Ep 147 | What is skateboarding teaching kids?

SPEAKER_00 0:00

It's supposed to be really good as a developmental tool for kids so that when they get older, they are able to be problem solvers and creative in their thinking to make things happen, you know?

SPEAKER_01 0:15

And collaborate as they're working with the other kids.

SPEAKER_02 0:24

Welcome to the Voices United in Education podcast. Each week we showcase the teachers, administrators, and community members who go the extra mile to contribute to the success of every student in Escambia County. You'll meet the real people behind the titles and learn about the amazing resources to support every student's success. Goals for a kid should be simple. Get outside, learn to entertain yourself, and make new friends. My next guest is helping Escambia County kids do just that, but in a way you might not expect. He's the owner of Waterboys Surf and Skate Shop, a business started out of his garage in 1989 that has grown into a skate park, surf shop, cafe, and community hub. Today he's going to share how his skate park, nonprofit, and surf and skate summer camps bring together kids and community all year long. Heart forward founder and laid-back leader, Pensacola grown Sean Fell. Thanks for being here.

SPEAKER_00 1:23

Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 1:24

So the funny thing about skateboarding is it it kind of has like negative connotations a little bit for like troublemaking and that sort of thing. But you've actually seen it solve problems for kids.

SPEAKER_00 1:37

Yes, for sure. It can definitely help kids develop in problem solving and using their creativity and imagination to solve problems and and get along with others. What I was talking to you previously about was how kids with no direction in a skate environment are someone told me it was called free play and where they're using their own imagination and creativity to solve problems. I see it in our park all the time because we have several different obstacles in the park, rails and ramps and little boxes and stuff that they'll start skating and then start talking to each other and decide, well, hey, let's put these two obstacles together and skate them and see what we can do and make a game out of it. And make a game out of it. And and yeah, so it's it's it's really something that comes naturally to kids when they're put in, I guess, any kind of a playful environment where there's things around that they can use their imagination and creativity to create things or solve problems. And it's supposed to be really good as a developmental tool for kids so that when they get older they are able to be problem solvers and creative in their thinking to to make things happen, you know?

SPEAKER_02 3:01

And collaborate because they're working with the other kids. I also think it's interesting that it's a a unique environment of screenlessness. I mean, you might have a GoPro hooked to your helmet, but you're not like on your phone while skating. You just can't do it.

SPEAKER_00 3:16

Right. Yeah. No, you gotta focus. Yeah, for sure.

SPEAKER_02 3:19

That's really interesting. I love that. And the the coping with frustration, I was another one that you mentioned in our pre-chat that really hit home because that can be so hard for kids because their the scope of their life experience is so short, they don't have anything to give them scale. They're like, oh my gosh, I can't make this jump jump. This is the worst thing that's ever happened to me.

SPEAKER_00 3:45

Yeah. So the persistence in conquering those little milestones for them, yeah, their building blocks and creating big conquering bigger things.

SPEAKER_02 3:56

Yeah, it creates that scale for other things, like in school or like with their relationships. And you just don't think of those major life lessons when you think I'm gonna drop my kid off at skate camp. Right. But but they could happen, and that's pretty cool. Do you have any memories of kids or moments that stand out to you that really illustrate the before and after that these sorts of environments can create for kids?

SPEAKER_00 4:23

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's in the time that we've had our current location, 2007, had quite a few kids that have come through on a daily basis to hang out because they really didn't have a better place to be. A lot of them that would end up that way were single parent families. And you know, we've had a you know, a lot of those kids really blossom emotionally and physically through the relationships they made with friends there and really helped them come out of their shell and and had a lot of parents come and tell us how big a difference we've m made in their kids' lives, particularly this one kid that comes to mind, his dad passed away when he was around seven or eight, and she was was still working, having to, you know, bring in money for the family. And so he was he spent a lot of time at our shop, and whenever she sees me, thanks me for that. But yeah, I mean, I think, you know, even all the kids, like even when they get together, they have a common interest, they're gonna make a friendship over that. And then they're having fun, and then they end up helping each other with like learning new tricks, creating different things to conquer together, you know, and I see that a lot in the skate environment and in the surf environment too. But uh you kind of get to witness it at the shop more often because I'm there more often and it's kind of a captive audience. Whenever I'm walking around the shop doing work, I can peek in and see what's going on.

SPEAKER_02 6:03

Yeah, I think it's good for people who haven't visited Waterboys to know kind of what that back area looks like. When I go to Waterboy, I always get a coffee from the cafe, and then I go visit the surfboards like they're long-lost friends or something. But I inevitably get drawn to what I would describe as kind of like a balcony, and you look down and you've got the bowl for the skate bowl. And every time I've gone, there are kids of all ages. There's like these little itty bitty guys and girls with their little helmets, and they have little mohawks on their helmets, they're so cute. Older kids, teens, and sometimes there's a parent in there. Every time I've gone, it always seems very collaborative.

SPEAKER_00 6:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 6:42

Like them helping each other. Am I just there on good days?

SPEAKER_00 6:45

No, that happens a lot. A lot of times, you know, I mean, a lot of the older kids will see younger kids that they can tell need help, and they'll they'll lend a hand. They'll say, Hey, put your foot a little here, bend your knees when you hit the bottom. And so yeah, I see that a lot. Because they they want to, everybody wants to see, doesn't want to see you know, they don't want to see kids get frustrated and and and not have any direction. So if they have insight, they'll they'll say, Hey, do this or do that, and and it'll help the kid. And the kid's like, oh, da-da, I get it.

SPEAKER_02 7:19

No, and they can practice at home because there's this like accessibility aspect too, because like I I love surf, you love surf, but even for us with vehicles and agency over our lives, the surf in the Gulf is a challenge, right? Because you have to be a meteorologist to see where the surf is on.

SPEAKER_00 7:39

You have to be an amateur meteorologist and you've got to be on it, paying attention.

SPEAKER_02 7:46

I have to want it.

SPEAKER_00 7:47

It can be really good at 9 a.m. and be gone by 11 a.m.

SPEAKER_02 7:52

So it's it's it'll drive you crazy. But the interesting thing about skate for kids who probably can't drive or don't have cars, or that they can just their point of entry is a skateboard and a helmet.

SPEAKER_00 8:05

Yeah, very low entry barrier for for skating as far as equipment and locations. They can pretty much skate just about anywhere.

SPEAKER_02 8:15

And you have a skate team too, right? So if they get really good, tell me about that.

SPEAKER_00 8:19

Yeah, we you know, we have a group of guys and girls that are some of the better skateboarders in the area and they represent the shop in different venues at our contests and some of the they they travel to contests outside the area and they help out with our camps and lessons and stuff like that.

SPEAKER_02 8:41

I definitely want to talk more about camps in a second, but since we're on the topic of contests, you're kind of doing something interesting with the new skate park, right? Which I found interesting because if I owned a skate and surf shop and a new skate park was being built not far from where I'm at, I would see that as competition. But you've taken a different approach.

SPEAKER_00 9:02

Well, yeah, because I was a proponent for this public skate park long before we built our skate park. I was trying to get them to build it. I mean, I started with petitions, hand signed petitions back in the mid-90s when we were when our retail store was at Court of A Mall, trying to get the city to build a public skate park, because we were pretty behind the times as far as other cities our size building public skate parks, and they just wouldn't do it. And even with hitting them with signed petitions, it didn't really seem to get any traction. And so I finally just said I'll just build my own skate park. And uh then fast forward to 2010 or or maybe it was later, maybe 2015, when John Shell took up the torch and started was able to use social media to help uh propel the issue further and deeper and and really he did a great job and and and got them to take action. Not only the city, but he got a lot of other sponsorships from donations that helped along the way too. But yeah, he did a great job. I I had to be behind it because I was for it in the beginning. And and and it's it's just better for the whole community, the city, and the whole region for us to have a big, nice public skate park. And it's really well built, it's a super nice skate park. So uh yeah, I mean it did take business from us in the sense from our skate park point of view, but our skate park was never a moneymaker in the first place. So it's not it wasn't a big loss. And in sense you mentioned the bowl earlier, we don't have the bowl anymore. We rebuilt our skate park last year and downsized it a little bit because and to make more room for retail, which does pay the bills for us because there's such a nice park down the street with multiple bowls. So we took our bowl out and downsized our park. Still big enough so we can do our lessons and camps and when this bad weather, kids come and skate, but we definitely don't get as much traffic as we used to. The contest we do annually is the TC contest, and we do it Labor Day weekend every year, and it had gotten so big that it was kind of getting hard to do it in our park before the other park got built. So as soon as that part got built, we were like, we need to start doing it there just because we the the it was our park was getting to be too small in the first place for it. And so yeah, we've been we've done it there the last two years, and we'll do it there this year again there. And uh really good turnout, really good, cool event in memories of one of our young team writers, T C McCoy, that passed away.

SPEAKER_02 12:03

That was a drunk driving accident, right?

SPEAKER_00 12:06

Yeah, um, intoxicated, I guess. I I'm not sure if he was drunk or not, but yeah, he had been at a party. He was in high school, and he wasn't old enough to drive, and he uh think his dad knew he was there, and he I don't know if he was supposed to be there, and so he and he wanted to go home and he saw this kid that he knew that lived near him, and he hopped in the car with that kid, and that kid was driving crazy, and yeah, he wrecked the car and he passed away from that accident. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 12:39

That's so sad.

SPEAKER_00 12:40

Yeah, it was very sad.

SPEAKER_02 12:42

Is that connected to your nonprofit at all or are those different causes?

SPEAKER_00 12:48

Well, the money we raise from the contest goes to our nonprofit first ride, and then yeah, and we use those funds to help kids with equipment and lessons and camps, scholarships, and stuff like that.

SPEAKER_02 13:04

So tell me how the lessons and the camps work.

SPEAKER_00 13:08

Like how are the lessons year round and the camps just in the yeah, lessons we do surf, skate, and skimboarding lessons pretty much year round. The surfing lessons we don't do so much in the wintertime when the water's freezing because you need a wetsuit and we don't provide wetsuits. And normally it it's hard for people to learn surfing when they're freezing. So we just do more of the lessons during the summertime. But the skate lessons we do year round, we do them right there in our park. And the camps we do the surf, surf and skim at the beach and the skate lessons in our park all summer, like 10. Or I think this this summer we have 11 summer. 11 camps? That's a lot of camps. Pretty much one every week we do it. Yeah, Monday through Thursday, nine to noon.

SPEAKER_02 13:59

Wow, that's incredible.

SPEAKER_00 14:01

What's the sign-up window usually for the people start signing the kids up usually around Christmas time? We'll run a little special at Christmas, and then yeah, people who plan ahead, people are signing up in January, February, and then there's always a lot of last minute signups too.

SPEAKER_02 14:18

If there's room.

SPEAKER_00 14:18

If there's room, yeah. We we limit both of them. The the surf camps we limit to 30 kids per camp and the the skate camp, 15 per camp.

SPEAKER_02 14:29

Yeah, they always fill up fast. I always see posts on social media like, is it too late? So it's definitely a popular event. As we wrap up, I wanted to ask you a question about kind of all the effort you put behind this because when you told me that you had had the shop since 89, yeah, and that I mean, I don't think people realize like that is a long time to consecutively run a retail business. And I know you've had different versions of it and you've been so good at adapting, but like it's it's so much. It's a lot. You're hiring young people. I mean, that itself has its own set of challenges, it's opportunity for them, but their scheduling headaches. Like just feeling that in your shoes makes me want to ask you with all of that, why do all this community stuff? Like, why put in that extra time and effort and headache to give back when just keeping a business open is so much.

SPEAKER_00 15:28

I don't know. I love the honesty. A glutton for punishment, I guess.

SPEAKER_02 15:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:35

I don't know. You know, my family is probably six or seven generations deep from Pensacola. My great-grandfather used to be the city manager of Pensacola. Um I mean, I've got relatives all over town that are involved in uh other businesses, and my brother's the golf coach at UWF. And I don't know, I just like to support the community to try and make Pensacola a better place. I mean, remember when I was graduating from high school, there wasn't really what much here, you know, or as uh or there wasn't as much opportunity here and there was not as much going on. And all of my friends were moving away right after college, I mean right after high school to go off to college somewhere else, not here, and then move on to bigger cities to careers like Atlanta or wherever. And I was like, well, like if everybody does that, then Pencilola will never get better if everybody just moves away. So I was like, Well, I wasn't really sure what I was gonna do. I actually was gonna try and be a dentist at first, and then I was like, I don't I don't think I want to do that after a couple of years of going down that road. And I just like I always like building things and and doing things with my hands, and I loved surfing, so I kind of put those together and made my first surfboard and not even thinking about making a business out of it. But then all my friends wanted them to make me to make them board, so I was like, well, I'll do this for a little bit, see what happens. And just, you know, 36 years later, I'm still doing it. Just kind of kept snowballing into different, bigger things.

SPEAKER_02 17:23

Yeah, different versions of meeting the needs of of what people need, whether it's a surfboard built, uh, a teenage kid that needs a job in the cafe, or you know, uh a parent whose spouse passed away and and the kid needs a place for built-in community. So thank you so much for for this. I'm gonna put all of the links to your website and socials and everything in the show notes so that people can plug in however they see fit. Cool. Thanks for listening. Be sure to subscribe and share. Voices United in Education is a production of Scambia County Public Schools.