In Honour Of The Big Session

I’ve never been one to skate by myself. When I first started I used to do it, and the “one man session” ran out of steam very quickly. With no one to bounce off, no one to push you, and no one to interact with, a one person skate can be really lonely, sometimes frustrating, and almost always disappointing. For an activity so focussed on individual pursuit and personal improvement, skateboarding is something that works so much better with friends.

There’s something weird that happens when you add more people to a skate session. A skate with a group of 4 people is fun, but when you start adding extra people, and extra cars full of people, the session gets more and more awesome. The perfect storm for this is to get a convoy of 3 or 4 cars, travelling to a skatepark you don’t often get to skate. This combines the stoke of skating a rad park that isn’t your local with the multiplied gnar of bringing what can only be described as a small army along for the ride.

With a group of 20 skateboarders, you get a wide variety of styles, skill levels and age ranges. You can often get a real good cross section of every type of skater in a group this large; super hesh pool board slashers skating alongside fresh as fuck tech ledge dancers, all part of the same crew and all doing their own thing. As a filmer these kind of sessions are amazing to film, but also frustrating, as for every rad trick you film, there’s an equally rad trick you’re missing out on at the other end of the park. This is in no way a bad thing though, and it’s an example of the infectious positivity skateboarding can bring.

Trips like this are what summer is made for: everything coming together to form a rad afternoon where amazing tricks just happen to go off. Whilst there is definitely a place for planned street spot missions where one person attacks a handrail for 30 minutes to get a perfect trick, I think I’m the kind of person who will always prefer to film a massive skatepark session. If a co-ordinated street mission is a perfectly choreographed concerto, a hectic 20 person skatepark session is freestyle jazz – and whilst that might be sometimes messy as fuck and sometimes kinda hard to take in compared to the focussed energy of a street spot assassination, it’s a reminder of one of my favourite things about skateboarding, and being part of a scene. It’s a reminder than skateboarding brings people together, and I’ll take any excuse to remind myself of that.