Craig Millar: junior in biomedical sciences, performs a powerslide. Local skateboarders and their parents have been preparing a proposal for a skatepark for Auburn to be presented to the city April 15. Lindsay Davidson / ASSISTANT PHOTO EDITOR
Students with a skateboard or pair of inline skates in their closet may be able to take them out and dust them off if a local group pushing for a skate park for Auburn gets its way.
The group has been meeting every other Tuesday night at the City Hall meeting room behind Cheeburger Cheeburger downtown since January. The local skateboarders and parents who comprise the group have been using the time to outline a plan of action to get a skate park for Auburn.
Dennis Golden, who has a son who skateboards, explained why he and many others think Auburn needs a skate park.
“I believe that skating is a popular sport, and I believe it’s a way more popular sport than it’s been given credit by our parks and recreation department,” Golden said. “It addresses the needs of what I think is a large group of kids that otherwise don’t participate in the more classic organized sports like soccer or football or basketball and those kinds of things. And so I think that while all of those other areas seem to be very well addressed in the city, there seems to be an almost obvious absence of any effort put toward addressing the needs of those kids in our community.”
There was once a skate park in Auburn, located behind the Frank Brown Recreation Center, but skaters not wearing their helmets and vandalism to the equipment provided by the city had been cited by City Manager Charlie Duggan as reasons for the park being closed.
The ramps and rails that were once at that location are now located at the 467 youth facility on Dean Road, but that does not satisfy many of the skaters. At one of the meetings, several complained the new space did not provide enough room, and being indoors and privately-owned, it was not public enough.
Jonathan Shaw, 23, has been skating 10 years and now runs Naked Skateboards out of the Adventure Sports store on Gay Street. He said the lack of a skate park makes it hard for skateboarders to do their sport.
“There’s a lot of kids who don’t have anywhere to go on a regular basis, so they’re gonna go out, and they’re going to skate on the streets,” Shaw said. “They just need a spot to be able to go to that is legal, where they don’t have to worry about getting hassled by police or people who own storefronts.”
Naked Skateboards put on a game named S-K-A-T-E to create interest in the effort for a skate park.
“I think it went great,” Shaw said. “It was much better than I thought. We didn’t even put flyers out or anything, it was all word-of-mouth. We had 65-70 people show up just by word-of-mouth, had about 20 people enter the competition.”
Now the group is trying to garner the support of local college students.
“I think the college campus is one of the biggest areas of essentially silent voices,” Golden said. “Every time we talk to college students who become aware of our efforts, almost uniformly they say, ‘I used to skateboard’ or ‘I used to inline skate’ and ‘When I came to Auburn, there was no place to do it, so I stopped doing it.’”
Richard Daniel, a freshman in graphic design, still skateboards, but he was disappointed when he came to Auburn and found no skatepark.
“I was a little disappointed, because I had heard that there was one over at Frank Brown,” Daniel said. “But all there is over there are those banks.”
Golden said the biggest thing students can do to help is go to their meeting on Tuesday April 15 at 6:30 p.m.
“That’s probably going to be the single most important thing they can do to try to help the need be recognized,” Golden said. “Because if we have a large turnout, we’ll prove the popularity of this sport.”
