"I can't believe he talked me into this."

"I'm going to keep my hands up the whole way!"

"Why am I doing this?"

"I think I can see my house from here."

"Why did I eat two hotdogs for lunch?"

Growing up in Cincinnati, Jeff Pike, a 1998 graduate of U of L's Speed Scientific School, quickly developed an infatuation with roller coasters during his many trips to King's Island with his father. Their favorite ride was The Beast, still the longest and one of the fastest wooden roller coasters in the world. With 7,400 feet of track, the coaster reaches speeds of more than 60 miles per hour.

During one of his first rides, as the cars approached the top of that frightening first hill from whose apex he would be flung into terror, Pike remembers thinking: "Someone has to make these."

He decided then and there that's what he wanted to do-make roller coasters. So he set about learning exactly what it would take to get this kind of job. He began by tracking down a local amusement ride producer and "bugging" its designer for advice. Annoyed at first, Curtis Summers was eventually won over by Pike's enthusiasm and became his mentor.

Summers told his young protege that for starters he would need a mechanical engineering degree.

"That's the reason I came to U of L," Pike says of his enrollment in Speed's mechanical engineering program. "I didn't really have an interest in being an engineer but I wanted to build roller coasters, and if that's what it took to do it then that's what I would do."

Pike is now one of only a handful of engineers who design roller coasters for a living.

And in his case, that handful is even more limited. In an industry dominated by steel, Pike estimates that he occupies one of only three positions in the United States that specializes in the original wooden variety of roller coasters-like The Beast.

Some designers consider wooden coasters archaic, especially since steel can be bent to allow much more flexibility in a track's layout. Pike knows the shortcomings but believes that in this instance aesthetics takes precedence over pragmatics.

"There's a nostalgia and an art to wooden coasters that you never get with steel," he explains. "A well-thought-out, well-designed wooden coaster blends into the park and becomes a part of the landscape like a dynamic sculpture."

On the practical side, he adds, wooden coasters are easily maintained and can outlast their steel counterparts by decades.

The Mad Scientist

What does it take to be a roller coaster designer?

Take a deep knowledge of calculus, physics and other pertinent engineering skills. Mix in a sense of humor, a dash of daredevil, a hint of sadistic mad scientist. Pike fills the bill perfectly.

At U of L, he was an enthusiastic learner outside the classroom as well as in. Summers had told him that getting a job designing roller coasters had as much to do with who you knew as what you knew. So he spent much of his time outside classes tracking down, researching and then communicating with roller coaster manufacturers worldwide.

"I bombarded them with information about myself," he says, "and told them I would be contacting them for a job."

He also enlisted the aid of Speed's co-op program, letting his adviser know exactly what he was looking for and following her advice on how to realize his goals.

"Working with the co-op program at U of L was the key. It was a huge advantage," Pike says.

And when it came time for an international amusement industry conference to take place here in the States, Pike made good on his promise by showing up at the manufacturers' booths and interviewing for a summer job.

His efforts paid off.

After a "nervous wait," several offers rolled in. Pike accepted a position with Chance Rides in Wichita, Kan.

However, his life followed the ups and downs, twists and turns of a coaster ride and before the summer internship could begin Pike suffered a broken back in a skiing accident. Chance Rides worried that Pike's condition would prevent him from performing a major job function-riding roller coasters-and withdrew its offer.

While his Speed adviser managed to get him another co-op with a "regular" company in Louisville, Pike was sorely disappointed. Next summer, fully recovered, he redoubled his efforts to secure a coaster design internship.

Once again, his persistence paid off.

This time the offer came from D.H. Morgan Manufacturing in La Selva Beach, Calif., whose lead designer was the brains behind the King's Island Vortex, a twisting steel mass of corkscrew turns and precipitous banks.

"My AutoCAD and other Speed classes helped, but this is where I really started to learn," Pike says.

Aside from their mutual obsession with roller coasters, Pike and Steve Okamoto were opposites. Pike is an outgoing talker; Okamoto, subdued and quiet. But as a team they clicked, and Pike knew he was learning from the best.

When Pike came aboard, Okamoto was meticulously plotting his latest scream machine, the Steel Force, for Dorney Park in Allentown, Pa. Pike arrived just in time to assist.

By the time they finished, Steel Force ate up a mile's worth of track that thrust thrill seekers 200 feet into the sky, then plunged them to the ground and hurled them at speeds topping 75 miles per hour through a 120-ft.-long tunnel. It would soon be voted the number one steel ride in the world by a respected coaster guidebook.

That experience led to invitations to return for subsequent co-ops and, six months before his graduation, a job offer. The offer came from a person he'd worked with while at Chance who had just started up a wooden coaster design company called Great Coasters International Inc. (Check out their Web site at www.greatcoasters.com).

There was just one catch: He needed to start in 60 days. After some desperate moments working out how to complete the last courses to earn his degree, Pike accepted.

Two months later he was in California, busily concocting a pants-wetting adventure called the Gwazi, a huge dual wooden coaster that was being erected in Tampa's Busch Gardens. While the company's manager was on-site overseeing construction and another staff member took care of structural details, Pike was left to work out "probably 350 design drawings, lickety-split."

"It was a rough start," he admits. "It was very difficult to go from school directly into such a fast-paced environment. On a scale of one to 10, I'd say during that project my knowledge of wooden coasters increased from one to eight."

Pike was able to put much of the computer programming skills that he had learned at Speed to work on the project, mainly using AutoCAD, Maple and Visual Basic.

Next up was the Lightning Racer at Hershey Park, Pa. Having proven himself on Gwazi, Pike was given the job of designing the track's center line and various sections. By the time the project ended, he figures he'd done 40 percent of the design.

Today, Pike is head designer at Great Coasters, which relocated to Sunbury, Pa., after one of the owners retired and the remaining partner wanted to return to his native state. Pike is busily figuring how to make a more flexible car featuring single axles that will reduce the linear footage needed for banking and allow the vehicle to travel "super fast." The company also is trying to break into the European market, something that it is very close to accomplishing, Pike says.

Having realized the first stage of his life's dream, he is now contemplating how to pull off the second: owning his own amusement park, featuring "a nice long roller coaster with a couple of lifts that take you into tremendous speeds."

Given his track record, Pike is sure to succeed.