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Recent Articles
- “Underexposed” in the Public Eye: Amelia Brodka Interview
- 2012 Skateboarding Fatalities
- Replacing Modular Parks with Concrete
- The Skatepark Bid Process
- Sample RFP for a Skatepark Bid (Replacing a Modular Skatepark)
- Stand Up For Skateparks
- Just Say NO To Modular Skateparks
- An Interview with Ty Smith: Drop Into Skateboarding
- Putting Wenatchee on the Map!
- Skateparks $100K and Under
- Art of Board and I Ride I Recycle – The Bruce Boul Interview
- 2011 Skateboarding Fatalities
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Design and Construction
Art of Board and I Ride I Recycle – The Bruce Boul Interview
Let’s start with the always interesting- How long have you been skateboarding and who influenced you to start? I started skating around 1983 or so. After riding a purple plastic banana board and a crappy Nash or something, I graduated to my first “real” board the Vision Mark Gonzales. At that time, I also discovered punk rock and my life completely changed. I was attracted to...
2011 Skateboarding Fatalities
2011 USA Skateboarding Fatality Reports There simply aren’t enough good skateparks or skateboarding venues in America. Skateboarders need safe places to skate. We hope that these figures of our 2011 USA skateboarding fatality report illuminates the gravity of this tragic problem. As skateboarding continues to increase in popularity in America we know that skateparks and venues set aside for safe skating are the best way to...
The 2011 Skatepark Tracker
Have you ever wondered how many public skateparks are out there??? Have you ever wondered how many get built in a year??? The first question is almost impossible to answer. Public skateparks started being built in the 1970′s and continued at a very slow pace through the 80′s and 90′s. Once the new millennium hit public skateparks exploded across the U.S. This explosion happened so fast...
Building Skateparks in Indian Country
Over the last couple of years we have seen an influx of public skateparks being built on Native American reservations. In fact, this is happening across the country in towns such as Tuba City, AZ; Sand Springs, OK and Pine Ridge, SD. Recently, we sat down with Lisa Fabian of the Nashoba Youth Foundation out of Poteau, OK. In the past year, Lisa has done an...
Lewiston, ID: Interview with Dan Prasil
Sometimes it takes years to get a good skatepark built in your town, and skaters are usually the ones leading the effort. SPS recently sat down with long time skater and skatepark advocate Dan Prasil. It took Dan and his crew over twelve to build a world class skatepark in their town. Check out how they did it… How long have you been skating? I’ve been...
Victoria, TX: Taking the Park Back
On Dec. 20th 2008, the City of Victoria opened a state of the art 15,000 square foot skatepark. The park features a large street area and a flow bowl, and is hailed as a destination skatepark in South Texas. Unfortunately, when the park opened it lacked common park amenities like restrooms, water fountains and shade structures. On top of that, the skatepark was poorly sited behind...
Concrete Skateparks in the Holy Land
In the last four years, four concrete skateparks have been built in Israel. That, in itself, is huge for our local scene. Even sweeter is that the parks have been contracted out to Grindline and that the most recently completed one in Kfar Saba was built by a Grindline-Dreamland cooperative effort that included Mark Hubbard, Mark Scott, Sage Bolyard, Tavita Scanlon, and Alfred Perez. The first...
Painting Murals in Skateparks
A few years ago we had A LOT of offensive, gang-looking tagging and graffiti showing up at Carolina Skatepark with the #1 target being the big bowl (likely due to it’s depth and the ability to not be seen easily from street level.) We’d heard that the “unwritten code” with graffiti artists is they will not tag each others artwork – so we thought we’d give...
Ten DIY Skateparks
The world we live in today is full of many challenges. We ask a lot of our community leaders, and they are forced into difficult decisions every day. Lets explore the opportunity to combine several unique challenges and deliver solutions that work for everyone. We know that skateboarding is popular, and that skateparks are generally the most used areas of entire park systems. There are many...
Concrete Ledge Construction
In 2003, our city installed the first prefabricated modular skatepark in San Antonio. At the time, we were not very familiar with this equipment, but within six months the modular ledge ended up looking like this… The ledge basically crumbled due to heavy skating, and the vendor did not honor the warranty to repair the equipment. I later found out this is very common with modular...