Longboard Collective

Friday, April 8, 2011

Out of the Darkness Spawns a New Light

Lots of bad news has hit the longboard community lately. Laguna Beach longboarders are facing getting kicked off the streets as a result of community drivers’ fears of liability from injuring skaters bombing down hills. The article hit the New York Times and is spurring on fears that the sport and method of transport that we all love could potentially be taken from us.

Read more here

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

GreenSkate

Reblogged from Silverfish...

It all started in Calgary in 2007. The heart of oil country is an approriate place to begin a worldwide movement that highlights longboarding as an environmentally friendly form of transportation. Four years later, Greenskate is a global event. No other longboard event is as big as Greenskate, period.

In 2010 we had 52 events, on every continent of the globe except for Antarctica (and we're working on that!). Events ranged from over 200 participants to less than a dozen. All told, over 1200 people took part in Greenskate 2010.

Greenskate started when a small group of dedicated community organizers planned a longboarding event to coincided with Earth Day.
The idea behind the event is simple: on or near Earth Day, go longboarding with your friends and others in the longboard community. GreenSkate is about promoting longboarding—whatever form of longboarding you love. Greenskate events have included campus cruises, critical mass rides, distance skates, slalom events, slide sessions, and even outlaw races.

Greenskate.org is where each of these unique events connect to one another and where you can discover or post local GreenSkate events. Videos and photos from other GreenSkate events from across the globe show that longboarding is a popular, global movement. The increased popularity of GreenSkate can be attributed to the internet and longboarding sites such as Silverfish Longboarding .Com, coastlongboarding and skateslate.

Organizers submit the time, date, and location of their events and GreenSkate broadcasts these details locally and globally. After the event, organizers submit media and participation numbers. Every local organizer has complete freedom to make their event as large or small as they would like.

With increased awareness of longboarding and more participation and media attention every day, Greenskate 2011 is going to be huge.

Visit www.greenskate.org to discover whether there is a GreenSkate event near you. If there isnt, pick a time, and a place, throw together a group of people to go for a skate on Earth Day, and . . . who knows, next year there might be 200 of you.

We would like to thank everyone who has participated in Greenskate since 2007. Special thanks goes out to everyone who has taken the time to organize there own GreenSkate event, big or small, all over the world.

We would also like to thank Ross Baradoy for being the main global organizer, as well as the other original founding members—Ross, Paul Kent, Rachel O`Neill, and Tyler (calgaryskate.com)—for their contributions over the last four years.

Maybe we need to consider an event in Hanover? Email me and let's get the discussion going.

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Board Shots

Friday, March 25, 2011

The 2011 Longboard Collective group and their longboards

Jared G.
The last day! Everyone’s boards are now complete and ready to be ridden. We started out the day by working on our poster for the March Intensive Expo. I chose some pictures from the Picasa album that I felt bet described our experience, and printed them out. At that point, everyone was really excited to get their trucks onto their boards, so it could finally be done. A lot of us, including myself, got some wheel bite after mounting the trucks. I simply changed the spacers to make the wheels farther apart, and that solved my issue. After I got my wheels on, I had to wait while everyone else put theirs on, and fixed their wheel bite issue. I relaxed with some lunch, and some Portal on Andrew’s computer. Pretty soon, we’re going to take our boards out for their first test run. Next week, I’m gonna buy some clear sticker sheeting so I can print out my boxman from the bottom of my longboard to stick on my helmet. Everyone really wants to test out our boards, so hopefully we’ll get out there soon. Overall, this march intensive experience was really rewarding for me. I had a lot of fun, and came out of it with a sweet final product that I will hopefully be able to use for a long time. BEST MARCH INTENSIVE EVARR!