A professionally designed concrete skatepark is extremlely important.

• Provide a safe challenging place for skateboarding (and similar extreme sports), allowing participants to develop as athletes
• Provide an alternative to team sports, to develop motor skills & balance in youth and the young-at-heart. Playgrounds are provided for younger children, but for older youth who don’t participate in team sports, there is often nothing.
• Attract visitors (skatepark enthusiasts & spectators) who enjoy skateboarding & similar extreme sports. When people visit they spend money!
• Make community more youth-friendly & give youth the message that they’re accepted & valued members of the community, by giving them a place to call their own & a creative outlet to express themselves
• Provide opportunity for healthy activity for youth, helping curb problems of inactivity & drug abuse (According to local Addiction Services, the most common reason given by youth for drug abuse is boredom.)
• Provide opportunities to host jams (competitions), presenting skating in a format that people can understand & appreciate. Skateboarding is a great spectator sport!
• Provide opportunities for “hard to reach, non-joining youth” to get involved in the community & foster creativity as each skater develops his own personal style and skills
According to veteran skateboarder Dan Hughes (2), “Skateboarding reaches these “at risk” youth, like no other sport. And it’s cool too. But, people are out of touch with what is happening, and just want to get these annoying skateboarders out of their hair. All the while, kids are learning that as skaters they are second-class citizens. Yet, it’s these same skateboarders who are learning a valuable work ethic. Because, believe me, if you don’t work hard and commit to a trick, you won’t land it. They also learn how to work independently, and also how to be creative, and develop their own style.” (Email, March 2007)
• Provide social opportunities by bringing different ages and social groups together, encouraging interaction and appreciation of each other; bring families together who enjoy skating as a family
• Empower youth by involving them fully in the process of establishing the park, enabling them to work with community elders, learning how government works & how they can become more active citizens
• Encourage youth to interact independently & develop socially, learning how to take turns & help each other learn new tricks
• Mitigate street skating problems, protecting private & public property from damage & reducing police time required to follow up on complaints. For example, 75% of 24 communities surveyed by the City of Calgary in 1998, after the skatepark opened, reported a significant reduction in the skate problem.
• Reduce pressure on hospitals as a result of reduced injuries from skating on rough surfaces and in traffic areas, i.e. street-skating. (According to Health Canada, only 5% of skateboarding injuries take place in skateparks.)
• Provide a healthy release for pent-up aggression & frustration
• Teach the importance of a positive attitude & belief in oneself. To progress in skateboarding, one must trust oneself & believe that they can do it!
• Benefit StFX University because many university students would use the skatepark
• Provide economic benefits.
According to the Antigonish RDA: “Community Access to a variety of recreational opportunities encourages business investment from outside the community, acts as a driver for immigration, and encourages resident retention (particularly among youth). Destination marketing and tourism development are closely tied with the number and quality of recreation activities developed and available.”
A skatepark would fit well into Antigonish’s established slogan of “Visit, Stay, Work and Play.”
Thanks to Jim Barnum of Spectrum Skateparks for many of the above ideas.

The easy answer is that they provide a place for kids who aren’t attracted to traditional team sports a place to go and express themselves in an individual and athletic manner. Getting kids, particularly at-risk kids, involved in a personal and esteem-building activity like skateboarding helps them build the confidence to do well in other aspects of their lives. Tony knows this because that’s what skateboarding did for him. That’s why he started the Tony Hawk Foundation–to help today’s kids by helping their communities build quality public skateparks. The 13-million skateboarders in America only have about 2,000 skateparks nationwide. That means the vast majority of them are skating in the streets. Skateparks, even the more challenging ones, are far safer than kids rolling through busy streets. And when parks are built right–with local skater input and involvement throughout the process–those youngsters develop a sense of ownership and pride. The very existence of the park is the result of their hard work. They worked with civic and local business leaders, with each other on design elements, and with the community to find a suitable location. These previously disenfranchised skaters, who once ran from the police, find themselves working with the police and city and community as a whole. It’s a transformational process for these young people. It might be useful to survey kids in your area.

Ask them if they currently use the athletic fields and ball courts your city offers, and if they’d like to have a skatepark as well. You’ll be surprised to find out how many kids who aren’t interested in traditional sports would jump at the chance to skate a good park, or have the opportunity to learn to. Some of the information on this Web site, like the “How To Get A Skatepark In Your Home Town” guide, may answer a lot of other questions for you.

Community

One of the great things about skateboarding is how it brings members of the community together. On any given day at a well-functioning and supported skatepark, you can see all age groups, from the 5 year old supervised by a parent, to the group of teenagers having their own skate session, to the older skaters who love the sport as much or more than the teens. In public recreation areas where there are other amenities such as baseball and soccer fields, playground, picnic areas, tennis courts, and indoor swim and workout areas, the skatepark tends to get the most traffic and use.

How can we foster responsibility and stewardship for the skatepark among all our public areas? What benefits the skatepark and the community around it the most is a few dedicated skateboarders who use the park and administer its programs. Every local area has at least one skateboarder who wants to share their love of skateboarding and cares very much for the park itself. These are the people who make the best skateboard coaches and skatepark stewards. Giving them responsibility for the kids and the skatepark is a very positive move that can bring more families and skatepark users together.
Benefits of a skatepark

Skateboarding is a sport, an art form, a lifestyle, and a culture. People have been skating for decades, and it has even become an extreme sport. We can all benefit from skateboarding, even if we’re not bombing halfpipes and grinding down rails. Not only does skateboarding get us outside, but it is a fun and effective way to get from point A to point B. Here are the best health benefits of skateboarding from Health Fitness Revolution and author of the book ReSYNC Your Life Samir Becic:

• Provides flexibility: Ankles must remain flexible and body should stay limber while skating. The more tense and inflexible a person is, the harder it is for them to skate.
• Offers full-body workout: You’re moving your feet and your legs, you’re using your arms to help balance. You’re twisting your body. All these things must happen simultaneously, giving your body a variety of movements.

• Physical Endurance: Most skateboarders don’t just skate for a few minutes and stop- many find it so enjoyable that they skate for hours a day, getting their physical endurance levels up.

• Teaches Precision: To nail a trick, many motions need to align perfectly, so when you fail, you try again, and again, and again. But each time, you make adjustments.  You place your feet differently on the board, you change your timing, you adjust your speed, you try and land differently. Until you have the motions and timing down to a precise science, you keep trying!

• Improves Coordination: Skateboarding involves a lot of coordination between your eyes, legs, feet, and arms. The more you skate, the better you’ll get at this. Precision and coordination are used throughout your life, whether you skate or not. When you improve these traits, you better your ability to do all sorts of different things from driving to climbing to multi-tasking.

• Calorie Burning: Depending on the intensity of the skate, the average person will burn between 150-500 calories per hour.

• Skills Transfer To Other Sports: including surfing, snowboarding, or wakeboarding. If the waves are flat, the snow is melting, or the water is too cold, a person can help keep their skills sharp and fitness levels up by simply riding a skateboard.
• Teaches consequences, practice, and patience: skateboarding provides a perfect opportunity for a young person to take calculated risks in a controlled environment, with very real and immediate consequences if maneuvers are not executed properly. Similar to martial arts, skateboarding skills and fundamentals must be learned and mastered over time with practice and patience, (unlike the instant gratification provided by television and video games).

• You learn to fall: Prevention of future injuries is one of the most beneficial things that skateboarding has to offer in terms of health. When you skate, you learn how to avoid falling (if possible), and you also learn how to fall correctly. Skateboarders naturally get better at knowing where to place their feet and their hands as they progress with their skating. This is a valuable tool to have in life because it will reduce the chance of freak accidents. You’ll naturally be more able to recover from slips, trips, and stumbles and avoid falling on your face.

• Stress Relief:  Any physical activity is considered to be good for relieving stress. Skateboarding can help you take your mind off things. Alternatively, it can also help you think clearly about things. Skateboarding seems to bring things into perspective and allows you to feel as though you’re more in control of other aspects of your life.

• Overall Health: As with all forms of physical exercise, skateboarding can reduce or eliminate your risk for many health problems, such as high blood pressure, diabetes and obesity. Skateboarding can also reduce your risk for coronary heart disease by reducing your triglyceride levels and increasing your “good” cholesterol.

Skateboarding and rollerblading are two of the fastest growing activities in the United States with more than 14 million participants. Most skaters ride wherever they can — in the streets, sidewalks and parking lots, and just about anywhere they aren’t chased from.

Community groups and civic leaders have identified skateparks as an answer to the lack of suitable places to ride. In recent years, hundreds of municipalities have come to embrace the recreational and societal benefits of skateparks, and three new skateparks are built every week in the U.S.

Skateparks, even the more challenging ones, are far safer than kids rolling through busy streets, and there is a lot less damage to picnic tables and other items throughout the community that skateboarders use as obstacles when they ride. In addition, when parks are built right — with local skater input and involvement throughout the process — the kids develop a sense of ownership and pride for the location.

Skateparks provide a place for skaters to go and practice the sport they love with friends. It gives them the opportunity to improve, to achieve small victories on a daily basis, to grow more confident in themselves and their own abilities, and allows them to dream of possibly becoming a “Tony Hawk” someday.