A quartet of professional BMX riders performed high-flying stunts at Veterans Tribute Career and Technical Academy on Wednesday with a simple anti-bullying message for their student audience: “You matter, and people care about you.”
“A few words can make such an impact on somebody,” said Zack Yankush, a BMX rider and the assembly’s emcee. “Bullies make fun of you for something that you’re into. We got made fun of for BMX our whole life. Who has the last laugh now?”
The group is taking their anti-bullying message nationwide this fall to more than 100 schools through the No Hate Tour, according to Dane Beardsley, the tour’s manager and a BMX athlete. The Clark County School District said it recorded 8,110 bullying incidents in the 2024-25 school year, including 874 incidents of cyberbullying.
Veterans Tribute was the tour’s first stop this fall, Beardsley said. Canyon Springs and Sunrise Mountain high schools have shows scheduled for later this week before the group travels east to Denver, Kansas City, Texas and the Midwest. The No Hate Tour is free for schools to host through a partnership with the U.S. Marine Corps, he added.
The act consisted of a short anti-bullying speech from Yankush sandwiched between several aerial tricks. BMX athletes Wesley Hark, Matt Mecher and Oscar Marquez soared through the gym, spinning their handlebars and even backflipping over a teacher.
Beardsley, a former teacher, said he has seen firsthand how student achievement and positive experiences with their peers are linked. He hoped their 45-minute assembly brought students joy and reminded them to be kind to others.
“If a student’s having a really rough day because something’s going on at home, and they bring that to school and they get made fun of on top of that, that’s only gonna push them further down to that dark place,” Beardsley said. “It’s just important to just be kind to people, because you never know what they’re going through.”
Yankush shared with students how his life was flipped upside-down during the COVID-19 pandemic and how his friends and his bicycle saved his life. He encouraged them to surround themselves with people who have their backs.
“I’ve lost way too many friends to suicide,” Yankush told students. “If you see somebody being bullied and don’t even directly get involved, let one of your faculty members know. It puts you in a position to make your classmate’s day a whole lot better, or you’re going to save somebody’s life.”
Contact Spencer Levering at slevering@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0253.
