SLS and The Demise of Contest Skating.

Well, its back. The worst thing to happen to skateboarding since benihanas.

It’s all over instagram and youtube, clogging the arteries of boredom and procrastination.

The dread king of contest skateboarding – SLS.

From bad judging to non-lines, this format of contest skating has come to produce the worst in skateboarding. Taking it from the freedom of the streets and the parking lot contests into mainstream jockular culture, SLS has been the slow infection that is making our once healthy escape into a burning fever of fans, merch, and ticket sales.

Let’s start with the worst part:

FORMAT.

Multiple runs of inconsistent skating. Best run out of five attempts; or is it three? two runs now; plus 4 attempts at best trick. It doesn’t matter because the problem lies mostly in the fact that these aren’t true runs. And they are definitely not lines, as they are being called now. Rolling in, doing a trick, and then getting off your board on the other side of the park (yes, its a park-not street), and then doing some other trick on your way back to the 1st side isn’t how a ”run” is done. The true difficulty of a run is multiple tricks done in succession without getting off your board in any way. Getting off your board after each trick is a way of cheating yourself and everyone else. Just that 1 or 2 seconds is enough to recharge the body, giving you a little break in the midst of your allotted time. Again, the difficulty or goal, is staying on your board for the set time, accomplishing as many tricks as you can. Doing it while winded ups the difficulty.

There’s already a best trick section of the contest. The set format of the runs pretty much voids it. Or maybe vice-versa. Having the best trick section, there’s no need for the best-of runs.

Judging/Points/Rank

The judgment of tricks is so subjective. Skateboarding itself is subjective. Just because a trick is technical or difficult doesn’t make it better or worth more than a trick that is objectively easier or simpler. Kickflip crooked grind to nollie flip out is a very technical and difficult trick. You know what I’d rather see? Back smith.

I think, really, what it comes down to is that the more technical a trick is, the further away skateboarding gets from the beauty it inherently has from being a simple form of self-expression. But this isn’t about self-expression; it’s about contests. So how do you judge a trick when everybody sees the value of a trick differently? Simply put, you can’t. Watch any SLS contest and you’ll see and hear it from the crowd. There is constant disagreement with posted standings and scores. You’ll even see it from the participating skaters-right before the camera cuts away.

And from those judgements come points. Because of how arbitrary the judging is, the points awarded follow in the same path. Sometimes more, sometimes less. More points equal a higher rank, but does that really mean someone is a better skater than somebody else? Maybe for the day or maybe even for only the 30 seconds of one particular run. Certainly not in any meaningful way or length of time.

Let’s make lines the new tricks

Technique/Style

Ah. Trick skaters. You have so much potential, but you waste it when you walk back from whatever you just tried. SLS has fostered a whole generation of people who only skate to do tricks. Sure, they’re fun, but they are not the point of skateboarding. Instead of the repetitive trickery that contest skating instigates, it would be nice to see a better push, or even a pre-trick and/or post-trick. Let’s make lines the new tricks.

It’s technique vs. style. How it’s done vs. how it gets done. It’s a literal judgement call when it should be anything but that.

Tickets/Venue

Get out your credit card. You’re about to waste a ton of money on convenience fees, overpriced food and beverages, and T-shirts promoting shit-culture. Everybody’s going to be a walking billboard for SLS and anyone affiliated with them.

And buying tickets through Ticketmaster? C’mon. They’ve been running this same scam for decades now. Overpriced, under-value; It’s a money-grab just because people will go along with it.

Look, I don’t blame the individual skaters for participating. There’s a lot of money getting thrown around and that’s tempting. But skaters are people and when people form groups…well that’s when things start to go awry. Groups make bad decisions based on their collective indifference to other groups. If there’s just enough to spark interest for something, people will often overlook the negatives because they think all the other people also don’t mind. I have no illusions that a few words I type out are going to change the trajectory of skateboarding, but if one or two people hear what I’m saying, agrees with what I’m saying, then another group is formed. And maybe that group will influence others and grow a little bit more. Eventually, maybe enough like-minded people will be enough to make a change in skateboarding. It’s happened before. It could happen again. Let’s make some new bad decisions.