I recently moved to Marquette from Banner Elk, North Carolina. In North Carolina, I was with a group of kids who showed me skateboarding. After my friend gave me a skateboard, I started skating all the time. I started progressing every day I skated, but soon after that, I found out that our skate shop’s skate park closed down. That was bad news because the town didn’t really like skateboarding and that meant no skating in town, so because of that, I would go to their houses to skate. Despite the skate park closing down and because we did still have some really cool skate shops there, skateboarding still went on. Later, one of the shops helped out with building a DIY skate park on the old high school tennis court, which was about 30 minutes from where I lived.

When I moved to Marquette, I got excited when I heard there was a skate park here. I now live walking distance from the skate park. It’s nice to have a skate park because it’s a place you can go whenever. The Marquette skate park is a nice place to go if you are a beginner and want to learn more, but it is also a good place for people that are advanced too. It consists of rails, boxes, ramps and two quarter pipes. I try to skate as much as I can and with this park, I’m learning more every day. I have been trying to progress with my flat ground tricks: like a kickflip, which is when the board flips underneath your feet while you’re in the air, but it’s easier said than done.

After I moved here, I found out that a few local skate shops had closed down. I know the skate season is short, but the time that the park is open the skateboarders there really put time and effort into skating. This past winter, I helped a whole group of people shoveling out the park to make the season longer. When a new skate season starts it usually means that skaters will need new decks and hardware for skating and it would be nice to have a local place to support instead of getting stuff from online shops. Skate apparel is another thing to sell at a skate shop: skate shoes, T-shirts and hats would be nice to have. I hope that someone will try to put a skate shop back up sometime and I hope it goes well.

The skate park has a few competitions in the summer. Last year, I got to go to one and it was pretty neat and they even had a band playing. I do think that the skate park is an awesome thing for us to have in town. It gives us a place to skate or the opportunity to just sit and watch others skate. One thing is when people first start skating and there is not a skate park nearby, it’s harder to learn because the best way to learn more is to watch others.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Ethan Darrin is 12 years old. He has been a member of 8-18 Media since October 2017 and music is his passion