By Stephanie Sonntag
As neighboring schools prepare for spring break, some BYU students are hitting the gravel slopes on longboards to escape school for a few hours. Some students find it a great way to enjoy the spring.
The sport branched out from the skateboard and became very popular in the late 1990s.
?I read a stat recently that there are more kids skateboarding than playing
little league baseball,? said Craig Collette, a senior majoring in visual arts who began a longboarding company called DVL.
?So what is America''s pastime now? Skateboarding! Skateboarding is more American than any other sport out there and it has come a long way in just the last 15 years.?
Collette became interested in the sport when he put bigger wheels on his skateboard to increase speed, and has been longboarding since.
?It?s one of the fun things you can do in boring Provo,? Collette said.
On Friday afternoons and on weekends fleets of longboarders carve down the hills around the temple and on the river trail. Longboarders have their own jargon with names for hills like ?upper element,? ?the mole? and ?suicide.?
?There?s lower element because it?s the one that most people learn on,? said Jared Collette, Craig?s brother and a history teaching major. ?Then we have suicide which is like suicidal. There?s the mole, which is the mother of all longboarding hills, it?s in Spanish Fork it?s like a mile or two long.?
Longboarding is relatively easy to pick up. However, there are important things to learn before borrowing a friend?s board and attempting the sport, like stopping.
?I think it?s pretty important that you pick it up and learn how to stop,? said Jared Miller a psychology and visual arts major who has been longboarding for two years. ?If you don?t learn how to stop, sometimes it?s a little bit dangerous.?
The way to stop is the pendulum or power slide. It is when you kick out your back foot and swing the board around. When this slide is perfected, expert longboarders say it is easy to stop at speeds around 20 to 30 mph.
Gloves and helmets are vital equipment when longboarding. Gloves increase options for tricks and enhance safety. Jared Collette melded part of a cutting board to the fingers and palms of his gloves. This makes it possible to put a hand down on the asphalt while riding.
Some of the longboard tricks include the rodeo, where you have one hand on the asphalt and the other in the air and the board is parallel to you. The superman slide is when the rider is facing parallel to the ground with both hands on the asphalt. Another is the coleman slide, when both hands are behind you, and the also the double rotation of 360, Miller said.
?It can be fun,? Craig said. ?There are lots of tricks you can do that most people don''t know about, just like skiing, snowboarding and any other sport there is some technique and you should learn simple things like stopping before you try bombing hills.?