Jennifer Horn/Oakville.com
Skateboarders line up on the ramp, getting ready to perform tricks during the competition at Kinoaks Indoor Skateboard Park in Oakville.
With this weekend’s skies full of clouds and spurts of rain, the youth of Oakville found refuge in the town’s first indoor skateboarding park where a series of competitions kept them active and dry.
Kinoak Indoor Skateboard Park held it’s first all ages contest on August 21, 2010 where kids and young adults of Oakville were able to skate and compete for five hours in order to win prizes sponsored by Hustler and Flat Spots skateboarding stores.
A number of contests were set up for the 25 participants, the first being ‘Best Trick’ where skaters would tackle three different obstacles and whoever managed to perform the most technically difficult trick took home a prize. The second contest, called S.K.A.T.E, resembled that of basketball’s H.O.R.S.E. Skateboarders would set up a trick and the next participant would have to duplicate it. If they were unsuccessful they would get a letter. The person with each letter of the word ‘skate’ was eliminated from the competition and the last man standing would win the prize. The third and last contest involved skaters performing tricks during a minute long run and once the best runs had been decided, the judges would give prizes to the top three.
Jennifer Horn/Oakville.com
Organisers of the competition, Josh Ranells and Josh Goulart, stand outside the Kinoaks Indoor Skateboard Park in Oakville waiting for the next competition to begin.
The organizers of the event, Josh Ranells and Josh Goulart, wanted to create an event that would bring the community together. The construction of the indoor park provided a perfect outlet to do just that. Goulart, who helped build the skate park in June, wanted to start running contests and events for the kids, for the community and also his friends.
“It’s awesome for the town to build this sort of facility for kids to skate,” said Ranells, co-organiser of the event and manager of Hustler. “Usually they would be on the streets skating, so this is great for the kids. It’s pretty much unheard of for a town to build an indoor skate park for kids and then to allow us to bring in a contest.”
Jennifer Horn/Oakville.com
Oakville skateboarder Cameron Tarhan, 11, skates toward a ramp in order to perform a trick at the Kinoaks Indoor Skateboard Park on Saturday..
For Cameron Tarhan, 11, skateboarding became his favourite thing to do throughout the summer. It was two years ago when he picked up his first skateboard. The young boy came to the indoor park the first month it opened and hasn’t stopped since.
“Once you do a trick you just can’t stop. You just keep progressing and you keep trying new tricks,” said Tarhan. “The competition today is really great. I like the ‘Best Tricks’ the most.”
When asked about the dismantling of the West Oak Trails skateboard park, Ranells was concerned with the amount of money the town spent in doing so.
”I was there for the council meetings when they decided what to do and I feel that the town probably should have researched a little more into where they were going to put it in the first place, before spending a lot of money to tear down the park and then build a new one. It probably would have saved a lot of our tax dollars.”
Kinoak Indoor Skateboard Park plans to continue opening the venue for skateboarders in the summer. It hopes to open a few months earlier next year to allow time for kids to spend more summer days skating and less in the rain.
Tags: skateboard parks
About the author: Jennifer Horn
A tree-hugging writer & photographer, recently moved from her Third World life to see if the grass is in fact greener on the other side. Currently studying Print Journalism at Sheridan College in Oakville as well as a BA in Communication Science from the University of South Africa.
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