The Changing Roll of Women in Sports

Pop culture truism: When advertising executives finally glom onto something, only then can it claim its official status in the contemporary Zeitgeist. Consider this year’s favorites--ska music and snowboarding--enlisted to hawk everything from cars to credit cards to carbonated drinks.

It’s no surprise then to find skateboarding, in the midst of a fourth-wave revival, featured in a recent Secret deodorant ad. Long before snowboards swooped into the marketing lexicon, advertisers invoked skateboards in the hopes of conveying those coveted abstractions of youth and cool, sometimes even rebellion. Its aggressive bad-boy image, which seethed in the ‘80s, always looked harsher than any tribal-tattooed surfer or skier-loathed snowboarder.

But the newest trick among image-makers is who’s wielding the skateboards.

Girls.

No longer satisfied being the girlfriends and sisters of skateboarders, more girls are rolling out than ever before on beach boardwalks, at skate park “Ladies Nights” and onto neighborhood skate ramps. Girls are cruising sidewalks on pink-wheeled longboards, and they’re grinding park embankments on standard boards as daringly as any guy.

Nearly one-fourth of the estimated 6.75 million U.S. skateboarders in 1996 were females, according to American Sports Data, which tracks industry statistics. While the skateboard industry reported a 20% boost in sales last year, it’s still a numbers game counting who among them are girls. Most female first-timers usually use a hand-me-down board before convincing parents or earning their own pocket change for a new one, which can start at $60 and go to $200 and more.

“The overall participation of women has increased significantly,” says Miki Vuckovich, managing editor of Transworld Skateboard Business, a Times Mirror publication. While he adds a footnote that “a lot of the women involved are into it recreationally more than competitively,” he believes that will change as society and the sport’s leaders recognize that some girls are willing to scrape an elbow to match abilities with the guys.

As for proof of marketplace legitimacy, examples abound. Consider the pro model signature skate sneaker and several skateboard models out this last year that are named after top women riders. Or the skateboard companies and board shops owned by women. Or the young women’s zines and teen magazines covering female skateboarders. Or the all-girl contests. Or think of the little girl wheeling through your neighborhood.

The ‘90s rallying cry--”Girls Rule”--on every T-shirt has been updated to “Girls Ride.”

Then there’s the Secret ad, featuring a fresh-faced and smiling girl standing with one hand on her hip and the other on a propped-up skateboard, appearing in several teen magazines this fall. Among them is the latest Moxie Girl magalog (a fashion catalog posing as a magazine), which is also stuffed with a nine-page spread starring professional rider Jen O’Brien, ranked among the top five women skateboarders worldwide.

New Breed Says It’s a Lifestyle

Popular-culture observers might call all this attention a phenomenon. But the young women involved insist this isn’t a fad.

“There’s no going back,” assures O’Brien, just off a six-week run of the alternative-music / skateboarding Warped Tour, in which she skated twice daily for the oohs and aahs of thousands of kids throughout the U.S. and Canada. “For the girls doing it for the right reasons, you know, not to pick up guys or because it’s the latest trend,” she continues, “it’s a lifestyle. The contests give them incentive to get better. And the industry now sees a market like it did with girls surfing.”

O’Brien is on the short list of rising stars who’ve secured deals in a market that hopes affiliation with these new female idols will translate into reasons for girls to buy a new product. Elissa Steamer, 19, favored by many as the fiercest of the new breed, is also the first to land a signature board, earlier this year with San Diego-based Toy Machine.

Sponsorship’s the Hot Ticket

But landing the coveted namesake sneaker is twentysomething Cara Beth Burnside, who personalized the Vans model with an embroidered sun designed like the one tattooed on her lower leg. Burnside is the undisputed big sister of the modern girls skateboard movement, as well as a snowboarder who competed in the winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan.

The hottest ticket is team sponsorship--complete with free skateboards, clothes and travel to contests. Lisa Whitaker, 23, left her Norwalk home this summer to visit Vancouver, Canada, where she competed with 27 other women in the Slam City Jam thanks to her sponsor Rookie Skateboards. Acknowledging that women have a way to go before they can compete at the level of the best men in the sport, she nonetheless believes she’s witnessed a rapid improvement in abilities in the last year alone. “Now with more girls skating and finally being able to compete, we’re pushing ourselves more,” says the business major with future plans to open her own skateboard shop.

New York City-based Rookie sponsors another four women--and three men. The company is another first because it’s owned and operated by women. But that’s where the novelty ends, emphasizes Elska Sandor who, along with twentysomething partners Catharine Lyons and Jung Kwak, founded the deck and apparel brand in 1996.

“People have certain ideas about what it means for a skateboard company to be owned by women,” says Sandor, a native of Australia. “A lot of people are surprised that we know the technical details of a skateboard; they’re surprised we design our own shapes. Even if we had only guys on the team, we’d still be seen as a ‘girls company.’ ”

As with math and science, a gender bias toward boys has long prevailed in skateboarding, propagated as much by the local boys on the block as by the skating industry itself, particularly the magazines in which women are more often presented as pubescent fantasies than as fellow athletes (Flynt Publications-owned Big Brother being among the most pornographic).

That, say many women skaters, is among the reasons why their numbers have always been few despite the brief instance in the ‘70s when a few renegades such as Leigh Parkin, Patty Hoffman, Robin Logan and Vicki Vickers proved their prowess on the contest circuit. But when a new era of exorbitant liability insurance rates and warnings from emergency-room doctors arose in 1979, skateboarding returned underground where it connected with punk rock and assumed an abrasive, tough-as-concrete persona.

“For the most part, girls lack the confidence to skate because of their social upbringing,” points out 29-year-old skater Patty Segovia. “For a long time it’s been seen as hard-core, dirty and something only guys can do. I was forced to do tap and ballet until I was 18. I used to cry. I just wanted to do sports.”

Making Strides in a Boy’s Club

But just as young women have made prodigious strides crashing the ol’ surfer boys club, so are many now doing the same with skateboarding. (Snowboarding has been a more inclusive sport since its start.) Like boys, they’re discovering it provides mobility. That it’s a solo sport that doesn’t require a team or another individual to participate. And it’s adaptable to any cityscape.

Yes, it’s challenging, aggressive and daredevil by nature. Which is why it sounds perfect for the modern gal who’s been weaned on the post-feminist-mantras- turned-marketing-schlock of riot grrrls and girl power. No longer is it a question of “Why?” but “Why not?”

“I don’t think skateboarding has become any less of a boys’ club, but it’s not stopping girls like it used to. Girls are being taught more and more that they don’t have to define themselves against the boys,” observes Susanna Howe, 27. The New York City-based skater is also a photographer whose stark portraits of contestants at last year’s All-Girl Skate Jam in Escondido will appear in the book “Dysfunctional: The Visual Language of Skateboarding” (Booth-Clibborn Editions), scheduled to be released late this year. Howe also authored this year’s critically acclaimed “Sick: A Cultural History of Snowboarding” (St. Martin’s Press).

Empowered, sisters are doing it for themselves. On Edge in Huntington Beach is among a handful of shops around the country catering to girls interested in board sports.

Twins Tiffany and Nicole Morgan, 23, are using part of their college savings to fund a zine, filmmaking projects and apparel and board manufacturing under the Villa Villa Cola banner, named after Pippi Longstocking’s house. They recently returned from a monthlong road trip in a minivan packed with five best girlfriends, traveling from their San Diego base to the Woodward Camp in Pennsylvania, billed as an extreme sports training camp for kids. They stopped along the way at two dozen skate parks across Canada and the U.S., their VHS, 8-millimeter and 16-millimeter cameras documenting the entire experience for future sale. Product and chitchat is available via the Internet, of course, at https://www.angelfire.com/hi/villavillacola.

“We’re learning about business the hard way,” says Nicole with a laugh, recalling how they hawked their goods from the back of the van. “But girls were willing to support us because they’re really interested in helping out girls who skateboard.”

That’s Patty Segovia’s goal in life. That and sleep after Saturday’s Vans All-Girl Skate Jam at the Escondido Sports Center, which is expected to draw 100 participants from ages 3 1/2 to 55 hailing from Brazil, Scotland, Sweden, Belgium, Canada and the U.S.

Segovia launched the event last year along with the Girls Skating Assn., an Internet-connected network of sorts, intended, along with the jam, to promote competition and confidence in the sport (https://www.allgirlskatejam.com). With double last year’s participants and $10,000 in corporate-sponsored prizes--half is cold cash--Segovia is encouraged that she’s helping to change the face of skateboarding.

“It’s no longer taboo for girls to be on a skateboard,” says Segovia, who set up operations in Cardiff-by-the-Sea outside San Diego and close to the Southland’s better skate parks.

But isn’t she contributing to the gender segregation? “They’ve driven me to create a separate entity,” she balks. More than a few in the skateboard industry lambasted her with laughter and criticism when she shopped around her contest last year. Since then, the World Cup of Skateboarding followed with its Slam City women’s contest in Vancouver, and the Goodwill Games in New York had its women’s trials, among other contests.

“It won’t be forever though,” promises Segovia. “When girls catch up and get recognized, it’ll only make the sport of skateboarding better as a whole.”