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When my friends and I were near the same skill level in skateboarding we would play the game S.K.A.T.E. It was rare I ever won the game, but it was fun to play and added that bit of competition to push ourselves to learn new tricks. When you lose a game you are motivated to learn those tricks you couldn’t land, and if you win you work on mastering your buddies tricks so they never have a chance at winning .

It’s really no surprise to me that the game is popular amongst other skaters, but it’s nice to see skaters like John Rattray mixing it up even more by rewarding the winner. Watch the video, and maybe next time you and your buddies are out skating you’ll switch it up with a game of G.L.O.R.Y.

Source: Black Box

Well if you’re just starting out skating one of the first tricks that is worth learning is the pop-shove it. Like a lot of skateboard tricks it is named after the actions that occur during the trick. Essentially, you pop your board off the ground and shove the tail end around 180 degrees before landing safely back on your board; grip tape facing up. When I first started to skate I loved this move because it was just as easy to learn as the ollie, but impressed the ladies a whole lot more. Ironically, due to the relative ease of the move I found that a lot of the tutorial videos for pop-shove its glanced over the finer points. Luckily a bit of youtube searching lead me to the unnamed gentleman in this video. If I knew his name I’d give him a shout out and thank him for the thorough tutorial on how to pop-shove it.

I’m a big Rodney Mullen fan if you hadn’t guessed, and some of the first tricks I learned certainly aren’t what most of the kids today are doing. When I was first got on a skateboard the world was just starting to figure out ways to use a skateboard that wasn’t styled after surfing. I suppose that is why I have a certain fondness for the move that is called the casper. The move was popularized by Rodney Mullen, but actually created by Bobby “Casper” Boyden in the late 1970s.

What better way to start of a fresh skateboard site then to introduce one of the most basic skateboard moves out there, the ollie. Now if you are on this site you probably already know what an ollie is, but for the skateboard novice who might have googled their way here the simplest definition is that an ollie is when a skateboard pushes off the tail of the board in order to launch the rider and board into the air.

My experience with the ollie was that you can be told how to ollie over and over, but knowledge is only part of it. If a skateboarder learns at least one trick this is the trick to learn. Just keep with it and you’ll pick it up. Since it is the foundation for almost all other skate moves once I learned to ollie new tricks came much quicker. It’s really a matter of confidence, and training your muscles to the point where you don’t think about it and just do it.

Anyway, enough rambling! I searched through a bunch of videos and decided this video on how to ollie by Mark Hanson did a great job. And if that isn’t enough here is a second link.