riding bicycles. They’re legitimately training like triathletes. And while Mayla has beat up on the boys for a long time in races, her growth and achievements over the last three years has been pretty impressive to see.”
Reynard says, “you can’t set a limit for where Mayla could go,” as her rise coincides with the infancy of the WMX division. He also has witnessed a rider who is tireless in her pursuit of the minutiae of the craft.
“Mayla has really good bike skills — the positioning on the bike and how she moves the bike around (while racing),” Reynard said. “Even with her bicycle jumps, she has some pretty good skills on a bicycle. She can jump a lot bigger jumps than I ever would have thought about jumping on a bicycle.
“The one thing that I always like to see when she comes here is when we’re done on the (moto) bikes, she’s out building jumps for her bicycle with a shovel, like actually doing work on the track to try new things — building a jump, testing it out, repeat. She never stops working.”
Starting next weekend, Herrick still has a serious challenge ahead of her to compete with the sport’s established forces — notably , who won the WMX title in the circuit’s pilot seasons, plus Australians Charli Cannon and Taylah McCutcheon as well as Herrick’s teammate, Mikayla Nielsen. Her amateur success, however, has already brought significant financial rewards.
Herrick has sponsorships from some of the sportap most recognizable brands, including Fox Racing, Monster, Oakley and Honda. Those sponsorships provide gear and her bike, but they also pay her a salary at the top of the field for female riders. Turning pro significantly increased her income as her big-name sponsors upped the ante to keep competitors from poaching her. And if she wins, her contracts feature performance bonuses that could increase the windfall.
It’s a lucrative set-up for a young racer in a sport where many of the professional men who are not highly ranked, not to mention privateers who are independent racers without major sponsorships, don’t make much money.
“I’ve got to remind her that your window’s pretty short (in professional motocross),” said Jeff Herrick, who also serves as his daughter’s manager. “So you want to have comfort while you win and all that, but you also need to make as much money as you possibly can, while you can.”
Thunder Valley’s role in WMX’s evolution
While Herrick is capitalizing on her rise, she’s stepping into WMX at a perfect time — and into a series that got a significant profile boost thanks to her home state.
Last year, the WMX races were initially planned to be two motos on Fridays all season long. But a rainstorm that hit Thunder Valley MX on Thursday, the day before the opening of the event, made the track unridable on Friday. That forced the AMA to audible and run a single women’s moto on Saturday following the conclusion of the men’s races, which meant the women’s race got on TV.
“Some people stayed, some people didn’t, but the broadcast (commentators) were blown away with the level of the racing,” Denney said. “And then came the comments on social media: fans being like, ‘They need to be racing on Saturday.’
“So over the summer, TV (decision-makers) asked, ‘Can we do the last three (tour stops) on Saturday, too? Like one moto on Friday, one on Saturday.’ When TV asks, you make it happen, and then we carried that plan into this year. With that, we knew we had to raise the caliber of the WMX motos, not only with the riding, but just all of the things that the professional men do.”
So while last year’s Colorado weather gave WMX the chance at TV exposure the women previously lacked, it also opened the door for a sponsor; purses that about doubled and expanded in payout from the top five to the top seven; and a tweaked point system that mirrored the men’s.
That changed landscape is what Herrick is about to ride into at High Point, the start of her WMX career that Denney believes will give the sport another young star who can “dangle a carrot out there for young girls to model them a path and a direction to become a pro motocross rider.” WMX’s other top talent is also just getting going: Turner is only 19, Nelson is 20, and McCutcheon and Cannon are 21.
“I want to create a pipeline for the younger girls early on, from like the 7-year-olds to 17, because next year you’ll have to be 18 to race WMX,” Denney said. “My goal is to align the best amateurs with more of a tangible path to really get them to stay interested in pursuing this sport. And the success and hype of a rider like Mayla, whom younger female riders across the country look up to, is a big part of that.”
