WHO DO THE KIDS EVEN LIKE THESE DAYS?

Jenkem_Babies_Kids_Giurato_Magazine

Go to any skate industry event and you’ll realize how surprisingly out of touch many skate biz folk are with the younger generation of skaters. A couple of beers deep and you’ll hear a group of grown men reminiscing over dinosaurs like Tom Penny and Brian Lotti, comparing VHS collections and sharing tour stories from the 90s. Despite the fact that the average age of the skateboarder is older than ever before, skateboarding is and always will be fueled by the youngins.

But kids are dumb, and their opinions should be taken with a grain of salt and a shot of tequila, right?

Wrong, you old geezer! Like it or not, the kids we scoff at today will be like us – the jaded generations of the future, so their tastes are just as valid as your own. And instead of just sitting around stalking Instagram and hypothesizing who the younger kids are hyped on, we went to three of Manhattan’s busiest skateparks and asked them ourselves.

isaiah

ISAIAH EDWARD

Age: 16
First skate video: Ryan Sheckler’s first Plan B part on Youtube
Favorite skaters: Ryan Sheckler, Andrew Reynolds, Luan Oliveira, Louie Lopez, Trevor Colden
Favorite company: Organika

luke

Luke Rinay

Age: 13
First skate video: Pretty Sweet – Girl
Favorite skaters: Grant Taylor, Nakel Smith, Ben Raybourne, Ben Kadow, Jesse Alba
Favorite company: Anti-Hero

ethan

Ethan Garcia

Age: 15
First skate video: Nick Mullins’s video on the Berrics
Favorite skaters: P-Rod, Luan Oliveria, Shane O’Neil, Carlos Riberio, Brian Peacock
Favorite Company: Nike SB and Plan B

mecca

Mecca Morris

Age: 15
First skate video: Some local skate video, but Baker 3 was the first real skate video I saw.
Favorite skaters: Brandon Westgate, Ishod Wair, Shane O’Neil, and I don’t have any more…
Favorite Company: Real Skateboards and Vans

shane

Shane Gordon

Age: 15
First skate video: the first online part of the Brunner twins
Favorite skaters: Marc Suciu, Louie Lopez, Kevin Bradley, Ishod Wair, Trevor Colden
Favorite company: Real, Emerica, Thunder, Spitfire, Skate Mental

carlos

Carlos Wilson

Age: 16
First skate video: Parental Advisory – DGK
Favorite skaters: Jimmy Carlin, Theotis Beasley, P-Rod, Keelan Dadd, Tom Asta
Favorite company: DGK or Real

mickey

Mickey Bellam

Age: 14
First skate video: Pretty Sweet – Girl
Favorite skaters: Luan Oliveria, Trevor Colden, Curren Caples, Manny Santiago, Torey Pudwill
Favorite company: Plan B

tal

Tal Radke

Age: 13
First skate video: Pretty Sweet – Girl
Favorite skaters: Chris Joslin, Chris Cole, Mike Mo, Torey Pudwill, Youness Amrani
Favorite company: Any Kayo company for boards

chris

“Chris”

Age: 14
First skate video: Pretty Sweet – Girl
Favorite skaters: Ryan Sheckler, Trevor Colden, Aaron “Jaws” Homoki, Torey Pudwill, Nick Tucker
Favorite company: Trophy Griptape and Plan B

julian

Julian Aprende

Age: 15
First skate video: Alien Workshop’s Memory Screen on Youtube, it was one of the suggested videos to watch…
Favorite skaters: Daewon Song, Curren Caples, Ryan Sheckler, Trevor Colden, Chris Joslin
Favorite company: Real Skateboards

Investigative reporting & photos: Russell “the Intern” Dolan
Original Illustration by Michael Giurato (@badhairlife)
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Comments

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BLACK NINJA
June 15, 2015 1:18 am

I WOULD TOUCH ALL OF THEM

Reply
limp biscuit
June 15, 2015 2:40 am

ben kadow is a professional

Reply
lookslike him
June 15, 2015 2:48 am

Shane Gordon A.K.A. Devine Calloway

Reply
Chris
June 15, 2015 11:43 am

Rad article and premise. And a million times better than what ‘respected’ market research company/pollster YouGov did in the UK with a sample of 200+ mostly young ‘people who do skateboarding’ on their brand preferences and spending behaviour, which provided all kinds of lunchtime LOLz for jaded office-based skateboarders: https://yougov.co.uk/profiler#/Skateboarding/demographics

Reply
- Russell Dolan
  June 17, 2015 2:23 am
  
  Hey thanks for reading ! And thanks for sharing this link , it’s kind of creepy , big government trying to pinpoint “what is a skateboarder?”. How will government take advantage of skaters ? Beware , if a bunch of nice plazas with no bust start being built , they’re trying to trap us.
  
  Reply
  - Chris
    June 18, 2015 6:19 am
    
    No sweat, bro. The UK Government and various big-time PR and marketing companies (and the mainstream press, like the Guardian newspaper) have been taking all kinds of interest ranging from the sinister to the patronising, following on from the establishment getting their arses kicked by the Long Live Southbank campaign. We tried to ramble on about this on the long-running UK website Caught in the Crossfire, but didn’t quite hit the nail on the head as neatly as you guys did by actually going out and talking to a bunch of youth: http://www.caughtinthecrossfire.com/skate/up-river-with-weed-socks-that-yougov/
- Cameron
  June 18, 2015 10:53 am
  
  To Russell below, YouGov is a private, independent polling company. Their profiler tool is applied to everything, not just skateboarding – it’s pretty fun to look around.
  
  Also, it is easy to read it and think that the research is saying almost all skateboarders like this. It doesn’t. It just means that compared to average tastes across every demographic, there are more of them who (using this example) bank with HSBC and are more likely to be between 18-24. It could be that only 10% bank with HSBC, but this is compared with 7% of the rest of the population (those percentages are made up – just for example), so it records skaters as liking HSBC.
  
  I don’t think kids go on YouGov, so I’m not sure how accurate it is. You know any 13 year olds responding to polls?
  
  Reply