Stoked Is Giving Teens Exactly What They Need To Be Successful
Extreme sports, mentors and a chance to create their own skateboard companies.
Once you start doing action sports, you never look at the mountain or the street the same. You can see parallels between what’s happening here on the mountain and what’s going on in school: The kids learn how not to give up — that when you fall down, you get back up. They get it. What I’m learning through snowboarding, I can apply to my life.
Stoked works with students from low-income high schools around the city. These are kids that don’t get breaks. They work hard. They commit to our program — that’s not an easy task. We meet with them for three straight years, twice a week after school for youth development work and on weekends they go snowboarding, skateboarding, and surfing with mentors.
This was our last trip of the season. We had a really big season — some kids went snowboarding 11 times! Imagine if you’d gone snowboarding 11 times!
You wouldn’t know it just from looking at these photos, but these kids worked hard to learn things that didn’t come naturally to them. They got up super early on multiple Saturdays, when the people in their lives were not up. Kids who show up on a Saturday are committed to changing their lives, committed to being the best version of themselves. They want to make something of themselves and of their lives.
And they have gratitude — they give good handshakes.
One kid on the snowboarding trip pulled me aside — we have a barn up there, and he pulled me behind the barn and said, “I just want to let you know how much Stoked means to me. I was addicted to drugs, was gonna kill myself, and Stoked saved me. Now I’m on the honor roll.”
I couldn’t believe it. I had to stop him, “Are you after-school-specialing me?
The first year of Stoked, the kids make their own skateboards. We give them a kit and they build their boards. That’s about self-expression and doing things for themselves. The second year, they make their own skateboard company and brand. The kids work together to come up with their company’s mission, vision, and values. They give it a name, a tagline, an Instagram account, a Facebook page. It’s like “Shark Tank,” where the kids present their companies to industry professionals at the end of the year.
This year, we have five teams of 15 people each pitching their company. There is a design group, marketing group, sales group, and communications group. Whoever wins gets to make more skateboards that are then sold in various shops.
One year, a company called itself Brink: Make It Matter. As the team explained it, “Life is about living on the brink — you’re always on the edge of failure or success.” Another group named its company Fate Break. That team — all black men — said they named it that because they want to break the fate of black men.
Our organization tends to attract the kids who don’t fit into traditional school culture, kids who have a hard time engaging. The music kids or the art or design kids — they want to express themselves, and they don’t fit into the after-school clubs. We work with those kids. They have the same mentality I did when I was a 14-, 15-year-old skateboarder.
If you see a kid, and you look like a skater, you have a common bond because you guys are the same thing. Skateboarders don’t walk places; we’d rather skate. We make our own rules — a curb isn’t a curb. It’s an opportunity to do a trick.
I skateboard and snowboard. It’s who I am. I grew up in Queens. I went to school on Long Island, a prep school in a wealthy community. I was the one black boy in my grade, and I was there because I got a scholarship because a man wanted to give a young black boy a chance.
We grew up lower middle class. My father was unemployed. My mom was the only one working. Life was tough for my family. I was into skateboarding and graffiti. I got into trouble, but I was fortunate to have mentors and a community around me to keep me in line. The person who appeared with the scholarship heard my mother’s prayers.
In action sports, “stoked” means you are pumped up, motivated, enthusiastic. I remember watching a documentary called Stoked: The Rise and Fall of Gator, about Mark “Gator” Rogowski, one of the biggest skateboarders in the 1980s. He ended up falling from the top to the bottom: He raped and murdered a woman. I watched his downfall. He came from a broken home, abused drugs, and had anger management problems. Toward the end of the movie, during the backstory, you realize this guy really needed a mentor.
I was passionate about action sports because it’s a lifestyle I lived. I knew there were a lot of translatable skills. Action sports are not competitive. There’s no winning or losing, no points. It’s community oriented.
It took me a long time to realize why I do this stuff. I thought I was doing it just because it felt good to give back. I didn’t connect the dots — my life, where I’d been, the opportunities given to me. I was given a chance, and now it’s my turn to give. I didn’t realize this until last year.
I like to say our real gift to these kids is we help them become the kids that everyone wants to be friends with. Participants become friends with kids from all different neighborhoods and different ethnicities — Muslim, Uzbekistani, Pakistani, Guatemalan kids — all mixing. The kids’ identities are changing. They are taking on new characteristics, new language patterns, and new cultures. They are being exposed to new careers.
We’ve found 100 percent of the kids who fully committed to three years of Stoked are the kids that graduate from high school. They had 100 percent college acceptance. The program’s rigorous model and the strong community and mentor relationships help get kids to commit to school and to meet deadlines. They have to get up early in the morning and do certain things to succeed.
What’s Stoked? It’s simple: Kids connecting with mentors, learning life skills on a mountain while snowboarding.
As told to Stacy Abramson.
Photographs by Christian Hansen for BRIGHT.
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