Aggressive Skate Blog

Each one, teach one…”

By Greg Allison aka Imightbearedneck

So perhaps the scene has died off in your town or you are one of the few that happened to be bored with everything else and saw rolling as a great way to have fun. The only problem is, you don’t have anyone to skate with. This can be a big problem because not only are you skating alone which means you don’t have that motivation to push yourself, but you have a potential friend that isn’t sharing in all of the fun you are having with rollerblading. Here are some things that I have done that have not only increased the awareness of rolling in my area, but have also got me a potential friend to start skating.

First and most important, keep your skates. Once you get to be over the age of fourteen, your feet may still grow, but your skate sizes will still be an okay size. What all this means is to save your old skates when you get new ones. Just put them in your closet or something. That way, when you do have a friend who is interested, he has a pair of skates that he can immediately start skating with you. Now you don’t have to break the news to him that he’s going to have to shell out a couple hundred dollars or so just to start the sport. He can worry about getting new skates once he gets into the sport and is willing to pay that kind of money. If anything, just save the boots. Roller Warehouse always has clearances on the other things like when they had the Fifty/50 Balance frames for under $20 and now with 16 abec 5 bearings for $9. If you can at least save the boots, he would only have to spend maybe around $50 to get a setup to skate with instead of over $100.

Now that you have potential setups, you need potential skaters. How can you do this? Well, they can’t like rollerblading if they don’t see it. You just have to constantly promote the sport in the way it is supposed to be shown. Technology is your friend. For instance in my case, I have a PSP and I have several skate videos right on it. So when I was sitting in school doing nothing (because I was already done with all of my work, of course) I would just whip it out and show the kid next to me the big grass gap in Freestyle Rolling, Brian Aragon’s Ego section, or maybe Black Market’s intro. If they seem impressed, you have a chance.

With a lot of older skate videos being up on youtube (and some not so old) you can always send them links to things and ask them what they think. If anything, you can always be a little tricky about it. Find a section with a genre of music that you know the person likes and send them the link and just say what’s that song? It’s kind of sneaky, but it is exposing them to rollerblading. Once they seem impressed and interested, just invite them over to skate your rail or something. Don’t complain about you not progressing or anything like that, you are trying to make the sport look fun like it really is.

Once you have your friend in the skates and interested, what can you do from here? You need to be a good teacher. You should try to get him to the level so that he can at least skate most of the basic ramps and obstacles. That way when you go to parks or something, you will be skating together instead of you over at the ramps and he is still just rolling around on the flat concrete and still doesn’t know how to drop in. You should give him advice from your own personnel experience and also make sure you let him know that he is doing a good job. Show him some of your favorite videos and just keep encouraging him. If you can get another guy, it does a lot for both you and your local scene. Not only does it get you more into rolling and give you someone to talk about it with, but people at your local park realize that rolling really is something comparable to skateboarding and biking and that you aren’t just the one weirdo he does something different. You will progress since you have someone to skate with, making you both better. Kids will see this and realize that rollerblading can be cool and if they do think about doing it, they’ll have someone to skate with. Hopefully, it will just turn into a snowball effect with more and more kids wanting to roll because they see more and more kids doing it.

I recently had a conversation with the owner of my local skatepark/shop that only carries skateboarding gear and he told me he thinks it would be really easy for him to start carrying rollerblading gear. He would just like to see more kids doing it before he made that kind of investment. Even if he only carried product from one distribution company, just that little bit of exposure would help. Because that is what our problem is, exposure. When I went to that park last weekend, I brought along a copy of Freestyle Rolling. The skateboarders didn’t mind if I put it on, they were a little curious themselves. So I play it, and a small group begins to gather. Their eyes go wide when they see the opening grass gap and so when I tell them that someone (Billy “Fish” O’Neil) lands it in the end, they were hooked. The way things are going, I don’t know if I will ever get enough into it to start getting the shop to carry rolling gear, but it is a goal to shoot for. I know that the only way that could be done is to just continue to try recruiting potential rollers with the advice in this review and to just continue my own progression because who wants to get into a sport when the only skater around isn’t all that impressive? So if we all just keep doing what we are doing, progressing, and the companies keep coming out with sick videos, there is no reason why we can’t at least help rolling out a little by getting others into it.

So go out, skate, learn, and above all, have fun.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 28th, 2006 at 8:00 am and is filed under skating, Video, dvd, aggressive, rollerblade. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.