Nederland skateboarders teach us a lesson

The general public tends to write off skaters as grungy, lazy, troublemakers. But that's far from the truth.

In reporting a story for the May issue of Caribou Current, I asked Nederland skateboarders about the lessons skating can teach us. There's a lot more to learn than just how to do a kickflip - skating can teach us how to persevere, how to fail and succeed, and how to be a good person. This episode is a compilation of some of those conversations.

Check out the original story about Ned's skate culture here: How Nederland's skate culture got its wheels on the ground

Special thanks to Dave Kingsbury, who shared this video wof him and his then 4-year-old son Quinn skating together.

Our theme song is courtesy of singer-songwriter Brittney Wagner. Stream her record Better off Dead here.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:02

Time for some honesty. I've set foot on a skateboard maybe five times in my life. I didn't last long. I could never quite get over the whole crashing into the pavement thing. Plenty of my friends were skaters though. And I always loved watching them do it. They just made it look so easy. When I set out to report a story on skating in Netherland, I wanted to understand why people do it. How they got over that fear when I couldn't. After speaking with Netherland skaters, local skate park advocates, and even a former pro who now works for Tony Hawk's nonprofit building skate parks around the country, I realized that fearlessness was not the missing ingredient. And there's so much more to learn from skateboarding than just how to do a kickflip. Welcome to the Mountaineer Podcast. I'm Tyler Hickman. Today, we're going to feature some of the conversations I had with skateboarders while reporting a feature for the May issue of Caribou Current. At one point or another, I asked each person I interviewed what they learned or what someone else could learn from skateboarding. It made me want to try and get on aboard again. Or at least capture that mentality in some way. So in this episode, we're going to get inside the mind of a skater. Normally, at this point in the show, we'd highlight some of our top stories from the week before our main segment. Admittedly, it's been a pretty slow week for news with the holiday weekend. So there's not much to report. But there's still a lot of great content in this week's paper. A photo roundup of the world famous Boulder Boulder race, poems about moms and baby elk, a snapshot from two Netherland area graduations this weekend, and an inside look at what could be the Peak to Peaks best community yard sale. The Mountaineer does it all. We're inside city council chambers at every event, listening to what our community is telling us. Whether you need a new recipe or a primer before your local election, we've got it covered. So make sure to pick up a copy of this week's paper or head to the MTNEAR.com. You'll find what you're looking for. Now we're going to skate school. The general public tends to write off skaters as grungy, lazy troublemakers, but they're actually very serious athletes. And I think the skate community is much more supportive of its members than most of the traditional sports we tend to put on a pedestal. Former pro Alec Beck, also the director of advocacy and public engagement for the skate park project, which helped fund Netherlands Nathan Lazarus Skate Park, thinks so too.

SPEAKER_04 2:59

In short, it's not competitive. There's no score, and if there's no score, everybody's winning. And that's one of the things I love most about this. You go to a skate park and you see people fall down, you see people land amazing tricks, regardless of whatever the trick is. Everybody's pushing themselves. When you're at a skate park, you have different people landing different tricks at different ability levels. The person who's landing their first Ollie over the pyramid versus the person who's doing their first kick flip back lip down the small handrail. It's a similar sense of accomplishment for each. It's not, oh, I got to level nine and you only got to level two. It's like, no, man, the jump from level one to level two is just as scary as the jump from level eight to level nine. And I think that there's that commonality that we have. We know that it's terrifying. We know that it takes a lot of courage. We know that it takes everything we have to push ourselves. And there are no coaches. I mean, there are, I mean, I was an Olympic coach, but it's not the same thing as nobody's telling you what to do. You're driving yourself there. That is recognized. We know how hard it is, we know how fun it is. It's basically this very interesting even playing field where there's magic happening no matter how good you are.

SPEAKER_02 4:21

Courage. That's what I thought I was missing. It's not something that most people just have, though. You have to build up to it. It's learned. The thing with skating is it takes courage to get on the board, but it will also teach you that courage every time you fall off.

SPEAKER_03 4:40

Do you know what a blunt is? A blunt, you you go up like here's your board, you go up the face, you pop, and then you ollie back in. So you're ollying back in backwards.

SPEAKER_02 4:49

That's Ned Local Dave Kingsbury, one of the driving forces behind Ned Skatepark. He doesn't have your typical skater look. Clean cut in a sort of backcountry way. He'll admit that himself. But he's got that skater mentality, which he tried to pass on to his son, Quinn.

SPEAKER_03 5:09

And I became obsessed with that trick. It's terrifying. And I think I knocked myself out like five times trying to learn that trick because I do think skateboarding imparts some pretty serious lessons. And I said, I'm gonna go out and I'm gonna try this trick 50 times. And I'm either going to the hospital or landing the trick. And I have this video Quinn has a clipboard, he's like this big, and he's making hash marks. And I missed the trick 53 times and ate shit. Just boom to the ground. And he's sitting there knocking them up. And then I made it on 54. And so what I was trying to pass on is don't give up. I never pushed him into skating. I don't think, did I? And he would skate between my legs when he was little. And then I was on the bike ride, you were maybe eight. And I came back from this bike ride, and I hear the rant. And I was like, huh. I didn't invite anybody over. Um, and Quinn was out there skating. And he got obsessed.

SPEAKER_02 6:35

Courage, perseverance, community. There's a lot more to skateboarding than meets the eye. And there's no skater archetype. But even if there is one, laziness is definitely not in its genetics.

SPEAKER_05 6:52

I have my PhD in evolutionary biology, and I I work in a lab that develops computer software and uses computer software to better understand biological organisms.

SPEAKER_02 7:04

Silas Titus grew up skating in the parking lot of the Ned grocery store and hitting jumps off DIY ramps that Nathan Lazarus Skatepark eventually replaced. Here's what the biologist said when I asked him what he learned from skating.

SPEAKER_05 7:18

I think it's probably the hardest thing I've ever tried to do. Not only are you struggling to just figure out how the mechanics of this thing works, um, but it's freaking painful. Like the the the risk that when you mess it up is like really high. So that sense of uh being able to like stick through and try something that you are trying to strive to get to, whatever arbitrary thing it is, is like definitely very, very valuable to um to have to work through that so much. And it's interesting because I think the reputation is sort of this like people see the intensity from the outside and the sort of like the grunginess of it, you know, everyone scraped up and bloody and like pissed off and smashing their skateboards and stuff. And it's so I think it has this sort of perception of being this like uh sort of like grungy person thing, but like the overwhelming number of people that I've met and interactive with skateboarding are always like they're just sweethearts. Like everyone's like tends to be really, really nice, nice people.

SPEAKER_02 8:26

Um Silas isn't the only kid to come out of the Ned Skate scene, learning more than just how to kickflip. Uh Steven Lefaber, executive director at Netherlands Teens Inc., watched the skate park change the lives of kids after he spent years working with local skate park advocates to get the park built next to the youth center.

SPEAKER_00 8:45

I think what I've seen is it it provides a low-cost, virtually no-cost way for teens to be active over the years. Certain teens were out there every day throughout the summer, and they just wait for the snow to melt. And it provides an opportunity for you know, some folks to really just engage in something positive. And I think, you know, for some like the skills that they learn through skating and trying to like do certain tricks over and over, and the feeling of like accomplishment that you get when you you know succeed at something after trying it for so long. I think those like indiv for for individual folks it's had like huge impacts on on their ability to to be resilient, to persevere, to overcome obstacles and kind of how that relates to their life. There's times when someone would ru come in and be like, I just you know landed or I just kind of skated off the Death Star or whatever, you know. I've been f scared to do that for so long, you know, and and they'd come in and be super stoked on it. So I think like, you know, from individual levels, there's there's there's instances where I have seen like that skate park keep people engaged in ways that maybe they wouldn't have been if it wasn't there.

SPEAKER_02 10:14

For kids growing up in Netherland, they have options, not just pee-wee football. Just like anywhere else with a skate park, Alec Beck from the Skate Park Project says, and options help kids find out who they really are.

SPEAKER_04 10:28

When you place a skate park in a remote or isolated area, you do create a social, emotional watering hole, social, emotional, physical watering hole for these people to come together to meet each other, to meet themselves. I think more than anything, skateboarding teaches you how to learn and it teaches you about yourself, teaches you really what you're made of, um, and it teaches you how to evolve that. So without that, you you get this kind of desert where your only options are whatever's there, team baseball, which is great, or playing video games, which has its own merits. But, you know, I think for a lot of us who grew up skateboarding or who are just finding skateboarding now, uh, it helps you find some things in yourself you didn't know you had.

SPEAKER_02 11:13

After hearing all that, I decided to give skateboarding another go.

unknown 11:24

Alright.

SPEAKER_01 11:33

Couple cars are looking at me. I don't think they trust me, and I certainly wouldn't after watching me on a skateboard. I got my vans on. Alright, I forget if I lead with my front foot. I'm getting on the board, pushing.

SPEAKER_02 11:50

I was a bit jelly-legged and immediately scared I'd fall and smash my face in.

SPEAKER_01 11:55

Not going very fast. Alright.

SPEAKER_02 12:02

I did fall a few times. But I got my feet under me just long enough to feel comfortable pushing around.

SPEAKER_01 12:28

I feel pretty successful. I feel comfortable. It's it's all I'm like working my way up here.

SPEAKER_02 12:36

I won't be going off any ramps anytime soon. But it felt pretty good to let myself fail so I could succeed. So the next time you see a group of rowdy skaters, sit and watch. It might not look like it, but they're learning. Learning how to fail, how to persevere, how to be a good community member. You might learn something too. That's all for today. A huge thank you to every single person I spoke to for this piece. You can hear more from them in the full story from our May issue of Caribou Current. It's also on our website. I'll link to that in the show notes. As always, if you liked today's episode, please share it around. It's the best thing you can do to help us grow the show. You can subscribe to the Mountaineer Podcast wherever you listen to get our episodes the moment they're released. Once again, this is the Mountaineer Podcast. I'm Tyler Hickman. And thanks for listening. We'll see you next week. And remember Skate or die.