Friction between polyurethane wheels and concrete reported the locations of skaters as they whizzed around the Frederick Douglass Community Association during a recent practice session of the On Deck Alliance.
Intermittent clacking of skateboard trucks told of the success or failure of each individual outfitted with helmets and kneepads.
During these sessions, Tuesdays and Thursdays from 1 to 3 p.m. and again from 5:30 to 8 p.m., kids and coaches gather on the first floor of the community center, 1001 Indiana Ave. in central Toledo, and give their best attempt at balancing on top of a board in motion.
“They’ve been looking forward to this for a while,” Jessica Lothery, 37, of South Toledo, said of her three children wanting to skateboard at a community event with On Deck Alliance. “It’s always good to experience positive things in the neighborhood. Sometimes I get excited and try to do a few tricks myself.”
Darryl, Darrinda, and Daryelle Lothery were some of the most invested skaters at On Deck Alliance.
“I like to do things like that [skate], and socialize, so I was down,” 15-year-old Daryelle said of the after-school-program, while her younger siblings excitedly moved back and forth across the practice area perfecting their jumps.
A dedicated group of skaters hasn’t made itself known in Toledo, but that doesn’t mean the desire to learn to skate is not there.
“She’s her grannie’s child. She likes a challenge,” Jean Collins of South Toledo said about her grandchild, Alexia Jewell, 11. Alexia was new to skateboarding but managed to easily master an ollie in the first few weeks of attending.
“I did all kinds of stuff,” Ms. Collins said about when she was young, and began talking about skateboarding with her granddaughter before Alexia interrupted her grandmother, telling the 77-year-old she would break her hip if she tried to skateboard.
To prevent hip breaks — and other kinds of breaks — Joshua Cunningham, the founder of On Deck Alliance, instructs the kids in the correct methods of falling.
“We teach them how to slide on their knees, how to roll it out, and how to run it out,” he said.
“There’s no cheat codes in skateboarding,” said Mr. Cunningham, 39. “Just like there’s really no cheat codes in life.”
“Anybody that sees you do a kick flip knows that you put in the work to do that. You can’t take steroids for that, you can’t take drugs that make you better at it, you can’t have better shoes to do it or more money,” he said.
In his program Mr. Cunningham hopes to take kids ages 8-17 and get them from zero skating experience to performing a kick flip, something he said is no easy feat.
But maybe one of the most difficult barriers to even starting to skate is “First, you’re scared,” Mr. Cunningham said. “Then you have to do it over and over and face failure.”
The keys to success in skateboarding Mr. Cunningham feels are transferrable to other areas of life, and, before the kids start to skate, he lays out a simple framework — the Four Cs.
“It’s courage, commitment, consistency and confidence,” he said.
“Courage is doing something, even if you’re afraid of it. Commitment is deciding to do something. Consistency is doing it over and over again until it’s right. Confidence is a culmination of all of those things; it’s knowing that you can do something.”
A Toledoan who grew up going to “The Doug” — as the community center is called — as a kid, Mr. Cunningham has ridden the waves of life, joining the Navy, and living on the West Coast and in Columbus before finally coming back to his old stomping grounds.
On the West Coast, in San Diego, Mr. Cunningham picked up skateboarding as part of everyday life in California.
“Everybody’s getting it out there,” he said. “If you’re going to a skate park you see every race, color, creed, gender.”
And when Mr. Cunningham came back to Toledo he went to Highland Park and saw kids acting up and getting into trouble.
“I was thinking, ‘Man, if these kids knew how to skate and had skateboards, they wouldn’t be out here messing this park up,’” he said.
That moment led to the creation of On Deck Alliance, which really was just Mr. Cunningham handing out skateboards to kids, starting at the end of 2022.
Since then the program has grown: It received grant money for youth programs from the city of Toledo and was able to buy some equipment for kids in the form of helmets, pads, skateboards, and ramps.
In June of 2023 the program became more organized, leading practices at the Douglass center, and now Mr. Cunningham is trying to solidify the nonprofit with his team of volunteer coaches.
“Our next step would probably be transportation to different parks and stuff,” said Chandler Boyer, 31, one of the coaches for On Deck Alliance, who has been with the group for about a year. Transportation has been a difficulty for the program, as kids with working parents may not have a way to get to or leave the program.
“But the long term goal, I want to see this place with a big warehouse of its own, teaching kids,” Mr. Boyer said.
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