The Legend of the Bike Whisperer of Beverly began four years ago, during quarantine.
A mother was trying to teach her child to ride a bike, but the lessons were not sticking. Frustrated, she posted a note to a Facebook group for moms of the South Side of Chicago: Did anyone have advice on how to teach her kid to ride a bike? Or know anybody who could?
Heidi Burrel saw the message and wrote back immediately: Louie, her husband, could do it. He taught 12th grade physical education at a Gage Park high school, he coached girls’ volleyball and boys’ basketball, and he had earned a reputation for possessing remarkable amounts of patience with young people attempting new skills.
That patience had been a surprise to even Louie Burrel.
When he taught his son, Brayden, to ride a bike, he let him crash a few times. He was more of a “boy dad” back then, he explained. He wanted his son to fall and pick himself up and all that.
“I wanted him to learn the hard way, which is not always the best way,” Burrel said. When bicycling became one of the few outlets for his kids in the early months of the pandemic, his younger daughter, Nia, was still using training wheels. Family rides were torturous. So Burrel took Nia to an empty lot, but this time, Burrel was gentle; in fact, he had promised Nia that no matter what, rule No. 1, Daddy would never let her fall. And 15 minutes later, Nia was riding a bike. She never crashed once.
Burrel told his wife, and his wife told thousands of moms online.
Within a week, Burrel had students for informal lessons, then more students. One mom posted a video showing how much Burrel could do with only a clear day and 30 minutes. He was fast becoming the Bike Whisperer, probably the only parent in Chicago who could teach a kid to pedal a bike without having a stroke or swearing like a sailor.
Four years later, he’s taught more than 400 Chicago children how to ride a bike.
Earlier this month, one of them was Alex White, a 6-year-old from Beverly. She waited shyly behind the wheel of her Frozen bike, silver streamers dangling off the handlebars. Her father, Kevin, wearing dark sunglasses, admitted to me, deadpan: “Look, we tried to do this ourselves. My wife and I. We tried. I feel like I am testing my manhood not teaching her myself! But everyone in her grade rides, and so I am going to try anything.”
He leaned over and said to Alex: “Baby girl, are you nervous?”
She shook her head no.
He righted himself and said, “We’ve gone up and down the block, but now I’m thinking that she probably does better with someone else teaching this. My wife is against it. She said we can still teach her to ride a bike, but look, I just want to see what I get out of it.”
Burrel, still wiping the sweat off his head from the previous lesson, nodded. He’s been told something similar dozens of times, from parents across the South Side and, increasingly, the suburbs and the North Side, where the Legend of the Bike Whisperer has spread. He stepped in front of Alex’s bike and crouched down.
“I am Coach Louie,” he explained. “You are here to ride without training wheels.” Alex nodded. “Good, for your lesson, I have two rules for me, three rules for you. Your rules: No. 1, keep your hands on the handlebars. No. 2, keep your feet on the pedals. And No. 3, look forward so you can see where we are going. Now my rules: No. 1, I can’t let you crash into anything, no matter what. And No. 2, I can not let you fall. You follow your rules and I’ll follow mine. Alex, can I get a high-five from you?”
Alex obliged.
“You broke my rule!” Burrel said in mock outrage. “Hands on the handlebars!”
They started off slow, Burrel’s right arm on Alex’s right shoulder. Her father watched and turned to me and, thinking out loud, said: “I don’t want her little brother to learn before her. It’s not the end of the world — right? Some of this stuff we hold on just needs to go.”
Burrel, in a way, is paid for his patience. He charges less than $40 for a half-hour lesson, and he earns it. When I tried teaching my daughter a couple of years ago to ride a bike, I would have paid double. Riding a bike is a skill that tends to click and stay clicked so tightly you forget there was a time when you couldn’t do it. When I asked friends and several parents who hired Burrel how they learned to ride a bike, it was striking how many could not remember. They fell, they all recalled. Then one day, they could ride. You tend to gloss over the hows and whos.
Burrel, though, sees the unformed clay. He takes kids who are scared of pedals, scared of balancing, scared of brakes, but he also gets kids so eager to start riding they take off without him. He’s always surprised how many don’t need his steadying hand within 10 minutes of the first lesson. But the names, the kids, the lessons, it blurs. There are only so many Aidens and Calebs one man can teach before everyone is an Aiden or Caleb.
Earlier in the day, Dee Atkins was watching her 7-year-old son, Noah, ride slowly beside Burrel, who was sweating buckets, jogging alongside the small bike, softly encouraging, making loop after loop in an empty bank parking lot on a warm Sunday.
“I reached out to Mr. Louie — my son calls him Mr. Louie — over the winter to get ready for spring, because Louie is a hot commodity. I wanted a jump on everyone before he booked up. This is Noah’s third lesson. My husband and I tried. We took a weekend. We figured we could do it in a weekend! But between the two of us, we struggled to give Noah the confidence to do it himself. I think, as parents, we might have been too close, you know? I had heard the Bike Whisperer was kind in spirit, and he taught kids to ride very quickly. He had the touch. Right now, Noah is working on controlling the bike and brakes, but the confidence Mr. Louie has boosted in him! My husband is a firefighter. He’s all about getting down and just doing the job, because that was his childhood experience. Baptism by fire. Funny thing, because he’s our child, we didn’t want that for him. We bought him shin guards, all kinds of guards, and we could not make this happen. So, Noah was flustered, we were flustered. But at the previous session, when Noah’s bike started to fall, Louie caught him and rolled onto his back. And that simple show of kindness …”
Noah stopped at her feet.
“Doing great, bud!” Dee smiled.
Burrel tugged a hand towel out of his pocket and swiped at his neck and sides of his face, but still sweat came. He took a swig of water. “OK, Noah,” he panted, “one more around?” They take off with Burrel’s right hand pressing against Noah’s right shoulder. The purple rims of Noah’s bike spun faster, faster. “Strong,” Burrel said quietly, “strong.”
A light breeze flapped the red and yellow awning of Joey’s Red Hots at the other end of the parking lot, but the sky was harsh and cloudless. Burrel acclimates well to the heat, he insisted. He keeps microfiber T-shirts in his car. He teaches a few times a week after school lets out for summer, then when school returns and he goes back to his day job, he does it on weekends. The demand has been so strong he’s been training a second Bike Whisperer, a younger one.
Burrel grew up around Morgan Park, and is in his mid-40s now, but looks a decade younger. He moves well for a guy who was briefly hospitalized in February because of tearing of abdominal muscles. He said with a laugh: “You reach a certain age and there are precautions you do need to take — for instance, stretching.”
When Noah’s lesson ended — he would need a fourth lesson to improve his braking.
Seven-year-old Yusuf Zvizdic of Oak Lawn, a student from earlier, still practicing loops around the parking lot, wearing a helmet topped with a faux Mohawk, zoomed past Burrel. His mom, Samra, said that she wants one more lesson for Yusuf. “He’s almost perfect but I want him perfect,” she said. “Yusuf doesn’t think he needs it, my husband doesn’t think he needs it, but I kind of just want him to be in that safe zone, you know?”
Burrel agreed and then walks across the lot to meet his next student, a 7-year-old from Bucktown diagnosed with ADHD who has issues with developmental coordination. He’s on his fifth lesson, but his mother, like the others, said he does better “with a third party.”
Burrel said, from his own experience, “parents seem more willing now to outsource the kind of things that we think parents should traditionally accomplish. I see both parents sharing duties, I see both working, and as much as they want to do this, time is now the biggest factor. But I also hear from parents who can’t run alongside a bike. Parents who have back issues. Maybe they don’t have a great relationship with the child. They would rather pay someone to do in 30 minutes what might take them three hours to fail at.” He said none of his students have crashed yet. He claims a 100% satisfaction rate.
His secret is no secret at all, he said.
He tries not to touch the bike. (“I want them to feel like they are in control the whole time.”) He likes to position himself to the left of the bike and touch a student’s right shoulder as they peddle, building a sense of security, a bubble around the student.
The summer tradition of riding a bike as soon as school lets out has taken hits in recent years: A 2019 study by the Sports & Fitness Industry Association said the number of American children who rode bikes at least 25 times a year fell by 1 million from 2014 to 2018. Other studies suggest those statistics have climbed upward since the pandemic. But realities remain: Bikes are costly, social media and video games have an outsize role in kid’s lives, and parents simply don’t let children roam like they once did.
As Burrel sees it, without the motivation to ride, learning to ride becomes less urgent.
“I was the youngest of three. I was trying to keep up. There was a lot of crashing into park benches and lampposts, but also my big brother saying, ‘OK, get up, we’ll clean off that scratch at home.’ My parents helped, but the real motivation was to just keep up.”
After a couple of preliminary rides around the parking lot, Alex Winter stuttered to a stop before her father. “She has a good foundation, I can tell,” Burrel said. “We’re two minutes in and I can tell it’s going to be a good lesson, Dad.” Kevin White looked relieved.
Alex pushed off and Burrel jogged beside her.
But as she made the last curve, her handlebars locked up and she pulled hard to the left and started to fall and threw a leg sideways, to the ground, but Burrel was there, righting her again.
“No problem,” he whispered. “Happens. Happens. You’re getting it. Almost there.”
