Old School Pool Skating Pro Tips with the Texas Poolsharks
Confession: Josh and I have never skated a swimming pool. Growing up in a tiny town in East Texas, everyone we knew with pools had the above-ground kind. Draining and skating those would have just torn up the material, causing us frustration and major property damage.
Can you keep a secret? About the original skateparks - swimming pools? And how draining and skating a pool can protect you from the coronavirus?! These old school skateboarders share their stories, friendships and tips for pool skating. Ronny Ripper, Cruzo, Lewis, Jeff, Chance, Greg, Mike Money and more discuss the ins and outs of finding, draining and skating pools - the original skateparks.
The Texas Poolsharks started as an online forum in the late '90s, long before Facebook, Instagram, Myspace or even Google, bringing together skaters obsessed with pool skating. Skaters from across Texas, and eventually the country, would log on to learn about the greatest pools that no one had ever heard of. Pools were discovered on a daily basis, from people happening upon an abandoned apartment complex, a home for sale, a car crashing into a pool (forcing it to get drained) or just knocking on a door and nicely asking if they could drain and skate the pool out back. Members would gather and put in hours of work to prep a pool for what may only have been a short session, but that didn't matter, because you were hanging with friends, doing something you love, an experience you couldn't get at a skatepark or even out of the streets.
Ronny rips it up
Greg Stubbs with the backside grind
They tell their own story
Jeff Bower has this to say about the group and the experience:
“Saturday, we had a "family" reunion at Guapo. Ronny Ripper and Justin McGuffin set up a display in the Texas Skateboarding Museum to represent the Texas Pool Sharks website that so many of us utilized before Facebook. The intent of TPS was to share resources concerning skating empty abandoned (or not) pools for skating. And it was highly successful in that regard. The biproduct turned out to be more powerful than any pool session though. A bunch of us wound up becoming life long friends. Today, setting up a skate session takes nothing more than some text messages or a FB post to meet at a skatepark. When TPS was founded, there were no public skateparks. There weren't even any smart phones. And Facebook had not been invented yet. To actually pull off a session back then, many abilities and qualities had to exist. The diligence to locate pools to skate, negotiating ability to get permission, ability to run and fence jump in case you skated it without permission, the hard work needed to empty and clean the pool, and the imagination to make use of the pool, once it was empty and dry were all essential to pull off even a 15 minute hit and run session. But the most enduring quality of all turned out to be the ability to keep ones mouth shut. There's something about knowing something really cool and being able to keep from telling ANYONE about it. If someone did run their mouth and blew out a pool, they didn't get invited anymore. That fact weeded out the flaky people better than anything. This is where we found integrity. And integrity is the most important virtue a human will ever have. If you tell someone you're gonna' show up after dark for 4 Tuesdays in a row to drain a huge pool in the middle of a golf course (It happened), and then never tell a single person other than the people who helped you drain it, you had an opportunity to demonstrate your integrity. It wasn't theoretical. It was a proven fact. And as a result, these people wound up becoming some of the best friends I've ever had. These are people who would actually drop what they're doing to help a friend in need, even to this day. These people are family and I truly love each and every one.”
Once social media became prevalent, the forum disbanded, but not the friendships. Thanks to the Texas Skateboarding Museum at Guapo Skateboards for the exhibit dedicated to the Texas Poolsharks and letting us shoot the interview there.
https://www.guaposkateboards.com
The band is back together at the Texas Skateboarding Museum inside Guapo Skateboards