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The Skateboarding Encyclopedia
A complete visual guide to shredding
Written by Keith M. Warter
Photographs by Mike R. Abarta & Sean T. Basalygia
Illustrations by Disney Artist Fred R. W
And Skateboarding by various shredders
Introduction to this Book
This book takes a complete look at skateboarding from beginning to end, complete with explanations and definitions of skateboarding tricks and terminology and relevant photographs and other visuals, so that those who want to learn about skateboarding can easily grasp its language. In order to make the language easy to understand, the contents of this book are organized into families of tricks and terms from basic to complex so that the reader can easily see the logical word patterns. This is the best way to learn any language, be it English, Spanish, Japanese, or skateboarding. It helps to have it introduced in a gradual way with each new term building on the last so you can develop your understanding and skill. This book explains skateboarding in such a way that it is educational for individuals who would like to learn about skateboarding, like mothers, fathers, grandmas and grandpas, girlfriends, boyfriends, and other family members and friends of a person who skateboards and would like to better understand and appreciate what that person loves to do, and perhaps actually know what they are talking about when they come home and tell you of a new trick they landed. There is no better way to connect with someone than to learn their language or dialect because that really shows you respect their culture, and it helps you connect with them on a deeper level. This book is also for beginning skateboarders who want to learn the terminology of skateboarding or know the name of a trick they just landed, or even advanced skaters who are arguing about what to call a particular trick. This book is intended to teach the art, culture, and dialect of skateboarding to anyone who wants to know about it, and clarify and expand peoples’ knowledge who already know about it.
To help with this purpose there are professional photographs by Skate Photographers Mike Abarta and Sean Basalygia, illustrations by Fred R. W, a renowned Disney artist, as well as skateboarding by some of the best skateboarders around, so that people can easily see the language of skateboarding in action, and grasp the art of skateboarding with ease. The words in this book are presented in a way that is conducive to learning, written by myself Keith Warter. I'm a student of cognitive psychology at UC Bekeley who has been obsessively compuslively skateboarding for 20 years, and will be using contemporary psychological research and some professor suggestions to make this book as organized for learning as I possibly can. Studies show that in order to become an expert at something it is important to have important related terms grouped together into a hierarchy of principles, otherwise everything looks foreign and complicated (Chi, Feltovich, & Glaser, 1981). I hope to organize the tricks into categories that are easy to understand so the patterns of this language will come alive for you. Along with the Crisp 11 frame per second sequence photographs by Mike, and other awsome photos and illustrations by Sean and Fred, you will learn this language in no time. After reading this book you will understand skateboarding, and you will be able to form sentences and trick names on your own without having to memorize endless new words. It is written as an interesting and fun-to-read novel that can be read from beginning to end, with the intention of giving the reader a complete understanding of all aspects of skateboarding.
Here is a Preview of some of the Sections
The terms “spot” is generally used by skateboarders in the context of “Lets go skate some spots,” which almost always means that they are going and skating “Street Spots." Street Spots are locations that are really good to skate, but were not made specifically for skating. These are distinguished from “skate parks”, which are places that are actually made for skating. Skate parks can be made from wood metal, concrete, or anything else, and many times have street-like structures like stair sets, handrails going down stairs, and maybe even concrete barriers that are found in the street. As much as these things resemble street spots, everybody knows they were made specifically for skateboarding, so they are absolutely perfect for skateboarding. This usually means that doing a trick at a skate park is almost always not as cool as doing the same trick at a similar “street spot” because street spots usually are a lot harder to skate, and there is usually a lot more going on, like short runway, ruff landing, yelling hobos, angry business owners, and dispatched cops, giving you only two more tries before you must pack your stuff and run before they get there.
Nowadays since skateboarders have spent the last 60 years since skateboarding was invented getting kicked out of skate spots, there has been a movement to make “natural” skate spots that are specifically made for skating so that you can go their and skate a street-like environment without getting kicked out. These places have usually come to be called “skate plazas”, and were established by a professional skateboarder by the name of Rob Dyrdek( Yeah that dude from “Rob and Big,” the Mtv show you may have seen on T.V). Most skaters still consider these plazas skate parks though because they were intended to be skated. Whether you call it a plaza or a park, it was intended to be skated and that just isn’t as cool. And its not like we should purposely make so called skate plazas that have crappy run way, bad landing, or hire schizephrenic hobos to run around yelling to give it the feel of true street. It will never work like that.
One of the funnest things about skateing, and the greatest feelings, is when you randomnly find a natural skate spot in the streets, at some school, or in a hidden ally way somewhere that is absolutely perfect for skateing. The perfect example of this is this one spot at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. It is an absolutely natural and perfect concrete quarterpipe. It was built on the patio of one of the rocket engineering buildings because they needed a way to have the wind from the high powered exhaust of the engines they work on go up instead of bouncing back and knocking over students.
This is the perfect example of a dream skate spot. Half the excitement is how tripped out you are that you are skating something that has probably never been skated before, and was made for some other ironic reason that worked out perfectly for you and your homies. Who would have ever thought that rocket scientists needed to use quarterpipes too. Who would have ever thought that this last wall in the very back of Cal Poly, the very last wall we even thought to look over for spots, would hold this incredible spot. Sometimes when you are skating around the city, driving to different schools (for some reason schools always tend to have spots, especially colleges) it can start to seem like you are in a desert, like the world is a baren wasteland for spots. When you finally peak over a sand dune and see a quarterpipe, ledge, handrail, bank, or some other siick spot in the distance, it is like an oasis in the desert. It is like finding a haven of water after days of a dry, baren, wasteland.
The only reason I can tell you where this spot it without making people angry is because this spot is already “busted”. This means that they have already stopped people from skating it. Not only did they throw heavy cement barriers and weird foam blocks in front of it to make it near impossible to skate anymore, but Cal Poly in general has cracked down hard on skateboarding. You get tickets almost every time you skate there. Still, check out this spot. You can imagine how stoked we were when we first found it and got to skate it.
It is too bad some people don't understand skateboarding. When you get kicked out of this skate spot oasis you find, it is like the equivalent of a Mirage in the desert. You run towards the oasis, you start skateing the quarterpipe warming up, thinking of siick tricks to do, and then when you finally get to the oasis and try a trick, a security guard comes out and tells you you have to leave. Many people have been lead to believe that skateboarding causes vandelism. This is not true though, only grind and slide tricks cause vandalism. Those only make up a small section of this book. Instead of discriminating against the whole activity and posting "No Skateboarding" signs, people should just put signs up that say "No grinds or slides," if anything. It would be much better if businesses just realized how cool skateboarding is, and how it takes an average ledge or handrail and makes it into art, but allowing everything except grinds and slides is better than nothing. Instead people often go overboard trying to deter skateboarding. Look at all the stuff they put in front of this quarterpipe to keep people from skating it anymore.
 
Now there is so much stuff in the runway that you can’t get enough speed to go up the quarterpipe and do anything. There is barriers, and blue foam things we have never been able to figure out the purpose for, and look at how much damage this has done to the spot.
 
Slamming barriers down to deter skaters has caused more damage than skateboarders ever would have.
Even though “spots” is a slang term for these street spots around the world as it is used in the sentence, it is also can just refer to a place for skating. Parks are a good spot to skate, but it isn’t that cool to film there because part of the fun and art of filming is doing something on interesting street spots not meant to be skated like the SLO quarterpipe shown above in its prime.
Full pipe: This is a full pipe. The kind of pipe we are talking about here isn’t like the plumbing pipes of a house though. This is talking about a pipe big enough to fit a human. It is even better if it is big enough to ride up the sides. Here is a natural full pipe in the middle of nowhere you have to hike to. Full pipes come in many different forms, from random hunks of metal in the middle of the desert like this one, and giant cement drainage pipes out off of the highways of the world.
Here is a really fun little full pipe out in the deserts of a city just outside Las Vegas Nevada
 
Half Pipe: This is one half of a whole pipe. Generally they are refered to as mini ramps if they are a half pipe under 6 feet or so. Above that it is just called a half pipe, until you start getting to the 10 foot or higher range. Then this is called a Vert ramp because at this point the sides get high enough to where they usually start transitioning to be vertical, meaning that they are completely straight down near the top. This offers complete weightlessness when you drop in or do tricks up there. Sometimes you may find a really long gradual transition on both sides but generally at around 10 feet or so the ramp will start getting legitimately vertical.
Here's a half pipe in the backwoods of the Santa Ynez Valley California, built by The Solvang Guru (Has to go by an alias or else his name would give away the name of the farm where it is and people would show up night and day).
Quarterpipe: This is one quarter of a full pipe, and one half of a half pipe like the one seen above. These can come in many different forms too
The Root Tricks
Ollie: This is where you jump off of the ground with your board by popping off of the back of the board so that you pop off the ground, and then you slide your front foot forward to even out the board after jumping off of the ground, all in one quick motion. This is the fundamental way that skateboarders jump off of the ground while still keeping their boards attached to their feet. This quick motion is a very effective way to jump with your board, much more than you would think. The highest recorded ollie on flat ground (without using a ramp to get higher) was 44.5 inches by professional skateboarder Danny Wainwright. Using ramps skaters can get ten times as high or more depending on how good the ramp is.
Here's Justin Martinez showing you what a good ollie looks like
Here is an ollie over a handicap rail in Nipomo California, by Jamey Algert
The ollie, jumping with your board, is the most fundamental and important trick in skateboarding. It allows you endless possibilities. It allows you to jump with your board like you are one. If you can ollie, almost nothing stands in your way. Jamey jumped from the slightly slanted part of this wheel chair ramp to the right, over this hand rail to the asphalt on the left.
Hippie Jump: Hippie jumps are another way to jump over something such as a rail, and it is the way people use to jump over stuff before the ollie was invented. A hippie jump is when you jump over an object, and you do not bring your board with you in the air, but you actually jump over the object while your board goes under it, and then you land back on your board on the other side. This trick isn’t quite as versatile as the ollie because you can only do it on things that you can push your board under. It cannot be a solid wall or else your board will just hit it and you wont be able to land back on it. Hippie jumps are cool to be able to do too though because they can generally be done over stuff that it would be very hard to ollie over because it is much harder to pop your board that high than it is to jump that high without your board. If you don’t have to bring your board with you you can suck your legs up in any way necessary to get them over just like jamey's "crouching tiger hidden dragon manuever below."
Here is a hippie jump over a guard rail In Aroyo Grande California, by Jamey Algert.
This rail would be near impossible to ollie over, especially from the side Jamey is coming from, but Jamey hippie jumps it no problem. He just sucks his feat up in “Crouching tiger hidden dragon” position, clears the rail with space to spare, and lands back on his board on the other side.
Backside 180 Kickflip (Backside flip): This is like the previously mentioned kickflip where you ollie and flick the board backwards with your toe, except here you do this while also doing a backside 180. Backside-180-kickflip.
Here is a sequence of Ben Cabreana showing you what a backside flip is in the DCA. Notice how he is a regular footer, the opposite stance than garrett the goofy footer shown above doing the kickflip.
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