CALGARY—Calgary is becoming a city to be reckoned with in Canada’s skateboarding landscape.

We now have more than 35,000 skateboarders (and counting), according to the City of Calgary — including even more women. Skateboarders can shred a different park every day of the week, a far cry from what our city’s skating scene looked like less than a decade ago.

There are more than 10 new skateboard parks operational or under development in Calgary and neighbouring towns.

“I’d say it’s a complete, almost polar, opposite,” said Spencer Corbett, brand director, team manager and event co-ordinator for the board shop The Source.

“Before, there was only one skateboard park (Shaw Millennium Park, Calgary’s oldest operating skate park and, according to the city, Canada’s largest outdoor skate park), and it was the hub for all skateboarders. You wouldn’t find skateboarders in suburbs or anywhere, everyone just met downtown and it was a very small community.”

Now “there’s endless options,” Corbett said, adding that with all the new options in the city, the perception of skateboarding has shifted for the good.

Corbett, now 24, began skateboarding at age 11 in Calgary. He said he started because his family couldn’t afford team sports. And because of skateboarding’s very as-solitary-or-social-as-you’d-like-it and bare-bones nature, it was an easy sport to keep up with while growing up in a family of a single parent with four kids.

At one point in his career, Corbett said he rode for brand sponsors for everything from shoes to boards, and based most of his work out of Calgary.

He said that Calgary wasn’t (and still isn’t, exactly) a hot spot for those looking to transition to the professional level, but our city ranks third in the country behind Toronto and Vancouver, Canada’s skateboarding capital.

What keeps Corbett and other skateboarders invested for such long periods of time? Corbett said it’s the creative aspect of skating that fuels most people’s fires.

“It’s like your own art form, it’s your own piece of work. It’s like your paintbrush and the city’s your canvas kind of thing,” he said.

“You’re able to just create your own masterpiece out of it, and everyone’s skating’s different, so just the never-ending evolving of different tricks and what it brings.”

And to further boost Calgary’s skateboarding cachet, the city now boasts a Ninetimes skate store downtown, and officials with skateboard shoe king Vans paid a visit in April with a House of Vans pop-up event, paying homage to Calgary’s skateboarding history.

Corbett said The Source is also working on its first full-length skateboarding movie, and recently sent 20-years-old team member Ashton Dobler to New York City to film him skating in one of the skateboarding hotbeds of the United States.

“It was the best 10 days of my life,” said Dobler.

“People are kind of realizing that skating is a good thing and it brings good things to the community now, that these parks have showed up,” he said, adding Shaw Millennium Park used to be seen as a seedier part of the city, but that’s changing now thanks to more families getting into skateboarding.

Corbett has also seen the positive ripple effects for neighbourhoods.

“Especially (in) today’s day and age, kids are always inside playing video games or watching TV and whatnot. (Skateboarding) kind of comes back to our roots and gets kids outside again.

“It gives the community more of a personality, as well.”

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Plus, Corbett said, since skateboarders always have each other’s backs, it’s “one of the more accepting communities.”

“It doesn’t matter where you come from, your ethnicity, who you are, it’s very accepting.

“It looks badass and it’s fun.”

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