Halftime! Jared Eberwein And The Boys Perform

“I recently just experienced a first for myself last week, I had the opportunity to do an NFL halftime show for the Oakland Raiders through the show company that I normally do shows for, BMX Pros Trick Team. I’ve been doing shows for Woody Itson for years, I believe my first show ever I was 16, long time ago. I’ve been able to experience a lot of different places and travels because of these shows that I do for Woody. Also very different an unique shows that I would have never imagined doing, for instance a halftime show for the Oakland Raiders. I could kind of guess what the situation was going to be like after dealing with so many different setups and conditions. Grass, big field, halftime, which usually means not that much time. Quickly setting up and getting right to it is usually the plan. We arrived at about 9AM the game wasn’t until 1PM but they had tons of fans filling the parking lot up with tailgating and just getting lose before the game. There was a little section in the middle of everything where people can get together for some drinks, food, and fun activities. We were setup amongst the mix of things also, scheduled to do a show at 10:30 AM. Then after that figure out a plan for the halftime performance setup. Ran through a little trial setup and figured everything out. Once all of that was set, we were taken to a little box suite they setup for us to watch the first quarter of the game. I had never been to a live NFL game, it was quite the experience, and for it to be a Raider game too, it was pretty intense. The fans were SO die hard and gungho for their team, I was a little intimidated, after our first show they gave us Raider hats to wear, I felt safer wearing the hat, because it was kind of like protection. Showing that I was on the Raiders fans side, making me feel more comfortable haha. We had to go down to the field at the beginning of the 2nd quarter just to be ready and get things lined up. Once it hit halftime, we rush on to the field withw a crew of dudes to help setup. The workers drove a golf cart stacked with a lot of plywood because everything was on grass. They laid out the base for use to set the ramp up on, we started working on that as they started laying out our 40 yard runway. Everything was ready to go, we rush back to the start of the runway and wait for our introductions. Once they ran through all 4 of us, it was showtime. The plan was, once the person in front of you takes off of the lip thats when its time to go. We had 4 riders we thought it was going to be a pretty good easy quick show, turned out to be sooo tiring. Our pedal back was in grass, our runway to the ramp was 40 yards, it pretty much turned into a non stop loop of laps. All I wanted was a little break to catch my breath, just had to get through it. We all did about 6 jumps non stop back to back, which usually ins’t that much and fairly easy, but it must have been the grass that was the killer part of the whole performance. Once we we’re done, we handed our bikes off and quickly disassembled the ramp and rolled it off the field with the help of all of the crew, and that was a wrap. The most amount of people that I’ve ever done any kind of performance for by far in my life, sold out stadium in the Oakland Raider’s hometown. Not sure on the figure, but close to 53,000. I had a blast and was such a rush!”