WATCH ABOVE: As Carolyn Kury de Castillo reports, a group of Calgary volunteers is giving skateboarders a place to ride through the winter months, as well as a community to belong to.
CALGARY- It’s a great time of year for those who love to lace up the skates and take to the ice.
But not so great if your skate has four wheels.
So a group of Calgary volunteers is trying to change that.
They’re giving skateboarders a place to ride through the winter months, as well as a community to belong to.
As any skate boarder will tell you, there’s plenty of negative opinions about their kind.
“Definitely people automatically think we’re just out to destroy stuff or skateboard on things we shouldn’t be destroying things,” Skateboarder Blake Rempel said.
But one Calgary organization thinks there’s a lot of potential in the skateboard crowd.
“Skate Life” runs the city’s only indoor skateboarding facility at Dalhousie community church.
“It’s a different place to hang out other than downtown. Some families don’t like sending their children downtown where sometimes non-skateboarding activities get in the way,” Roger Mann said.
Roger Mann is a volunteer with skate life, a non-profit group that raises money through this annual ball hockey event in northeast Calgary.
Every Tuesday evening Mann helps transform Dalhousie community church into an indoor park.
But for volunteers with skate life, it’s not just about the skateboarding. It’s a way to reach out to skaters, who organizers say are often overlooked, compared to teens in other sports.
”Skateboarding is a unique culture, it’s not a team sport you don’t have coaches you don’t have mentors. so we want to be those coaches in life for them and be there to give them a positive influence in their lives,’ Jason Dueck from “Skate Life” Calgary said.
Blake Rempel has grown up with skate life, starting when he was 11.
“Skateboarding is a solitary sport, and when you have these people who actually care about you it becomes a group thing where you were doing it together rather than just by yourself or you’re getting involved with pushing yourself further,” Rempel said.
“I get lots of good times and lots of fun and sharing good morals rather than being at Millennium Park maybe being involved in things they shouldn’t be in. They get more involved in people that care about them and people that are just good people.”
As for the mentors who skate together with these young people, it’s a rewarding way to have fun.
“There’s a lot that I’ve seen in my years. Kids who come from no families, they find family, kids who come from broken families find love and they find acceptance and they find moms and dads. My wife helps me out with it so it’s pretty fun to be a mom and dad to the kids who may be having to experience that. So they get family belonging, they get a lot out of it. It’s pretty neat.”
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