A year ago in June, Kevin Lyman, founder and organizer of the Warped tour, wondered if his long-running festival had run its course.

Ticket sales on the 2006 run of the tour had dropped notably and that summer’s edition of the tour had been fairly tumultuous, with tensions between several bands on the tour getting considerable media coverage and a number of bands dropping off early.

“I didn’t know if maybe it was time for the Warped tour to end,” Lyman said in a mid-June phone interview. “We had gone down in ticket sales. Of course, in this industry everyone’s like, ‘Oh, the tour’s over. It’s done.’

But as the 14th year of Warped tour gets going this summer, Lyman is once again excited about the future of the annual traveling modern rock festival. Losing the Warped tour would have certainly been difficult for the alternative rock community. Over the years, Warped has given hundreds of bands the kind of exposure they could never hope to get with their own tours, and even helped a number of bands (including in recent years Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance) score major commercial breakthroughs.

One band on this year’s tour that can speak directly to the benefits of landing a slot on the Warped tour is Story Of The Year. The group, which had a hit album, Page Avenue, in 2003, but hasn’t regained momentum since, has done stints on the Warped tour in four previous years.

“It [Warped] was a good opportunity to get the record out there to maybe a new audience,” guitarist Phillip Sneed said. “We have been away for a couple of years, and a lot of these kids that are coming up, younger kids, may not be all that familiar with who we are.”

This year, each Warped date features roughly 65 acts, and the bill once again covers a multitude of styles, including pop-rock (Say Anything and Cobra Starship), hard rock (Every Time I Die), punk (Pennywise), ska-pop (Reel Big Fish) and even psychobilly (HorrorPops). Complete band list and schedule is available at www.warpedtour.com.