A tour of the Tobey skate park design

Our preliminary skate park design has been posted on the web! Shown above is the bird's eye view of the Tobey skate park design. If you would like to see other angles of the design, go to the Wormhoudt Inc website where Zach Wormhoudt's firm has posted images showing multiple views of the park. Check it out.

Let's a take a little tour of the lay-out so we can fully appreciate the careful thought that has gone into designing our skate park.

Terrain is all inclusive

One of the big mistakes commonly seen in skate parks is the absence of a gradual transition from beginner features to advanced features. Sometimes a park will host mostly beginner terrain but then have few intermediate or advanced areas or you will see parks that have beginner and advanced elements but lack intermediate terrain. For example, the Oxford skate park has an incredible advanced area that is 6-10 feet high that abruptly transitions to a beginner area that is only 3 feet. Going from 3 to 6 feet requires huge jump in skill level that few will make at a younger age. Ideally you would have some 4 and 5 foot terrain mixed in as well.

As shown in the image below, the Tobey skate park lay-out is designed to have a diverse type of terrain that caters to a large range of skill levels and skate styles.

The green squiggled line marks the beginner/intermediate area. The yellow line marks the street area which is for intermediate and advanced users. The black line marks the intermediate advanced area.



The beginner area hosts a feature known as the snake run. For a teaser/preview of what we can expect the snake run to look like, check out the Venice beach snake run being skating by six year old Asher Bradshaw in the this YouTube video. The snake-run is about 40 seconds into the video. Pretty amazing feature and kid!

In the picture below the the "snake path" is shown as a green line while red dotted arcs indicate areas in the snake run that will be used by more advanced users. These dotted arcs represent places where users will jump or "ollie" over sections of the run.

There is another beginner area outlined with a black circle. This area hosts a mini-halfpipe feature that will allow 4-5 year old kids to learn how to skate while also keeping kids out of high traffic areas. This is an important feature to have in order to minimize collisions with younger children.






Intermediate/Advanced bowl Area

There are two bowls in the area that are connected to each other. There is a five foot intermediate bowl (circled with the red dotted line) and there is the advanced bowl ( circled with the solid red line). The advanced bowl ranges from 6 to 10 feet in height. All levels of skateboarders will enjoy this area, however what makes this area advanced is the height of deeper bowl. Beginners and intermediate skaters will roll around the bottom of these bowls while the advanced riders will actually ride and grind on top edges of the large bowl. Advanced riders will also be able to launch 2-6 feet into the air because of the height and the design of the two interconnected bowls.



Street area

There are eleven street features ( circled and numbered below in yellow) which include a flat rail (1), a low down rail (2), step-up fun box (3), snake-run ledge (4), table-top step down (5), hubba ledge (6), return flat-bank (7), gap ledge (8), back extension ledge (9), a bank to bank (10) and a curved hubba ledge combination (11). It's quite amazing that Zach could squeeze these many features into a 10,000 square foot space.



All in all, we are going to have a fantastic park! Although our park will not be big, it will be packed with stuff that will be fun for all different ability levels. My guess is that parents who have not skated for years will have a hard time just sitting there and watching there kids skate-it will turn into a family affair. Let's get this park built!

Still here!

I can't believe it's been six months since my last post.

My apologies for letting my vast reader audience down ( all two of you ).

Despite not blogging for awhile, it's been busy here in Memphis skateland.

We had a public meeting in September that was kicked-off by our own Mayor, one of our collaborators, Splinter Youth inc won a Give365 grant and MAM had a demo at Greenlaw with the Untitled skate team! Congrats to Mark Jannetta on pulling down that grant. He'll be using the grant funds to build a portable skate-park set-up that he will use to bring skateboarding to kids in other community centers through out the Memphis area.

Faithskate and and Advent Session finished their 3rd and 1st season(s) of hosting bi-weekly skate sessions for the Bartlett and Cordova youth. Well done and much appreciated.

In September, Zach Wormhoudt, our skate park designer gave a thorough presentation at the public meeting of what type of skate park we should expect to see when the park opens next fall.

A big thanks to everyone who took the public skate park survey and attended the public meeting. Your voices were heard and are reflected in the preliminary design that is now up on the Wormhoudt Inc website. Check it out here. It's still preliminary and has to be approved by the City so we won't "officially" celebrate just yet..

We're stoked on the design and certainly hope you are too! The park design has a lot of beginner terrain in it that will make the park very friendly to small kids and families. I'll get more into layout details in another post soon.

The Final 3 day push in May to win a skate park for Binghampton!

We are still rallying for April but we'll push hard the first three days of May to get into the top two positions.

If we hit the top two spots in the first three days we will vote the rest of the month to stay there. If we don’t hit the top two, we’re done voting.

Vote for our partners too! They are voting for us.

We have 9 Pepsi partners so we have nine ideas to vote for each day. The “ideas” that won in April used this strategy.

To win, each partner MUST vote for the other 9 ideas.
Voting for 9 partners will take you about 1 minute:

The first time you vote for the 10 ideas, it will take you about 5 minutes. However, the Pepsi refresh site remembers what ideas you voted for so the next day you can vote for all of the ideas of our 9 partners in about a minute.

How?

The next day ‘sign-in’ at the bottom left part of the pepsirefresh.com site. After you “sign-in” the “sign-in” will disappear and be replaced with “Your profile.” Click on it and a new webpage will load with all the ideas you voted for the day before. Vote for all ten ideas. Repeat daily.

We'll vote for you!

Thank you all for your dedication for voting each day in April. If you would like to continue to vote but are a bit tired of voting we'll vote for you. Send us your name, email and date of birth and we'll vote for you. You can send your info
here




Here is are the vote buttons for our project and our partner's projects:

Diversity rules in skateboarding high school competitions

Here is an article taken from the LA Times. Consistent with it's national passtime status, skateboarding is quickly gaining popularity in high school sports. The article reports that three years ago there were only three high schools that offered the sport. Three years later there are over 40 along with a new competition between schools.

Read on:

"Southern California is the place where alternative sports flourish because on any given day, thanks to wonderful weather and diverse geographic offerings, the sports options are overflowing.

Let's count the diversions: surfing, roller hockey, motocross, ice hockey, rugby, cricket, boxing, rowing, bowling, sailing, rock climbing, skiing, fencing .

Skateboarding growing in popularity among high school sports
HIGH SCHOOL NOTEBOOK
The National High School Skateboarding Assn. began with seven high schools three years ago and has 40 schools represented this season, and it continues to gain participation and sponsorship.
May 04, 2009|ERIC SONDHEIMER, ON HIGH SCHOOLS

Southern California is the place where alternative sports flourish because on any given day, thanks to wonderful weather and diverse geographic offerings, the sports options are overflowing.

Let's count the diversions: surfing, roller hockey, motocross, ice hockey, rugby, cricket, boxing, rowing, bowling, sailing, rock climbing, skiing, fencing . . .
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So there I was Saturday morning in Culver City seeing the adventure spirit of teenagers exploring, experimenting and enjoying the adrenaline rush of skateboarding.

This was the Southland at its best, kids 14 to 18 from seemingly every ethnic background showing the magic of what can happen when diversity and ingenuity converge.

They came from Los Alamitos, Palmdale, Venice, Chatsworth, Granada Hills, Santa Monica, Riverside and Long Beach to represent their high schools and compete as individuals in the fledgling National High School Skateboard Assn.'s Future AM Series, where by the end of June, the top 20 individuals will be invited to skate this summer in an X Games "best trick contest" on the X Games street course.

Last season, the top individual was Jeremiah Bohnet, a 5-foot-9, 130-pound junior from Palisades High whose shiny braces can be seen each time he flashes his friendly smile as he maneuvers his skateboard among the rails, banks and ledges on the concrete course.

"I love to skateboard and do tricks," he said.

"It's never-ending, a lot like video games, but you can never beat it."

There were free snow cones and free energy drinks, a DJ playing loud music and even some parents sitting in bleachers.

But mostly, there were kids from different stripes and communities, some with short hair, some with long hair, and all committed to engaging in a day of fun and games in a sport they cherish.

"When I skate, it's not for money or product," Bohnet said. "It's for the love of skating. All my troubles go away. It's almost another world."

Sports are known for bringing together people from different backgrounds, and the diversity among skateboarders is striking. And they even follow directions, such as putting on helmets when asked.

"A lot of people think skateboarding is about destruction and vandalism of private property," Bohnet said. "I think it's an art form. You're expressing yourself in a different form."

Bohnet really nailed what skating is all about. Skating is a different world where one can go an freely express themselves and forget for just a few hours all the pressures that come with growing up or having a job or whatever.

One of my favorite quotes is from Liz Kerr a Philidelphia Mom of three teenagers who says it this way: "skateboarding is a panacea for the problems of the American teen — racism, classism, crazed sideline parents, epidemic obesity, drugs, alcohol, and the isolation of video and computer games."

We'll keep pushing.

In the spirit of transparency- what's going on??

Today AC Wharton signed an executive order that will promote a more open form of government where public records and government officials salaries would be available for public viewing.

I would like to add to that list. How about we make certain public projects available online so that people can track the progress of that specific project.

Perhaps not every project but ones that are known to have a significant level of public interest associated with them. The public skate park, a project that was funded since July 2008 with $440,000 CIP money, would be a model project.

What type of public interest? We had 300+ skateboarders and close to 400+ people show up to show their support for a public skate park in April 2008 and the project has been written up in both the Flyer and the CA.

Almost a year and a half has passed and at this point, all I can tell ( all I know ) you is I think the skate park will be at Glenview park and I don't have any idea when groundbreaking will occur. I tell people all the time that "hopefully" we'll have a skate park by next summer but honestly I don't know. This has been a bit frustrating for the skate community and a number of the skateboarders doubt it when I tell them we are going to have a skate park. If only I could point them to a government url and say "see here is what's happened so far!"

Perhaps an online document would help encourage a more efficient collaborative process between the public, parks and rec and the department of engineering. I can tell you this much, the construction takes only 6 months for a small skate park, what happens before that is a big "?" that could be answered by bringing the project online......

Update: Looks like other cities could benefit from this system too.

"Green" skate decks

For those of you who are looking for a local socially and environmentally minded skate deck company, look no further.

Comet skateboards is the first company to step up to the challenge of making a "green deck."

The company is also a B certified corporation which is a big deal since there are only a few hundred companies that have passed the B criteria. Check out the other companies, you'll be inspired!

I ordered my Shred City 35" deck yesterday so we'll see how that goes.

If the deck "shreds" perhaps we can coax CBS, Desoto Sk8 or Cheapskates into selling some Comets. Look for a product review coming soon....

Take the final Mud Island Land Use Study online survey : our two cents

Well the final survey is out for you to put your two cents on the three proposed land use study maps. Keep in mind this is a map that the RDC will use for the next twenty years to determine what will be on the Island.

When I took this survey here are the few key thoughts that guided how I responded to the survey questions.

1. Less is more: The City has invested $60 million into the existing River Park so let's invest the least amount of money on key facilities that will allow us to be good stewards of that initial investment.

2. The theme of the park is a safe family friendly place to visit : Let's build on that with recreation.

3. We have an excess of retail and restaurants in our city: Walk down Main street and count the number of vacant retail spaces. Then think about the River Park which is far less accessible and consider how well a business would do. Focus on utilizing existing River park retail space that will meet the specific needs of visitors of the River park such as a Skate shop, skate rentals, snack shop, coffee shop, canoe rentals, boat rentals, fishing gear rental etc.....

4. Access: A land pedestrian bridge from Beale Street Landing would make the South tip of the Island for more accessible. The bummer part is the cost of the bridge, but that doesn't take away from the need for one.

5. Heat: It's hot !!! A splash park, water park or a flow rider ( standing wave) or a combination of the three would be a complement/heat alternative to the skate park on the South tip when it's too hot to do anything else.

6. Playground: While the big kids skate the Moms and small kids have the playground or greenbelt path.

7. Extension of the Greenbelt: This is a no brainer even if the green built does not extend pass the security gates at least it could extend from the Auction Bridge to the Security gates. However, this is a Land use study so that means it could eventually extend all the way to the tip.

8. Skate park on the SOUTH TIP: The skate park should be highly visible and serve as the focal point of the island.

9. My favorite land use study map: is #2 then #1 and I simply don't support #3. Map two has the skate park or recreational space on the South tip.

Here are my top 4:

1. Skate park on South Tip
2. Playground
3. Extension of the greenbelt
4. Splash park/water park

Have fun!