On sunny days, the skate park at Ohio State University would draw dozens of daredevils on skateboards and bicycles.

On sunny days, the skate park at Ohio State University would draw dozens of daredevils on skateboards and bicycles.

Ohio State officials had one big problem with that: Most of them weren�t students.

When the university started to tear down ramps and rails at the Kenny Road park recently, with plans to finish the work by June, skaters started an online petition to save the park. By yesterday, it had garnered 1,200 signatures, and OSU officials had agreed to meet with delegates of the petitioners on Friday.

But crews wrecked the rest of the park yesterday, leaving only rubble.

�I guess I�m going to have to ask the guy why they went ahead and tore down the whole thing when they saw that there was obviously some interest,� said Kyle Decot, 27, who started the petition and is a Web-application developer at the university.

The park is to be replaced with two grassy fields. They will be used chiefly for a student soccer league that fills up nearby fields every year. Two new fields could add 1,000 students to the league, said Dave Isaacs, a spokesman for the Office of Student Life.

�Our top priority is accommodating the needs of Ohio State students,� he said.

Decot knew something was amiss when ramps started disappearing. Then he saw a blurb about the change on an OSU website.

�Over the past few weeks, one ramp would be gone one day, and then the next day another ramp would be gone,� said Decot, who skated at the park when the weather allowed.

After he started his petition, he scheduled a meeting with the director of recreational sports at OSU to make his case.

In the petition, Decot wrote that the park gives visitors a safe place to practice. Friendships and a sense of community have grown there. He asked Ohio State not to discredit sports that aren�t as �conventional� as soccer.

Some students have supported the petition.

�That�s where we go,� said Josh Suh, 22, a junior from Akron who formed a skateboarding club at Ohio State last semester. �For all the other parks, we�ve got to drive off-campus, and for a lot of students that�s not an option.�

The park opened in 2006 after students who wanted somewhere to skate worked with the recreational sports department at Ohio State. It quickly became a hub for skaters in nearby neighborhoods that don�t have skate parks, said Johnathan Hoch, 30, a former student who helped lead the project.

Regulars more recently said the wide-ranging crowd was part of the attraction.

Less appealing were the fist-wide cracks that traced the asphalt, parts of it patched with sheet metal. Wood on some of the ramps had started to come apart.

�It�s nothing fancy. It wasn�t the best skate park by far, but it was just a good, basic place to go skate, and you didn�t have to worry about cops yelling at you,� said Eric Barkow, owner of Embassy Boardshop in Clintonville.

Interest in skateboarding has stayed strong in central Ohio, Barkow said. His shop hosts several competitions each year that attract about 200 competitors. �We have bigger and bigger turnouts every year,� he said.

Barkow�s store donated some of the ramps at the Ohio State park. Isaacs said they won�t go to waste. The university donated some of the obstacles to a skate park in Wilmington, southeast of Dayton. Decot and Suh both had planned to ask university officials on Friday to spare the park. Now, they have a new idea. They plan to ask for a new one.

cbinkley@dispatch.com

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