Arts & Life

Skateboarding gets a facelift

In popular belief, skateboarding is the diversion of choice for rebels, daredevils and dropouts. At Cal State Long Beach, however, it’s a popular and now stylish mode of transportation.
A quickly emerging company, born in Berkeley, Calif., that makes skateboards just for college students has chosen CSULB as the first university in the state to launch its new custom cruiser.
Ditch Skateboards has been collaborating with 49er Shops since January to launch the new skateboard line geared towards CSULB students. The boards are ironically now available in the University Bookstore, even though skaters can still be ticketed if they’re not careful.
“We’re not setting out to change these rules,” Wilson Tseng, co-founder of Ditch Skateboards, said. “We just want to try to show skateboarding in a different light.”
The company began with three college friends who wanted to develop a board that they could share with others as well as love to ride themselves. They skateboarded on campus during their college years and found a design that they believed would be perfect for the student needing an efficient and lightweight way to get around.
Tseng said that their boards will hopefully shed a positive light on skateboarding, clearing the stereotypical skater image of scarred, apathetic punks with ripped clothing and bad attitudes.
“People have a set impression in their mind of what skating is and what it’s for,” Tseng said. “That’s an outdated way of thinking.”
Tseng said the mission of the company is to create the perfect board that makes skating available to a wide range of people, both young and old. Although the boards are designed primarily for students, Tseng said that the boards could be for alumni and university aficionados as well.
The first model of this “perfect board” is called the Ditch Original, while the black and gold version of it available in the bookstore is the Long Beach State Original.
“We were so stoked with how it came out, and we knew that other people would like it too,” Tseng said, “so we decided … to collaborate with schools and make custom designed boards for them.”
The Ditch team aims to eliminate the reasons why people may be skeptical of skateboarding, both through their board design and availability. Tseng said that the boards being sold in the bookstore eliminates the intimidating first visit to a skate shop full of already-skilled skaters.
“We wanted to make sure that there are other ways people can get into skating,” Tseng said.
The boards are named after the popular location to skate, “ditches,” or dried up irrigation wells. The boards also combine practicality for transportation and capability for tricking — a “signature” design, according to their website. While the new product is currently being sold solely to college students, Tseng said that the company doesn’t encourage students to “ditch” class to skate.
The company refers to the Ditch Original as a “beach cruiser” board, inspired by vintage boards from the ‘60s and ‘70s, when surfing gave birth to skateboarding. Unlike the typical skateboard with its softer wheels and wider deck, the Ditch boards are more convenient for cruising and commuting. Tseng said that Ditch Skateboards believes that the more practical cruiser boards are the “direction of skateboarding.”
While the board isn’t primarily intended for popping ollies and grinding kinks, tricksters can still kickflip it around. According to Tseng, the board is roughly the same size and the same price as the popular Penny Nickel board but is crafted from wood rather than plastic.
Ditch Skateboards is currently collaborating with Iowa, North Carolina, Kansas and Ohio State Universities, but CSULB is the first university to launch the boards. Although the team formed up north, they targeted CSULB because of its signature lifestyle, and despite the skateboarding ban on campus, they knew skateboarding couldn’t perish.
“We knew Long Beach there was such a good skate culture there,” Tseng said. “Whether or not it was actually permitted, it’s the lifestyle. We knew that the students were skating a lot, and we didn’t let it discourage us.”
The complete board costs $119.95, and can also be found online at www.ditchskateboards.com.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published.

Daily 49er newsletter

Instagram