2017 has been, for me, the year of the frontside grind. Frontside grinds have been an obsession of mine for a while now and it’s been a very long and slow process to get them back. It took me more than four and half years and they are still not quite where I would like them to be. For me they are a benchmark trick, a delimiter. Like kickflips to street skating, frontside grinds on transition are something I think you must be able to do, to be considered a “true” skater.
I think I first formed this opinion during a visit to Baltimore several years ago. After skating the then new bowl in Hampden I stopped in at Vú, the local skate shop next to the park. The owner, Gary Smith, and I briefly talked about the sustainability of skateboarding as adults and he said something to the effect of “as long as I can still frontside grind I’ll be happy”. Gary rips and I, at that point, was still just learning to carve bowls but I took what he said to heart. I couldn’t frontside grind, at least not how I wanted to, and I realized that that was a fundamental skill I was missing. I knew then that I needed to re-learn them.
This is how it is with skateboarding, the goalposts keep moving. Once you learn something it is the coolest thing ever and before you even know it you have moved on to the next coolest thing ever. This is what we mean when we talk about progress. We set these goals for ourselves and then struggle to meet them. “I won’t be a real skater until I can do a frontside grind” was an entirely arbitrary goal I imposed upon myself because of someone else’s opinion but man did it have some psychic weight.
There are of course many different types of frontside grinds. Over the previous years I had accidentally hit some frontside carve grinds in the shallow pockets of bowls, slashed some grinds on banks and even gotten my front smiths locked in on smaller ramps. Stand-up grinds to tail (as illustrated by the header image of this blog) were actually one of the first transition tricks I relearned, after axle stalls. That had always been my go-to trick as a teen and was easy to relearn because it is “safe” since all of your weight in on top of the ramp. What I wanted were real 5-0s though and I couldn’t get them because I was doing them wrong. I was trying them like my grinds to tail. I would get up on top of the coping, tail drag to a stop, teeter and then fall back in to the ramp. I knew that I was not doing them correctly but I couldn’t figure out how to commit to leaning back on them. In order to relearn them the proper way I had to start at the very beginning. I had to learn scratchers. I had to learn to kickturn and just touch the back truck and for some reason I was terrified of this.
Hoboken 2017. Photo by Ray Sunwoo.
The mental aspect of skateboarding is often the most difficult. Through sheer amount of repetition and practice you can drill in the muscle memory for tricks. If you try something (within reason) long enough you will eventually land it. It then takes a million more tries to be consistent with it. But certain tricks you cannot begin to learn without first committing to them. Frontside grinds are one of these tricks. You have to be fully committed to them and by fully committing you are risking a slam. Hopefully if you lap over or slide out you have enough warning that you can kick the board out and run out of them but there is the ever present danger of just going down hard. Not to mention missing under, which can send you ribs first in to the coping. The fear can be crippling.
Yet if the mental and physical aspects of skateboarding are the two main factors in learning tricks, there are other, more nebulous things at play. One of these is just something I call “board control”. Board control to me is progressing in skateboarding without learning tricks. It is just defined by the amount of time spent skateboarding and how comfortable you are on the board. A trick you tried and couldn’t get previously will come together surprisingly quickly as your board control improves. Board control is knowing how to react to unfamiliar or unexpected situations. Experienced skateboarders can drop in to an unfamiliar bowl and figure out how to carve and pump it right away. They can hit a crack and adjust their weight so they don’t fall. Something can go wrong and they will be able to react and correct it. Novice skateboarders often look “stiff” and this is just not because of their posture. The board control that comes with practice gives a fluidity to your skateboarding and this fluidity allows you to do things that you previously couldn’t.
This is how I like to progress. While I normally work on new tricks each session, I generally only give them a small number of tries. It is rare that I put in the work and dedicate myself to a few hours of trying to land something new. I, instead, like to just skate and let the slow, steady, cumulative process of gaining better board control help me learn the tricks faster at a future point. This is what happened with frontside grinds. After a few years of sporadically trying them, including learning and then losing them on two separate occasions, it all finally came together naturally.
It began at the mini bowl at 2nd Nature. This indoor park, in a small town on the Hudson River an hour train ride north of the city, has become a winter destination spot. Two or three times a year, whenever the weather is bad enough, we take the long trip up to skate it. Despite the relatively few times I have been there, it has consistently helped me unlock some of the fundamentals I was missing. I learned how to figure 8 carve a bowl there for example. This year it was frontside grinds and that happened by complete accident. The bowl is so small and so fast that coming back in to shallow I frontside kickturned one wall and scratched the truck. The next run I did it again, intentionally. I remember saying to my friends “This won’t seem like a big deal to you, but I just touched my truck”.
This past winter I was also lucky enough to have friends who had memberships to Winter Bowl, the private indoor spot in south Brooklyn. Its namesake, the bowl itself, is tight and one of the more challenging things I have skated. The mini ramp on the other hand was more my speed. This ramp is a little bit steeper and taller than I am comfortable with and for a few sessions I struggled to even axle stall there. Finally, one day I felt comfortable enough to scratch some grinds. I missed low a number of times but pulled off enough that I got over my fear of touching the coping.
Early in the spring I took off work one weekday and trekked over to Hoboken for the sole purpose of skating the small mini and doing nothing but frontside grinds. It was drizzling by the time I got there but I was on enough of a mission that I waited it out and mopped off the ramp a few times with the chamois I keep in my skate bag. It paid off. I was now no longer afraid to scratch grinds but I still couldn’t really stand up on them to get a proper 5-0. That happened in the Bronx.
At the River Ave. park in the south Bronx, there is a section of quarter pipe that slopes up from about one foot up to something close to five foot. Because it starts so small and moves up so gradually it was the perfect learning spot and for the first time I was able to stand up on my grinds. I took this back to Hoboken in the following weeks and had one of the most fulfilling days of skateboarding ever. Not only was I able to stand up on my grinds and do real 5-0s on the little ramp but, with the encouragement of my friends Ray and Shark Dog, I was also able to scratch a few on the bigger ramp as well (as seen in the photo above). That was enough to let me start to do these scratchers almost anywhere. I am now comfortable enough with them and have enough board control that they have become one of my go-to tricks. I am still not standing up on the grinds on anything over four foot, on bigger ramps my weight is still solidly in the ramp, but it is just a matter of time and practice before those grinds turn in to proper 5-0s too.
Now I just need to learn to kickflip.
I feel this soooo deep. Frontside grinds have been an obsession/bane of mine for years. Over the last month ive 100% committed to getting them. And with soooo much success. I love them. Next step is standing up on em