How Skateboarding Changed My Life

The first time I stepped on a skateboard, I was 12 or 13. Never having been any good at sports, I felt the board shoot backwards and my body shoot forwards. It took a few tries to get both feet onto the thing, but when I did, I was hooked.

But for all my love of sidewalk-surfing, I never dared venture into a skate park. Tricks and skate parks, I thought, were for white boys keen on skipping school and breaking the rules. I was a bookish nerd from an immigrant family, so I stuck to cruising the quiet streets of my suburban neighbourhood. Kickflips only happened in my dreams.

Fast-forward 15 or so years, and my skateboards sit in my parents’ garage gathering dust. Then in 2021, Annick Press acquired my debut novel, Crash Landing. It was a story I had been writing in some shape or form since I was a teenage skater girl, and it was about teenage skater girls grappling with identity, family and friendship.

I wanted to get a feel for riding a board again so I could write authentically from a skater’s perspective, so I attended an East Vancouver session organized by the Late Bloomers Skate Club. I was nervous going in and I remember the space being very busy, but to my surprise, the session was full of people just like me: women, femmes, non-binary people, queer people, people of colour and adult beginners.

I soon fell back in love with skateboarding and, in the process, discovered a blossoming scene that was more welcoming and less male-dominated than I remembered.

I skated with groups like the Real Hot Skate Moms and Takeover Skateboarding. I competed (and won third place!) at “Stop, Drop and Roll,” an annual contest for women, non-binary and trans skaters of all levels. The cherry on top was witnessing skateboarding’s debut at the Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics, when teen girls swept the podium and ushered in a promising new generation of athletes.

The skate park remained an intimidating space for me, however. And it took me a while to step into one by myself.

That’s when I found the “Courts,” which has become one of my favourite skate parks in Metro Vancouver — if not one of my favourite Vancouver places, period.

By skaters, for skaters

Located on the remains of an old tennis court on the grounds of the Britannia Community Centre in East Vancouver, the Courts feels different. For one, it’s made of movable obstacles that are built, maintained and painted by skaters. It’s also markedly diverse: in no other Metro Vancouver skate park have I seen so many women and non-binary skaters, older skaters and beginner skaters.

I met Kim Regala at a Late Bloomers session. Regala first stepped onto a skateboard in Grade 6, but, as she recalls, “My dad immediately was like, ‘Oh, you’re a girl, you can’t get into it, you’re gonna get hurt.’”

Regala rediscovered skating in her early 20s, when her partner at the time got her a board and she “completely fell in love with it.” The first time she visited the Courts, another female skater immediately said hi.

Regala, who describes herself as a Filipino Canadian immigrant settler, eventually became a Courts regular and says it is “a big part” of her getting back into skateboarding. Today, she’s a volunteer who leads Late Bloomers sessions, inspiring others to get into skating.

She was nervous the first time she visited Courts, but, she says, “Everybody is so friendly all the time and you realize a lot of that stigma is really in your head.”

When she discovered Courts a few years ago, Dakota Cootes hadn’t skateboarded for around 10 years. At first, she didn’t believe it when a friend told her Courts had so many femme skaters. “I was really taken aback by that because it just wasn’t a thing when I was growing up.”

The space kick-started her return to skating, and today she is sponsored by major brands like Girl Skateboards, Spitfire Wheels and Vans. To Cootes, who identifies as a queer Indigenous trans woman, Courts “has evolved into a place of necessity” where skaters, “regardless of age, gender, what have you, can show up and step on a skateboard for the first time, or re-enter skateboarding.”

Cootes also serves as one of the directors on the Britannia Skateboard Committee. The committee formed in 2022 after skaters learned that because the informal park wouldn’t be included in the Britannia Renewal plan, it was in danger of being demolished.

This was despite the space being used for skateboarding for years. Cynthia Low, executive director of Britannia Community Centre, remembers students from the nearby Streetfront alternative school putting simple obstacles there as much as a decade ago.

According to Low, the youths’ DIY efforts were supported by many teachers, who saw first-hand the health benefits of skateboarding. Then, Benjamin Knight, who worked just up the street at an art space called Slice of Life, started bringing larger obstacles circa 2017. This seeded the beginnings of a true skate park.

Today, Courts is a central fixture in Vancouver’s skate community, hosting skate jams, video premieres and “Stop, Drop and Roll.”

“It’s become something that I could never have made it [into],” says Knight when I interview him for this piece. “It’s pretty amazing.”

As for skateboarding’s inclusion in the Britannia Renewal, it’s “looking super favourable,” says Oliver Tennant, another committee director.

A thriving, necessary ‘third place’

The Courts is special for its spirit of inclusion and the vibrant and welcoming community of skaters who make it their own. And I believe it’s a perfect example of what sociologist Ray Oldenburg terms a “third place.”

A third place “is not home and not work, but instead one of the physical settings that have throughout history encouraged a sense of warmth, conviviality, and that special kind of human sustenance we call community,” write Oldenburg and Karen Christensen in The UNESCO Courier.

While Oldenburg championed conversation as the main activity of third places and coffee shops as the best example, I posit that parks like Courts are an even better example of their benefit.

For one, entering the Courts is free. Secondly, how the park is set up — ample seating around the perimeter, shaded picnic tables nearby and proximity to a community centre — makes it accessible and conducive to conversation, relaxation and casual moments of connection.

Skateboarding itself is also relatively accessible: the equipment is much cheaper than skis or a snowboard, and thanks to parks like Courts, you don’t need to buy lift tickets.

“Courts is cool because everything is movable,” says Tennant, and this flexibility creates a sense of ownership among the skaters who frequent the park. “Not only are people moving the obstacles, but they’ll be helping paint them and fix them and build them. So that sense of ownership makes people feel very, very connected to the space and it’s not something you really get at a concrete skate park, typically.”

Another committee director, Alex Williams, wrote his master’s thesis in landscape architecture on Courts. He noted the importance of the surrounding neighbourhood: “There’s a buffer around the area,” which dampens noise, and the Commercial Drive neighbourhood has a culture that is “down with DIY and grassroots initiatives.”

The park also aligns with the Britannia Community Centre’s philosophy, which is “historically grounded in ensuring that community are engaged and involved in where they live or can play,” says Low.

Skate city: An antidote for difficult times?

The City of Vancouver seems to agree on the positive effects of skateboarding. In 2022, Vancouver adopted CitySkate, a skateboard amenities strategy that would expand opportunities for skateboarding and other wheeled sports by building and improving greenways, skate parks and skate spots.

Strategies like this come at an important time: loneliness, disconnection and anxiety about youth spending too much time on devices is at an all-time high.

More than ever, we need accessible public spaces where people can gather for free, stay as long as they want and chat as much as they want.

Of course, this shouldn’t be limited to skateboarding (it’s not the easiest skill to learn!). But I think skateboarding offers a model to inspire and adopt: get a group of people who are passionate about a healthy activity, give them an underused space, let them transform it into something that serves them, and support them along the way.

I re-entered skateboarding at a challenging point in my life: my mother had recently passed away, I was anxious about my debut novel, and the recent pandemic had made me more isolated than ever. But skateboarding pulled me out of my shell.

When Regala refers to skateboarding as “healing our inner child,” I can’t agree more. Because unlike many traditional sports, skateboarding emphasizes creativity, community and having fun over perfect technique or winning competitions. And this spirit is evident at Courts.

Skateboarding has changed my life, but I don’t think that transformation was due solely to finding a mode of exercise I don’t hate. Skateboarding has improved my health, physically and mentally, thanks to places like the Courts and the folks I’ve met.

When I first joined Late Bloomers meetings, my goal was to land a kickflip and call it a day. I’ve yet to land my first kickflip. But I can promise that I will skate as much as I can for as long as I can.