Who gets to decide?

A handful of years ago, I was sitting in a meeting at the skateboard company I worked for when someone showed me a DM. It was from a 13-year-old girl. A few days earlier, she had just won an Olympic gold medal in women's street skateboarding.

I don't know what you were doing at 13, but I was certainly not winning Olympic gold medals. She had written to us in English that had clearly been translated, saying it was her dream to ride for one of our brands — her favourite brand.

For about a minute, the room was genuinely excited. Flattered even. And then almost as quickly as that excitement happened, the conversation changed. There were concerns that she was too young, that she might not even be interested in skateboarding in a few years.

Which, sure, maybe it's a phase. Maybe winning an Olympic gold medal at 13 was just something she was trying out. To be fair, this was the very first Olympics for skateboarding and skateboarding wasn't entirely sure how it felt about being there. The move from “skateboarding is not a crime” to skaters wearing uniforms and representing their country on the biggest stage in sports had happened fast.

It was a strange adjustment and raised legitimate questions. What does Olympic success actually mean in skateboarding? Do we, as an industry, care? Because winning a big contest has never meant you're an automatic fit for a brand. That's not really how skateboarding works. It's all about relationships, your personality, style, and how it meshes with the identity of a brand; a whole collection of things that don't simply equate to cool, you won, welcome to the team.

I understand all of that. I spent years working inside that system. But what stayed with me about that meeting wasn't really the decision; it was how quickly they dismissed the possibility. How certain people were about what she might or might not become. For all the time we spent in those meetings talking about the future of skateboarding, it felt like a lot of the time the room was pretty committed to the past.

That attachment is understandable. I also have a deeply unreasonable emotional connection to certain eras of skateboarding. The ones that defined me. The videos, the skaters, the music. But if you’re not careful, the past can become a trap.

Of all people, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney gave me a pretty good way of putting my finger on the problem during a speech he gave at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January — not my usual source of skateboarding industry guidance.

He talked about the rapidly shifting geopolitical sands, how the world we once knew had changed, and that isolating ourselves in a vision of the past isn’t a path to the future. Basically, he was telling America off in the most Canadian way possible. While doing so, he said something that stuck with me.

"We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn't mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy."

I realize geopolitics and the skateboard industry aren't exactly equivalent. However, both worlds have kept many of the same men in power for years.

Nostalgia is not a strategy. I've been turning that sentence over and over in my head because skateboarding is having some really difficult conversations right now about declining sales, shops closing, an aging customer base, and where the next generation will come from. And yet, so much of the industry's imagination remains devoted to recreating the world it remembers. The good old days.

The thing is, nostalgia has a way of turning our personal experiences into a one-size-fits-all standard. We remember how something made us feel and eventually we start believing that's how it should make everyone feel.

The past is a wonderful place to visit; it just becomes way more complicated when we insist that everyone else live there.

The meeting about that rider wasn't unusual. I'd sat through plenty of conversations like that. I'd forward a skateboarder's Instagram over and then the assessment would happen. It was always some variation of the greatest hits:

They're just a contest skater.
Not enough viable street footage.
Too much park footage.
Nobody wants to see this.
Not really the right fit.

Some objections were considerably less flattering. And then, just like that, the possibility of that person would disappear. I remember another skater from a different meeting with the same outcome. She was already a dominant force on the contest scene and she wasn't asking for money; she was willing to ride the wheels for free.

Pass.

After working so long inside the system, I developed my own tactics. It was always obvious: I’d relentlessly bring up underrepresented riders during any opening, float ideas for them, let others at the desk connect the dots and make it their idea. Even less subtly, I’d set internal mandates for support within the brands and their product drops. For every three ads, one would feature a woman or gender-expansive skateboarder, or, with this product drop, leverage that rider instead. 

I’d build a marketing run on the back end. Pick up the phone and connect with anyone who could link one opportunity to the next so that rider suddenly showed up everywhere in the right places — carefully orchestrated coincidences on a silver platter, hoping someone would recognize the hype and see the potential. Or at the very least, get curious enough to pay attention. When it worked, I'd let them take the victory lap. 

Sometimes someone from the office would come back from a trip with a skater that had previously been deemed to lack “all the right footage,” and suddenly they were so cool and had such a vibe. The only thing that had changed was that they'd actually met. They weren't just a name on a screen anymore. It’s a lot harder to dismiss someone when you’ve actually spent time together and you can witness the spark and possibility firsthand.

I'm not suggesting every brand needs to sponsor every talented skateboarder, and what interests me isn't that someone made the wrong call or that the people making them are terrible people. That's not the case here.

In business, people make the wrong calls all the time. However, in skateboarding, there’s a longstanding, outdated framework that keeps leading to those decisions, a quiet declaration of what's valuable and what isn't. There's a type in this industry who's always protecting the brand, but sometimes, what they're really protecting is their own idea of what the brand is supposed to be.

Because you have to remember, for years, women and gender-expansive skateboarders have had very limited access to the traditional pathways into professional skateboarding, a phrase that requires acknowledging how unnatural “traditional pathways into professional skateboarding” comes across in a world known for not being big on rules.

But somewhere along the line we developed an impressive number of them. These rules, which exist primarily under the surface as a career-altering undercurrent, are actually pretty easy to rewrite. When someone came along who didn't quite meet those mercurial criteria but everyone liked them, suddenly, the gate opened right up. Funny how that works. 

Skaters have found other ways in. Contests are one of the few places you could enter on your own, where you could travel, skate, make some money to pay for the rest of the job of being a skateboarder, and build an audience along the way. Rayssa Leal has amassed 8.2 million followers on Instagram as an individual. On the same platform, Thrasher Magazine has 6.4 million followers as the collective voice of skateboarding. 

It's a pretty remarkable thing to give someone very little access to your world and then question their legitimacy when they find their own way inside.

Another layer is how much authority we give lived experience in the skateboarding industry. Often the workforce pipeline is pretty straightforward: a pro skater’s career winds down and then they move into a brand because they understand the culture from the inside. They helped create it. They know all the people, the language. They can get anyone on the phone when they need to. It's all the subtleties that don't neatly translate into the business world.

That is all valuable, of course. That's how I got here, too. But lived experience is also, by definition, limited. You could spend forever in skateboarding and still have very little understanding of what it's like to be a 13-year-old girl navigating the skate scene today.

Which often means the problem isn't that those working in the industry don’t understand; it’s that they assume they do.

These conversations aren't unique to skateboarding. Women's sports have been having versions of them for decades. I'm a skateboarder first, but my loyalties extend well beyond. I love women’s sports — you know I ride for my shes, gays, and theys with the Golden State Valkyries.

There’s nothing like watching people who are extraordinarily good at doing something that I can never do. And as the WNBA has seen historic growth in recent years, we're finally getting to know these athletes as people, not just what happens on the court. Social media has helped with that.

For years, mainstream sports put so much effort into making athletes look polished, professional, and frankly, a little boring. Skateboarding has always taken the opposite approach. The messier, the better. The louder, weirder and more unapologetically yourself you were, the more people cared.  

Now we get to see the personalities and the behind-the-scenes, and the media coverage has been hitting so hard, largely because of who's now telling those stories — former players, coaches, and pundits who actually know and care about the W. And if basketball isn’t your thing, there's always the increasingly elaborate L Word chart of who's dated who, who's now playing against their ex, who's playing alongside them. Personally, I think this deserves its own broadcast.

And the more you learn about the people playing a sport, the more you start to understand the world around it. The labour struggles, the women's and civil rights movements, and LGBTQ+ history — all because you cared about someone who’s exceptionally good at putting a ball through a hoop.

When you think about it, that’s pretty much how skateboarding has always worked. First, you see someone’s video part, then you want to dress and skate like them, find out about the band that made the song in the video, and then visit the spots in it. Suddenly you're in another city standing in front of a granite ledge and genuinely moved. Before long, you're learning about the architect who designed it and the materials used to build that plaza.

You came for the skate spot and left with so much more. That’s one of the many great pleasures of skateboarding. The activity is just the beginning. Lately, I've found myself going down a similar rabbit hole with women's basketball, a sport I've never actually played.

Let’s look at two numbers: $1.3 million and $1.9 million.

They're not terribly far apart, until you find out what they represent. $1.3 million is the combined salaries of the Golden State Valkyries team in 2025. The second number, $1.9 million, is what an NBA bench player named Quinten Post made for the Golden State Warriors that same year, while averaging just 17 minutes per game.

One guy on the Warriors’ bench made more than the entire Valkyries squad, two teams that share an owner. That’s such a glaring illustration of the problem that it almost feels made up, especially when you consider everything that's happened in such a short period for the Valkyries, an expansion team that has existed in the WNBA for only two seasons.

The Valkyries have sold out every regular-season home game. They became the first women's sports franchise to bring in $100 million in annual revenue within two years. They're now estimated to be worth a billion dollars.

That’s a remarkable amount of money for something we've spent decades being told nobody wants to watch. Because that was always the argument: Nobody cares about women's sports, which was always a wild conclusion to draw about something that was made almost impossible to find.

The broadcasts were always scattered across different channels and platforms at odd times. And even if you had the right subscriptions, you might discover the game was blacked out in your region for some Byzantine licensing reason. And if you finally found the game, the production quality was so bad that it looked like someone had set up a camera in the nosebleeds and gone home for the night. Then there was the media coverage, which was minimal at best and generally dismissive at worst.

So with all that stacked against the league, when audience numbers were unsurprisingly disappointing, those metrics were used to explain why the sport didn't deserve more investment. You don't invest because nobody's watching, but nobody's watching because you don't invest. And around we go.

To oversimplify, it took years, incredible player unity, a new collective bargaining agreement, and a ravenous fanbase that became impossible to ignore for things to begin to change. But even now, with the WNBA ascendant, the players making better money, and its 2026 season breaking records across all fronts, those in charge still haven’t fixed even the most basic of those longstanding issues. Look at the 2026 WNBA Finals, where the Golden State Valkyries took on the Atlanta Dream in an incredibly fun matchup.

Throughout the series viewership was at an all-time high. Games sold out with 18,000 paid tickets, again and again. All of that verifiable, money-in-hand success and still, Game 6, which could have decided the championship, tipped off on a Thursday at 12:30 PM Eastern, 9:30 AM West Coast time, when most of the country was unavailable to watch sports.

Why? Because the MNBA’s Atlanta Hawks had a regular-season game that evening. Their third of the season.

Somebody could have won a WNBA championship over your morning coffee. Think about all those kids at school who had watched the entire season and whose favourite player is Angel Reese or Gabby Williams; they could have missed an historic moment that would have cemented their fandom for life as they sat in class.

Skeptics have always pointed to the numbers, but this kind of scheduling decision is what manufactures bad metrics. Even if you're not a sports fan, you remember what happened when the Knicks won the championship this summer, their first since 1973. New York City erupted. Everyone filled the streets and celebrated with their neighbours. It was one of those things that was just bigger than sports. It brought people together.

The Hawks haven’t made the NBA Finals since 1961, when they were still in St. Louis. Yet here they were, relegating the WNBA Finals to the workday for a game that didn’t matter and was bound to sell fewer tickets and have less viewership. The Dream won that game, pushing the series to Game 7. They also sold out Atlanta’s State Farm Arena that afternoon. Again. As they had throughout the series.

This isn't a scheduling issue. At a certain point, it becomes embarrassingly obvious what's happening here, and it's fascinating from a business perspective: You have the supply, there's clearly the demand, and people are practically begging to give you their money and their attention — I'm pretty sure capitalism loves this part of the story, yet the suits chose to dismiss it.

Skateboarding, of course, has had its own rich history of exactly this. There's a market, but not many in charge could recognize it or deem it valuable, so the money sat on the table, flashing under neon dollar signs. It isn't just the fans who pay the price for this kind of thinking. The athletes do, too.

Some of the best basketball players in the world have spent their off-season playing overseas, months away from their families, their lives effectively on hold, sometimes playing in countries where being openly gay could be dangerous or where a government's record on war crimes and human rights wasn't exactly a selling point.

Oh, the irony. Leagues in countries that don't value women's rights were paying these women more than those in the United States. But that's just where the money was. Playing professionally at home often wasn't enough to make a living, so we called playing overseas an opportunity.

There's something terribly strange about being one of the best people in the world at your profession and needing a second job to afford your first one. The more I learned about these players and the league, the more I recognized a story I already knew. I had spent years watching a version of this unfold in skateboarding.

Remember that billion-dollar valuation? What I find so interesting about that number is how much of that monetary potential had simply gone unrecognized. The fans who hadn't found a way in, the kids who hadn't yet imagined themselves playing — none of that shows up on a balance sheet. Not at first.

Because you can't really measure the value of an opportunity people haven't given you yet. Someone has to create it. Ohemaa Nyanin, Carmen Yee, and Natalie Nakase — the Valkyries’ General Manager, Talent Acquisition Specialist, and Head Coach, respectively — were put together by the team’s president, Jess Smith. Four visionary women who helped build a WNBA championship team from scratch in under two years.

I’m not saying every skateboard company is sitting on a billion-dollar franchise it hasn't discovered yet, but you do have to wonder: what else are we overlooking?

That 13-year-old girl who wrote to us, she did end up riding for the brand eventually. It just took time and a lot of dragging the conversation back into the room, fighting for her and whoever came next. And the skater who couldn't get on the wheel brand, even for free? She's one of the more talked-about skateboarders out there today, reaching fans far outside the traditional industry, and moving the bar of progression for women's skateboarding on what feels like a weekly basis.

It is wild to see, if you've been watching. I think of both of them, and so many others, when I hear people ask where skateboarding's next generation is going to come from.

They're already here. They've been here. How many more futures are we going to dismiss because they don't look enough like the past?

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