EVERYTHING
FOR YOUR FAMILY
Get in the Game
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Four-year-old Kaylie Hults of Costa Mesa has one strand of pink in her curly blonde hair. She’s going through a pink phase. But the pink streak doesn’t keep her from skateboarding a sport in which the color pink is virtually outlawed. Kaylie is one of the younger girls participating in “extreme” or action sports such as skateboarding, surfing, BMX and snowboarding. Of the action sports, skateboarding has the highest number of participants by far, and the number of skater girls is steadily ramping up. There were 11 million skateboarders in 2003, of which 20% were girls, up from 7.5% just two years earlier, according to Board-Trac and SGMA International. For many of the girls who have become skateboarders, friends or family encouraged them to try. Kaylie got into it because her parents skate. Her father, Chuck Hults, is an avid skater and designs boards for a local skateboard maker in Costa Mesa. Her mother, Debbie, recently started skating with the local International Society of Skateboarding Moms. Now they skate as a family and dad couldn’t be more pleased. The injury factor Not all girls get three cheers and a brand-new skateboard when they want to join the sport. After all, skateboarding is one of the most challenging activities with one of the highest risks for injury. And falling, which usually means a thud or a skid on concrete, isn’t graceful or pretty. “My parents discouraged me,” says Quynh Le, who lives in Irvine. That hasn’t stopped her, though. The girl who didn’t even know what an Ollie was four years ago is now better than some of the guys at the park. But she learned how to skate by watching the guys. She watched skateboarding videos with the pause button at the ready. She read skateboarding magazines and she visited websites such as www.bobstricktips.com. “The thing about skateboarding is there are no parameters,” she says. “Nobody tells you the rules because there are no rules.” For Quynh, skateboarding is an art form. Like other girls, when she first started she stayed close to home. “I was too embarrassed to do it.” For the guys, skating comes more natural because they have less fear, she says. “It’s cultural.” Fear itself Feeling intimidated at first is common among beginner female skaters. When Erin Altman of Laguna Niguel began skating at the Laguna Hills skatepark, she felt uncomfortable skating with all the guys but it taught her more about the sport. “I would hesitate to take a turn because I didn’t want to mess up in front of any boys,” she says. What she learned was that she needed to be assertive. “In my experience, it wasn’t often that someone would wave you to go before them if you were hesitating,” she says. More girls are willing to deal with the temporary discomfort for the rewards of skating. “It’s challenging,” says Lisa Whitaker, a skater and filmmaker who lives in La Habra. “It takes a lot of practice to get a trick.” Whitaker has been filming female skateboarders for the past four to five years. There are more girls skating than people know, she says. But it’s an underground thing right now. She and her pals, known as Villa Villa Cola, made a documentary about the girls skate community called “Getting Nowhere Faster.” 411 Video Productions, a large distributor of skateboarding videos, is expected to release the documentary in January. The company originally approached Whitaker in search of some footage as a DVD bonus. But after she sent in sample footage, “they were just blown away. They had no idea there were that many girls skating and to this level.” The film features known and unknown skaters. Some of the most recognizable names include Cara-Beth Burnside and Lyn-z Adams Hawkins, who recently won the X Games. SoCal ride Perhaps one of the best signs of girls’ heightened interest in action sports is OP Girls Learn to Ride night at Van’s Skate Park at The Block in Orange. The program teaches a variety of action sports and is a safe haven for girls to make mistakes and fall without feeling goofy around the guys, most of whom have had the run of the park and months, if not years, of practice. On a Wednesday night this past summer, girls were lined up out the door to learn how to skateboard and ride BMX. But events like Girls Learn to Ride don’t happen without sponsors, says Dawn Williams, events director for Van’s. “A lot of them don’t think there’s a market yet.” However, those sponsors betting early on the girls action sports market include Chorus, Cherry Skateboards and Orange County’s own Ocean Pacific, Etnies and Roxy. Mark Sperling, founder of the Laguna Beach-based OP Girls Learn to Ride, says that calls from mainstream advertisers recently have been picking up: Campbell’s Soup, Tylenol, Tampax. Next year, he’s hoping to start the Girl Games Series competition, similar to the Van’s Triple Crown series. But crossing the line from skating for fun to competing can be a wily road in girls’ action sports. Sasha La Rochelle of Santa Rosa worked her way up to being a professional female skater. A natural athlete, who has been featured in many magazines, Sasha has soured on competitive skating. What hit Sasha hard was not getting invited to participate in the X Games. “It’s a pretty involved thing to be a pro athlete,” says her mom, Nicole La Rochelle, who has dedicated herself to Sasha’s career. To compete in big events, girls need to have big sponsors that will pay their way. But there is little money right now in girls’ action sports, she says. Sasha says,she’ll keep teaching skateboarding clinics and keep skating for fun. And there are girls in the wings. Eight-year-old Chelsea Olson recently traveled from Illinois to compete at the Wicked Wahine competition this past September in Glendale. About 40 girls skated that day and 300 people attended the first-time event. Chelsea, sponsored by “Grandpa Roy,” took third place for the young girls category. She got into skating after her aunt and uncle gave her a skateboard. “I liked it right away,” she says. Her dad, Eric Olson, worries at times about her getting hurt, but mostly he encourages her. “I used to hold her hand to help her learn to drop in but now she learns on her own.” Chelsea’s aspiration is to be a professional skateboarder and compete in the X Games. Her favorite skaters are her brother Tommy and Tony Hawk. And that’s a sign that girls’ skateboarding still has a ways to go. Sherri Cruz is a Newport Beach-based writer. |
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