Billy Harrison

The AA Pro Who Named Supercross BMX, 1989

A Legend Bike Co. rider page · primary source: Bill Ryan and Supercross BMX company history

At a glance

Level AA Pro
Scene Southern California, late 1980s
Teams SE Racing (Quadrangle, then the Assassin prototype) · TECH Racing Team
Known for Naming Supercross BMX in a 2 a.m. phone call, then never racing the frame built for him

Billy Harrison is the reason Supercross BMX has the name it has. He is also proof that BMX history does not always hand out fair endings. He was the AA Pro Bill Ryan built the first Supercross frame around, the rider whose frame problem started the whole project, and the guy who picked the name over the phone at two in the morning. Then, before he ever threw a leg over the finished bike, a mountain bike crash took him out of racing. He never rode it.

A Frame That Kept Flexing, Then One That Didn't

In the mid-1980s, SE Racing built Harrison a stretched Quadrangle frame — and it flexed too much under him. Not long after, Bill Ryan designed the SE Assassin, one of the first straight-tube race frames SE put out, built around Quadrangle dropouts and rear stays. Harrison rode the Assassin prototype and loved it. That was the frame Bill wanted the whole TECH Racing Team on. SE could not build enough of them to supply the team, and that shortfall — Harrison's flexing Quadrangle and the Assassin SE couldn't produce at scale — is the gap Supercross BMX was built to close.

Supercross BMX's own company history backs up how stuck the team was on the frame question. TECH was working with SE, Free Agent, Diamondback, MCS, and Elf at different points trying to get Harrison a frame he liked. At one point the plan was to buy a batch of rejected Elf Boss frames, repaint them, and sell them under a different name to fund Harrison's racing. When he actually rode one, he hated it. The frame problem stayed unsolved.

Building the First Supercross Frame

With outside options exhausted, Bill Ryan and the TECH riders built their own frame from the ground up. Harrison was one of the voices in that process, alongside Brian Lopes, Kiyomi Waller, Jon Agnew, and Billy Griggs, whose technical input stood out most. They started from the geometry of the Free Agent Limo, the dominant frame of the moment, and fixed its two common complaints — a rear triangle that ran short and a head angle that turned in too fast. Watching riders flex their rear triangles a quarter inch on every gate-start snap is what led to the frame's signature secondary seat stay design, built to stop that flex from wasting energy on the launch.

2 A.M., a Phone Call, and a Name

The geometry and the design were done before the frame had a name. According to Supercross BMX's own published history, Harrison called Bill Ryan at about 2 a.m. from a national race — the two of them had been kicking names around for months — and said, "I've got it. Supercross." He told Bill he'd put it to Greg Hill and a group of other pros, and Supercross came back the unanimous pick. It stuck instantly, and it is still the name on the frame 37 years later. Greg Hill's input on the name is also why every Supercross frame built from 1988 through the last of the 1999 models ran GHP dropouts — a quiet thank-you built into the hardware.

The Frame He Never Raced

The first Supercross frame came together fast once welder Brent Shoup built the prototype — black raw cro-mo, fresh weld beads, ridden all night at the local jumping spot, then painted black with neon green stays and dropouts by morning. They called Harrison to tell him it was ready. Before he ever got to ride it, he was seriously hurt in a mountain bike race and stepped away from racing for a while. The frame built specifically to solve his problem became the bike he never once raced. Supercross had to go find a new team almost immediately afterward, starting with Rayner Matthews for the Grands.

Where He Is Now

Billy Harrison is alive and well these days, living in Georgia and helping coach his son's baseball (source: Bill Ryan, firsthand, 2026). Web searches on his name also turn up material about unrelated people who share it — a reminder that a common name needs real corroboration before anything gets added to the record.

Where the public record runs thin

Billy Harrison's birth details, hometown at the time he raced, and full national-level results ledger are not documented in the period BMX magazine archives or the databases checked for this page. He does not appear in the USA BMX Hall of Fame. Nothing beyond what Bill Ryan and Supercross BMX's own published history confirm is included here.

Where Billy Harrison fits in the bigger story

Riders: Glenn Pavlosky, Brian Lopes, Brian "Bogi" Givens, Billy Griggs, Greg Hill. Brands: SE Racing, TECH BMX Products, Supercross BMX. The bigger arc is in our History of BMX series.

Sources

Bill Ryan, founder of Supercross BMX — first-hand recollection of the SE Quadrangle and Assassin frames, the TECH Racing Team, and the founding of Supercross BMX (primary source), as published on his own Legend Bike Co. page. Supercross BMX, "History of Supercross BMX," supercrossbmx.com — the frame-development process, the naming phone call, and the mountain bike crash that kept Harrison off the finished bike. oldschoolmags.com and bmxsociety.com were checked for independent period coverage of Harrison; neither returned results beyond general BMX archive material at the time of research.