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August 16, 2008

Eighteen compete for YMCA skating glory

What goes up must sometimes be skated down

By Dan Linehan

MANKATO — slideshowClick here to see a photo gallery of the skateboard competition.



This is a contest for street skaters, who ride rails and do kickflips down stairs.

“What you guys walk up, we like to skate down,” says A.J. Vossler, 22, a YMCA employee who was behind the microphone at the YMCA Chesley Roller Sport Park Saturday afternoon.

Eighteen competitors, ages 13 through 23, competed in a series of one-on-one contests to measure skill under pressure.

There’s a skatepark just next door, with ramps and jumps that promise high speed and lots of airtime.

But this style, called “flat land” or “street,” shows off what skaters can do with just a kick and their wits.

A lot of the kids here, Vossler explains, aren’t “park rats;” they spend more time on the street.

“A lot of these kids are at the gov...,” he says, trailing off because he probably doesn’t want their haunts published.

If the onlookers are any indication, though, skateboarding isn’t the taboo it once was.

You know it can’t be so bad when a 96-year-old woman rolls by and nods approvingly.

Betty Chesley, for whom the park is named along with late husband B.H., wanted to see if the contest was going well, and she seemed satisfied.

Chesley said she and B.H. wanted an outlet for all the kids who aren’t good at typical sports and otherwise would have little opportunity for recreation.

Eddie Williams, 16, has been skating for six or so years and says most parents are cool with it.

And, pipes in friend Alex Peterson, most skaters wouldn’t care what their parents thought.

So, does sponsorship by the Young Men’s Christian Association make skateboarding less, well, cool?

Both skaters are emphatic that it makes no difference.

The tournament runs much like back-to-back games of HORSE in basketball. The skater who goes first (decided by a rock-paper-scissors match) does a trick, and if his competitor misses he gets a letter.

In this case, the first letter is “O,” because the game is OUT.

Another variation, SKATE, “gets pretty gnarly,” Vossberg explains. After consulting a colleague for the definition of “gnarly,” he explains that it takes too much time.

Williams has an aggressive strategy that involves going straight to difficult tricks.

He starts his first match by popping the skateboard up with his back foot, flipping it around beneath him, then landing on it. His opponent, 19-year-old Eloi Albanil of Fairmont, can’t match it, earning the elder skater an “O.”

But Williams can’t keep up the pressure, and loses to Albanil, the eventual contest winner. He’s got a more conservative strategy: Start simple, then move to harder tricks.

In round one, competitors have a success rate somewhere between baseball and basketball — landing five out of 10 tricks would be a good record. By the second round, the hit-miss ratio is about even. And by the final round, skaters are landing three tricks for every one they miss.

If there are two generations here — younger teenagers and older regulars — then a third generation may have had representation as well.

Tamera Saar, of Eagle Lake, is here with her five- and seven-year-old boys, and if she has any reservations about skateboarding or the crowd it draws, she doesn’t show them.

“I’m a very open-minded person and if this is something that they can enjoy, that’s great.”

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