Our attentive team create a supportive environment that cultivates resilience and self-confidence in every budding biker.
Our Staff
Trained. Trustworthy.
Here for your kid.
Biking Buds staff are caring, energetic educators and youth workers who know how to help kids feel safe, seen, and excited to learn. Every team member is First Aid/CPR certified and completes our staff training, which blends three essentials:
Safe, skill-appropriate biking instruction
Social-emotional support (helping kids manage emotions, make friends, solve problems, and build confidence)
Hands-on learning that encourages kids to try, reflect, and try again with new insight
Our staff use simple, everyday moments on the bike to teach resilience, cooperation, and good decision-making. They’re steady, encouraging adults who help kids take healthy risks, build friendships, and discover what they can do.
Meet our Director: Sam
Sam Schultz brings more than a decade of camp leadership, curriculum design, and K–12 program management experience to Biking Buds… but the truth is, his camp journey started long before his résumé did. Raised at camp as the son of a head counselor and a head nurse, Sam grew up surrounded by the rhythms of outdoor play, communal learning, and the deep bonds that form when kids feel safe, included, and free to be themselves. It’s no surprise he went on to become a camp director.
Professionally, Sam has served as both a day camp director and a regional operations manager for a major bike camp program, where he sharpened his expertise in youth-centered instruction, staff development, safety systems, and experiential learning. He is deeply committed to using camp as a direct response to today’s youth challenges: loneliness, anxiety, lack of community, and shrinking access to unstructured outdoor time.
With Biking Buds, Sam brings Portland families a camp experience that is straightforward, trustworthy, and genuinely fun. He designed the program around what he believes matters most: cultivating skills, building confidence, nurturing social-emotional growth, and giving kids a place to form lasting friendships through shared adventure.
Energetic, earnest, and endlessly loyal to the magic of camp, Sam is fired up to bring the Biking Buds approach to budding bikers across PDX, and to help a new generation of kids discover what’s possible when they feel capable, connected, and joyfully in motion.
