USC skateboarders say they are tired of being kicked off campus, and they’re trying to do something about it.
In the last two months, hundreds of students have signed a petition to build a skatepark at USC, citing community building and improved well-being as potential benefits of the project.
The movement for a designated space for skaters at USC has been in the works for over a year, said Smith Shute, the president of USC’s skate club and a contributor to the petition’s creation, but the official petition for the park was just released this semester.
“The petition is step one of proving to the university that there’s actually a substantial backing in the student population for something like a skate park,” Smith said. “Now we have the numbers behind us. It’s not something that, you know, a group of five people want. It’s something that over 500 people want.”
The petition was spearheaded by Maggie Bowen, the president of a skate club for women, nonbinary people and the LGBTQ+ community called Aunt Skatie. Bowen could not be reached for comment.
The nearest skate parks to USC are Trinity Skate Park and Gilbert Lindsay Skate Park, and both parks are more than two miles away from campus. If students want to practice skateboarding close to campus, they risk skating in unsafe areas like parking lots and uneven ground or even restricted areas.
“It’s hard to actually have just genuine time to practice without worrying about getting kicked out by other people,” said Zaki Cole, a freshman who is part of an informal skate group. “At the end of the day, people are still going to skate. It just depends on where.”
Supporters of the movement to build a park argue that it would provide a safe space for the diverse community of skateboarders on campus to practice their sport and improve their mental health.
“A skate park is more of a community center than anything else because skateboarding is a very amorphous sport nowadays,” Smith said. “You can kind of come from any walk of life, you can represent whatever you want and like you’re going to get accepted.”
Zoë B. Corwin is a USC research professor for the Pullias Center of Higher Education and part of the USC Skate Studies research team. According to its website, the Skate Studies project aims to “inform the skate community about challenges, needs and strategies experienced by skaters” and “take lessons learned from skateboarders – about a wide range of topics – and share them with the broader society.” Corwin said building a skate park at USC would have a variety of benefits.
“It has a positive impact on mental health,” Corwin said. “When people skateboard, they tend to put their phones away, they tend to focus on the moment and they are outside, they are exercising and they are pushing themselves to work through challenges.”
“It’s a really organic place for people to communicate across differences. So you oftentimes will have people from different racial backgrounds, different socioeconomic classes, different genders and different age groups,” she added.
Supporters of the park say that building this skate park would connect the university to South Los Angeles neighborhoods in addition to giving USC students a communal meeting space.
“I think it would provide that space, not just to us, but to everyone in the surrounding community that would want to use it, which I think is very important here,” Shute said. “If we’re like a private university coming on to like this public space and we don’t provide anything back to the community, I don’t think that is very fair, honestly.”