It was founded in March 1984 by five former members of the American Bicycle Association (ABA): Rich Mann, Dave Cook, Geoff Sims, Steve Schaefer and Rod Keeling, who became the USBA's first President.
[citation needed] Many believe that the lawsuit was an attempt by the ABA to crush the new competitors, and while unsuccessful, it did bleed time and resources from the USBA and engendered the destructive atmosphere that was to follow.
[citation needed] Of the original five founders of the USBA, Dave Cook and Geoff Sims, both commercial pilots, left the company for flying jobs shortly after its creation.
[citation needed] The 1985 USBA Grand National held in the Tarrant County Civic Center in Fort Worth, Texas, could arguably be recognized as the high point for the sanctioning body.
[3] In ill-advised move, the new USBA management had business dealings with disgraced promoter Renny Roker.
As much as it was ill-advised, they had an agreement with Roker that he would tape for broadcast on cable TV by the Nickelodeon network the USBA's San Diego National held in early 1986.
Many of the top BMX bicycle manufactures including Murry, Redline, GT, CW et al. sent their factory teams to that race in the hope of TV exposure for their products.
After a shaky first two years of operations, it met with financial problems during 1986 which was the result of low sign ups for its nationals that plagued it from the beginning.
Factors that fed this apathy by racers were poor track construction; delays in running of races; equipment failure, holding their nationals which coincided with those of the ABA and NBL.
For instance during the low amateur sign up (the professionals attended in mass) Pro Series No.3 held near Las Vegas, Nevada, in 1986 the electronic starting gate broke and starts had to look back to an earlier era of BMX and manually drop the gate.
[citation needed] In early 1986 to obtain more members, the USBA brought the freestyle BMX National Freestyle Association (NFA) sanctioning body in early 1986 from Hutch Hi-Performance BMX, a bicycle company that had created the NFA originally in 1985.
The short, inglorious days of United States Bicycle Association ended on an up note.
For the first two seasons of its existence the USBA practiced a nearly unique system of advancement in the amateur ranks called the "Bye".
This involved very complicated paperwork integrating the previous days class winners into the semis of the Grand National competitors who worked their way up in the qualifying motos.
This system was tried before by the National Bicycle Association (NBA) in 1974 and it also failed both for its complexity and the perceived unfairness of transferring racers to the semi-finals (or quarter finals, etc.)