Michelle Sheehan

The Woman Who Ran S&S Bikes and Backed Tiger Teeth

A Legend Bike Co. chapter · a deliberately short page, because the record is short

At a glance

Role Proprietor, S&S Bikes (Sheehan & Sheehan Racing)
Scene Round Rock, Pflugerville and Austin, Texas · 1980s into the early 1990s
Known for Running one of the very first Supercross BMX dealerships, and backing the Tiger Teeth component brand

BMX history has a habit of writing down the riders and forgetting the people who paid for the van. This is a short page about one of the people who paid for the van.

It is short on purpose. We would rather publish four honest paragraphs than pad it out with things we cannot stand behind, and there is one open question about this chapter that we have not been able to close.

What the record confirms

The clearest account comes from Supercross BMX's own published company history, which matters here because Supercross dealt with S&S directly and had no reason to invent any of it.

In that account, Michelle Sheehan ran S&S — the Texas BMX mail-order and vending trailer operation that was one of the very first Supercross BMX dealers when the brand started up in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Her son Ryan was the founding member of the S&S race team. And when Ryan came to her with the problems that professional riders and older amateurs were having with their bikes, she started a little company called Tiger Teeth to fix them. Bitchin' Bolts came first, then the Tiger Teeth chainwheels, then imported JIVE panels from Ireland.

Read that back as a business ledger rather than a family story. A woman in Central Texas was running a retail counter, a mail-order catalog, a trailer that traveled to races, a sponsored team touring as far as England, a manufactured component line, and a transatlantic import arrangement. In the 1980s. In a sport that was almost entirely run by men and almost never wrote any of this down.

Bill Ryan's own assessment, given firsthand in 2026, is that the Sheehans were highly influential in BMX through S&S. This page exists because that influence never made it into the written record anywhere else.

2020, and giving her blessing

The one moment where she appears in the record in her own right comes decades later.

In 2020, Supercross BMX wanted an original-pattern chainwheel for its 30th anniversary bikes. Rather than reverse-engineer a dead brand and say nothing, Supercross reached out to Michelle Sheehan and asked permission to replicate the Tiger Teeth design. She gave her blessing, and the part went out as the Tiger Teeth Ryan Sheehan Tribute Chainwheel — named for her son, who had died in 2005.

That is the whole documented episode, and it is a decent measure of the person. She was under no obligation to say yes to anything.

An open question we could not resolve — read this before citing the page.

Supercross BMX's account names Michelle Sheehan as the woman who ran S&S and describes her as Ryan Sheehan's mother. The Sheehan family's own memorial site for Ryan names his mother as Brenda Sheehan, and the memories published on that site are written in Brenda's name. Both sources are credible and they do not agree. We can see several innocent explanations — a middle name in everyday use, two women in one family, a first name misremembered years after the fact — and we have no evidence for any of them. So we are not asserting the relationship. What we state as fact on this page is only what Supercross BMX published: that a Michelle Sheehan ran S&S, backed Tiger Teeth, and authorized the 2020 reissue. If you know how these two names fit together, we would genuinely like to hear from you through the contact page.

Where the record runs thin

  • Effectively everything biographical. No birth details, no hometown of origin, no account in her own words. Nothing.
  • Her exact role and title at S&S. Owner, co-owner, manager, the one who actually worked the trailer — the sources say she ran it and go no further.
  • The relationship question above. Michelle or Brenda, and how the two names connect.
  • Whether she held any role in track operation, race officiating or sanctioning. We specifically looked for this, because it is the sort of thing a shop owner in a strong state scene often ends up doing. We found no evidence that she was a track operator, an official or a sanctioning body figure, and we are not going to assume it to make the page more impressive.
  • Hall of Fame status. She is not among the 79 inductees listed by the Texas Bicycle Motocross Hall of Fame as of August 2026, including in its industry and pioneer categories.
  • A separate identification we did not make. A Michelle Sheehan is publicly listed as president of Gaston & Sheehan Auctioneers, the Pflugerville firm that Ryan joined after he finished school. Same surname, same small town, plausible on its face. We could not confirm that these are the same person and we are not treating them as one.

Where Michelle Sheehan fits in the bigger story

Family and brands: S&S Bikes, Tiger Teeth, Ryan Sheehan. Trade connection: Supercross BMX and Bill Ryan. The shop-owner tradition she belongs to is covered in The Bike Shops That Made BMX and in the Beavers Bicycle Shop chapter. The wider arc is in The History of BMX.

Do not confuse S&S Bikes of Texas with the unrelated California company covered in our S&S Performance chapter.

Sources

Supercross BMX, supercrossbmx.com — Tiger Teeth Ryan Sheehan Tribute Chainwheel product page; the primary source for Michelle Sheehan running S&S, S&S being one of the very first Supercross BMX dealers, Ryan as founding member of the S&S team, the founding of Tiger Teeth at Ryan's urging, the Bitchin' Bolts and chainwheel and JIVE panel sequence, and her blessing for the 2020 replica. BMXmuseum.com — reference entry 4521, S&S Tiger Teeth Chainrings, for S&S as Sheehan & Sheehan Racing and its Central Texas base (page not directly loadable; text obtained through search indexes). rememberingryansheehan.com — the Sheehan family's memorial site for Ryan Sheehan, which names his mother as Brenda Sheehan; the source of the naming discrepancy set out above. Texas Bicycle Motocross Hall of Fame, txbmxhof.org — inductee index checked directly against all categories; no Sheehan listed. Bill Ryan, founder of Supercross BMX, 2026 — firsthand recollection that Michelle Sheehan and her son Ryan were highly influential in BMX through S&S, that S&S came out of Pflugerville, Texas, and that Tiger Teeth started out of S&S. bmxsociety.com and oldschoolmags.com were checked and returned nothing naming her.

Last reviewed: August 2026. This is a living chapter and a thin one. Firsthand accounts and corrections are welcome through the contact page.