New additions to the Zero Gravity Skate Park in town aims to help new skaters land new tricks and reach new heights with recent upgrades made on June 21.
Trish Kluane, manager of parks and open spaces for the town of Cochrane, explained that the grand unveiling coincided with National Go Skateboarding Day. Through a collaboration with Shredz Skate Shop and The Inside, the skate park received repairs a few new additions.
“Shout outs and thank you to Shredz and The Inside for their generous donations,” Kluane said. “And to 5-O Solutions and their staff for their incredible talent to install these new features, and for their knowledge and repairs to were able to help benefit the park.”
Owner of Shredz Sam Stuart, explained that one of the new additions include a Pier 7 manual pad, based off of an obstacle that’s really popular in San Francisco. But most importantly, the addition of a quarter pipe and a mini-ledge is something that is greatly needed for new skaters in town.
“These two are really important to us because when you look at the park, it’s all large and extra-large obstacles,” Stuart explained. “The bowl is huge, and those rails and everything else is too. So, for how amazing the skate park is, […] it’s really missing some of the fundamental stuff for training blocks.”
Rocy Marr, a local skateboarder with both The Inside and Shredz, outlines that it’s very important to have these accessible obstacles for younger riders.
“If you’ll notice, there’s usually more people on scooters than skateboards because skateboarding is really difficult to learn, especially because there’s no small obstacles,” Marr said. “So, hopefully these obstacles will help nurture a new skateboarding community with easily accessible obstacles so people can learn tricks, and have fun skateboarding.”
With a growing skate culture in town, Stuart says these new additions will definitely be put to good use.
“There’s a lot of charities that do stuff here like The Inside who do a youth thing every Thursday, we do a girl’s skate night on Tuesdays, and there’s a crew from Mînî Thnî that does different skate programming every Wednesday,” Stuart said. “We work with them, and sometimes they come here. I think everything's better when you have something for everyone.”
Overall, Stuart said he would like to thank the Town for being receptive on their feedback.
“When we came to them and we said – hey, the [skate] park has some upkeep issues that need to be done and it’s missing some key features, they were really amazing to work with,” Stuart said. “And 5-O Solutions is the company that came in and built everything, and they did a really good job.”
