Nelson skaters seek place to board

By Aaron Lee

Published: July 16, 2008

Cameron Eberwien’s aunt must be an understanding woman.

Because what was once the basement garage of her Nellysford home is now her 13-year-old nephew’s makeshift skate park.

And while the park competes for space with a dusty pool table and a washer and dryer, the smooth concrete floor is what draws Eberwien and his friends for hours each week.

- On Aug. 23, SkateNelson will host a Community Cabaret at the Earl Hamner Jr. Theater at the Rockfish Valley Community Center in Afton beginning at 7:30 p.m.
- Six to eight bands will play at the event, which will also include a presentation by the Black Cat Skate Team of Charlottesville.
- Door proceeds from the event will go to SkateNelson.
- For more information, call (434) 361-1999.

Hours of practice, and tricks-that-got-away, that have tattooed the drywall with scuffs and dents.

“We’ve just taken what we’ve seen in urban landscapes and recreated it here,” Eberwien said.

For him, the roughly 15-by -20-foot space beats the basement in his parent’s house nearby, where he used to skate in a space about half the size.

“(My aunt) does say that I do need to fix the dents one day,” he said.

The road to Skatedom

The gravel driveway leading out of Eberwien’s home is a half-mile long. At the end of it there’s roughly 30 more miles to a skate park in Charlottesville.

Eberwien spends as much time as he can at that park. But he’s limited between trips like a lot of other skaters in Nelson County, where pastureland far outstretches sidewalks and parking lots.

It’s a fact of life that is now banding together rural skaters looking to build a homestead of their own.

SkateNelson.org is the brainchild of a handful of teens that wanted to see a skate park built in the county. The Web site’s proprietor is Tim Gorman, a skater living in Afton who has two skateboarding kids.

Gorman sees skating like this: “There is a whole segment of kids that may not gravitate towards a team environment that still need an athletic outlet.”

Since March, SkateNelson has already organized itself as a non-profit with the help of the Rockfish Valley Community Center. That means it now can start talking with local businesses about getting financial support that could double as a tax write-off for donors.

Last month, the group, with the support of the county’s parks and recreation department, borrowed a mobile skate park from Augusta County and set it up at Rockfish River Elementary School.

Gorman said he realized how popular a permanent skate park could be. The park’s ramps and grinding rails were set up for four days, and at the height of each day more than two dozen kids were skating, Gorman said.

Gorman said the initial idea is to put a park in the Rockfish-Afton-Nellysford area.

Around the way

The City of Staunton built a skate park less than six years ago at a time when there were ordinances in the works to prevent skateboarding its historic downtown area, said Chris Tuttle, director of Recreation and Parks.

The park is 100-by-100 feet of concrete and cost roughly $100,000 to build. It was built in one of the city’s parks, Tuttle said, and took about two years to get from the idea phase to the breaking-ground stage.

The park caters to bikers, skaters and scooters and was designed during brainstorming sessions the city held with local skaters, Tuttle said. The cost of the park’s upkeep is minimal, he said.

Tuttle describes the park’s popularity like this: “I’ve even found snow shovels where they’ve shoveled the snow off to skate.”

But for now …

Colin Bruguiere lives in Afton. He’s a rising sophomore at Nelson County High School, where skating the campus is frowned on, he said.

“A lot of times you don’t realize you’re not supposed to be somewhere until someone comes up and tells you,” Bruguiere said.

He skated the mobile park last month and called it “a huge success,” but said the talent of the county’s skaters is improving and is in need of a permanent challenge.

While building a county park is being discussed, he spends hours each week, sometimes each day out in his backyard skating a used half-pipe his dad, Curtis, found for $150 in the classifieds.

It took several trips with a flatbed truck to move it from Madison Heights, but has since made his house a hotspot among friends.

“There’s a lot of interest, but there’s no place for them to go and do this,’ Curtis Bruguiere said.

The Bruguieres estimate it would have cost upwards of $3,000 to build the ramp from scratch.

“This is a well-used ramp, to say the least,” he said.

And Curtis Bruguiere is glad to see the popularity.

“It gets them out of the house to get some exercise,” he said.