Skateboarding is definitely not a crime at the Logan’s skate park
Despite all the signs around strip malls, schools, other public places and campus that say “No skateboarding allowed,” many students still find ways to get out and skateboard.
Logan has what many skateboarders call one of the best skate parks in the state of Utah. The park, located just behind the Logan Aquatic Center at 500 W. 500 South, is a hot spot for skaters of all different ages.
The park tries to incorporate a few different styles of boarding like vert, park and street, said Austin Veabell, of Logan. He has been skating for the past eight years, and during that time he has been to many different parks in Utah. He agrees that Logan’s skate park is one of the best.
“It’s really nice because all the transitions are really smooth. The park down in Brigham City isn’t as good because the transitions are rougher,” Veabell said.
Though he is a more experienced skater, the park and skateboarding is for everyone. Kim Veater, a law and constitutional studies major, said she loves going to the park as well, even though she has only been skating for the past two months.
She said when she first went to the park, she felt a little intimidated by all the ramps, rails and verts, but as she has practiced she has come to enjoy it more and has felt a sense of accomplishment when landing a trick.
“Skating is really hard because it’s not something you can easily do, but when you get a trick, it’s pretty exciting,” Veater said.
Skateboarding is a sport that has grown in popularity in the past few years. It once used to be considered an outcast sport, but now it’s a trend amongst today’s youth, said Craig Stevenson, co-owner of the Directive Skate shop in Logan.
Jarvis Pary, who works at Directive, said back in the day it used to be easy to recognize someone who skates, but now that it has become so popular, some of the things skateboarding used to represent in his mind have changed. It was the style of skateboarders that enticed Pary to become a skater.
“I really liked what they represented – it used to be kind of rebellious,” he said.
Pary and Stevenson have been skating for many years and said they can remember the days when skate parks like the one in Logan didn’t exist – those were the days when the whole city was their skate park. They would skateboard any place they could find, like the streets, using benches, stairs and railings to skate on until they were kicked off.
“When the police told us we couldn’t skate anymore, we asked, ‘Where are we supposed to go?’ We didn’t have a skate park to go to back then,” Pary said.
Stevenson said skateboarding started out as an outlet, just a way for people to have fun, and somewhere along the way it turned into that rebellious stereotype. But for him, it has always been freedom and progression.
Skateboarding isn’t an easy thing to learn, and there are no classes to teach someone how to skate. Rather, boarding is passed on between friends and siblings, and it is learned through determination and plain old practice.
“Anyone can do it if they practice enough,” Stevenson said.
According to Veabell, learning to skate always comes with a few falls. “You just got to get over it, you have to know that you are going to fall sooner or later,” he said.
The best thing someone can do, he said, is just getting right back on the board and trying
-dwkoecher@cc.usu.edu