Ambridge, PA. The local high school gym is abuzz. Ebullient young athletes take to the floor in a vigorous, though unconventional, race. Inventor Phil Stebler can't conceal his own enthusiasm. Phil knows that successfully launching a new competitive sport is no easy task.

In a Play Station®-Xbox® world, it's an uphill climb for any game viewed as low tech and, heaven forbid, physically taxing. Players today are more interested in games to be mastered with a single, toggle tripping thumb (while the other thumb is hooked around a pizza).

Besides, physical competitions typically are dominated by the gifted. You know the ones: hovering height, pumped pecs, and flat-out fast. Common folk need not apply. After all, we have our own role to play. Our job is to spectate (to coin a phrase), while focusing our own enthusiasm on nurturing our ever-broadening waistlines with cold beer and hotdogs. But, Phil Stebler believes he has put together a competitive game that will coax us down from the bleachers and out onto the playing field.

"We all stand to benefit from vigorous exercise; that's an understatement," Stebler explains. "But this new sport also is about teamwork and coordination. And, best of all, just about everyone can play."

Stebler is referring to Trekking, a competitive sport he introduced to great press reviews only a few weeks ago. I met recently with Phil Stebler, and we reflected on seminal moments in the development of great American sports. "In every case," Stebler noted, "we find that games weren't simply invented for games' sake. Always, the inventor had in mind at least a specific objective, if not a grand vision. Sports annals appear to confirm his observation.

Take, for example, the case of famed sports innovator James Naismith. The year was 1891. Naismith, a YMCA phys-ed instructor in Springfield, Massachusetts dribbled a soccer ball across the floor, pulled up and tossed the ball into a suspended peach basket. With a swish, basketball was invented.

What was Jim Naismith thinking, we ask? As the story goes, his boss had issued an ultimatum with a two-week deadline for Naismith to invent an indoor game that would channel excess energies of rowdy boys cooped up during those particularly icy Springfield winters. So we see Naismith performing under pressure in what apparently was the first full-court-press. Goal Naismith!

Unlike Naismith's experience, Walter Camp didn't labor under ultimatums. Instead, he was known to have a vision, borne of his own determination. Camp envisioned a more intricate and orderly game than the rugby and soccer sports he and his Yale classmates routinely played against their New England rivals. Walt Camp had distinguished himself as a player on the rugby field, but it was in the quiet of his dorm room that he penned the rules that distinguished the enduring game of American football.

And then there's baseball. Three decades before Camp's fellow football players took to the gridiron, baseball already was well on its way to becoming America's pastime - - thanks to the inventive mind of Manhattan bank teller Alexander Joy Cartwright. In the middle of the 19th Century, Cartwright was the first to organize ball players into a club which he dubbed the New York Knickerbockers. Then he turned to the task of defining baseball rules and regulations, and even invented the playing field diamond itself. Thus, a ragtag pickup game played previously as town ball was reinvented, conforming to standards thoughtfully crafted by Cartwright.

The Cartwright vision was realized: organized teams such as the Knickerbockers could journey from Manhattan to Hoboken (and soon thereafter to New Orleans and San Francisco) with every expectation of playing a consistently formalized game of Baseball very much as we know it today. (By the way, in the first recorded baseball game played under Cartwright rules, his team lost…on the road…in Hoboken.) Vision may not win ball games, but it can help launch an invention, as Phil Stebler points out.

And speaking of Stebler and vision, this man has seen a lot in this world. A former US Marine with experience in the South Pacific and the Korean Conflict, Stebler now is a retired homebuilder in Western Pennsylvania. Not surprisingly, his invention also has a marine connection. He says he drew inspiration from a Marine boot camp training film where teams mastered coordination and collaboration by “walking” with feet positioned on parallel rails. Short ropes attached to the rails enabled team members to lift each rail in unison, moving it forward in a synchronized walking motion. Forward progress depends upon strength, timing and perfect cooperation.

In Stebler’s inventive adaptation, the ropes are eliminated and the rails, or Trekkers as he calls them, are equipped with multiple foot-bindings accommodating more than one person. For indoor competition, Trekkers are provided with carpeted lower surfaces. Forward movement is accomplished as players lift the foot bindings and press them forward, much like cross-country skiing. Excitement is ratcheted up by Phil Stebler’s special features. He interconnects front/rear ends of the skis to form ski “chains” and adds parallel players sharing common skis with their partners. The result is a mind-boggling collaborative challenge like nothing you’ve ever seen. And the kids love it. Trekking teams compete head-to-head or against the clock.

Phil Stebler holds great dreams for his new sport and has filed patent claims to bolster those dreams. But, like Naismith, Camp and Cartwright, monetary gain isn’t listed on his game roster. Instead, Stebler rejoices in seeing his innovation enthusiastically embraced by young people, as happened in the inaugural Trekking event held in that little town near Pittsburgh, this spring.

Phil is happy that his new sport is accessible by people of all ages, types and sizes. He’s especially proud that it fosters unity of purpose, teamwork and physical fitness, not unlike the boot camp lessons learned by his US Marine Corps successors. Phil Stebler beamed, “The media really jumped on this, and all those young people Trekking across the gymnasium couldn’t have been more enthusiastic.”

“New Sport Tests Teamwork,” proclaimed the Butler Eagle;
“Keep on Trekking,” cheered the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette;
“Tricky Trekking…students participated in the first Trekking meet,” reported the Cranberry Eagle

In the rousing event in Ambridge, the Army JROTC team from nearby Seneca Valley High School took on the Marine Corps JROTC from Ambridge High. One of the JROTC captains later wrote to Stebler expressing his enthusiasm about the meet. The young man’s letter included a particularly moving comment prompting Stebler to tack it to the wall just above his workbench.

As Phil Stebler happily continues to perfect his new sport, he looks up occasionally to read the younger man’s prediction: “I think what you have invented will become a worldwide sport.” Phil Stebler’s vision, precisely.