A weekly skate challenge for Old Skaters

Benoit: Old Skaters Tricks Challenge host - news from the shop and The Sore Skater Studio - Ryan Clements wisdom - Vincent Touzery personal style

OpenSB is a skateboarding collective. We are a bunch of skateboarders who release work, collaborate, and support one another.

The OpenSB Times is like a skateboarding writing label, trying to explore every corner of skateboarding and serving fresh weekly edits. Collectively written and curated.

Housekeeping

You’re receiving this newsletter because you interacted with Krak, KrakBox or any other OpenSB members sometimes in the past. You can easily unsubscribe at the bottom of this email [one click, easy]. No hard feelings whatsoever so don’t hesitate 😎

In this week edition:

• What’s up in the community: shop; The Sore Skater Studio.

• Introducing a new release: Benoit — Old Skaters Tricks Challenge host

• Cool links we’ve enjoyed

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What’s up in the community 🔥

• members enjoy a 50% discount on special/ exclusive gear and skateboarding paraphernalia on our online shop — available for everyone in the 🇺🇸. You can become a member for as little as $50 a year.

• another Ben is joining the fun — on top of a funny hammer in the first few secs. we highly recommend giving the video below 👇 a watch. Ben is all about creating mindful fitness videos for skateboarders 🙏

Benoit — Old Skaters Tricks Challenge host 🏆

The Old Skaters Tricks Challenge is a 12-week challenge for old skaters where you need to submit one trick per week for 12 weeks, shred on, and climb the leaderboard.

What is this Challenge about?

This is a motivational thing that gets you on your board every week. But it also helps us relate to one another and share the current struggle (or not) in getting that weekly trick down. More interestingly, at 30+, some of us are often isolated in our practice — be it for the fact that friends have stopped skateboarding for a long time now, or just that with a tighter schedule, we end up in parks when everybody else (children, and specifically scouter kids) sleeps.

How was season 2?

Season 2 was particularly fun. First, we saw the community growing quite substantially (from 33 people in season 1 to over 60 in season 2). This energy was particularly addressed by our new “place,” which is a Discord server. Sure, Discord can be a bit of a struggle at first, but clearly, it would have been impossible to scale had we stayed on Twitter.

What changed?

Some details changed, like the bag of selected tricks or the point system. But, clearly, what enables more interesting changes is the move to Discord. We saw various initiatives popping up. Now, it is hard to tell how much of a success they have been, but it is pretty exciting to see new projects stemming from the community. For example, we have Ben, who started a channel for publishing warm-up exercises [nb: yep that one Ben from the video above]. We have Erik, who offered to stream skateboarding events together. We have Nicolas offering to feature a dedicated Old Skaters section in a video.

Are there any struggles or things you wish could have been started?

For sure! To be honest, I am a bit frustrated with many things I would have loved to start or strengthen during season 2. I am thinking of a few ones, like partnerships. If I had had a bit more time, I would have spent it negotiating goodies with brands to distribute to the community. But I am also starting a new job soon, and finding time has become harder.

The only possible solution is to delegate and empower other members to help me run the community. I am so stoked to have Julien (@sahr) and Erik (@therealbeatris) helping approve and upload the tricks so that the leaderboard gets updated. This notion of Old Skaters Staff is really new. It is a first step towards making the community more resilient and getting people involved. I owe this to Virgile (@vir), who is always of great advice.

And things you are proud of?

Well, for a start, I am so stoked to have this family there, one discord away, to help me keep pushing. As I mentioned earlier, the community is becoming more and more resilient and active — this is awesome to see. I was really pumped to have over 50 submissions on week 1 of season 2. This clearly was unexpected, given it was a weird shitty north variation trick, lol.

What’s next?

To finish season 2, we will hold a short celebration time after the leaderboard is updated with streak points. Then, we will group together and try to identify one thing or two we would love to see for season 3. It is still pretty early to see where it gets, but we see some struggle with keeping various skateboarder levels motivated at the same time. Anyway, I am pretty confident it will head in the right direction and evolve at its own pace, and I’ll try my best to keep this wheel spinning.

Last words

I’d love to say thanks to our two partners OpenSB, for the relentless support and the generous prizes on the store, and to Skate Sexy, created by one of our members (Ryan Boud), who is always here to share the stoke.

Finally, if you haven’t joined yet, you can opt-in from the landing page — we will hold off-seasons until we have a plan ready for season 3 (probably when the Canadian snow starts melting, lol).

Cool links we’ve enjoyed 🌐

👴 since we’ve been talking ‘old skaters’ all across this issue, let’s highlight a very special one of them: Ryan Clements. Below he’s discussing the economics of skateboarding events, big corporate sponsors and how they’re perceived [+ many more topics] 👇

And now, let’s enjoy the action. Happy late-birthday Ryan 🥂

👴👴 ‘old skaters’ focus again, we loved that interview of the @brittle_bones_brigade_ on Jenkem: Meet the crew proving it’s never too late to start skating. We can’t agree more.

Seeing the falls, attempts and makes of these new (but old) skaters serves as a friendly reminder that skating isn’t always about doing the hardest tricks or even looking cool.

We spoke with Josh and a few members of the crew to discuss how they got into skating, their best and worst moments on the board, and what keeps them motivated to get better.

👕 we obviously can’t promise any ‘style-focus’ post in every issue here but still, it was fun to discover that one from the homie — old skater as well — Konstantin Malkov

Vincent Touzery personal style in Supreme «Blessed»

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You can think of OpenSB as a metalabel for skateboarding projects. Our goal is to create a common good for the whole community, truly owned by everyone.

Peace everyone ✌️