Effort to build skate park finds surprising allies: Young girls

By Patrick Lalley, for Pigeon605

There was this kid back in the early ’90s.

He was like a lot of kids in Sioux Falls back then.

Working-class home in Hilltop, hanging out, listening to punk music, wearing tattered jeans and dyeing his hair blue.

He got a skateboard and met another kid with a skateboard. There was a parking lot at a bank with some curbs that made for good skating. The owners didn’t care, as long as they weren’t there during business hours.

That wasn’t a problem.

Then there were some other kids with skateboards, listening to punk music, with tattered jeans and cool hair.

And then it was a thing, and they spread out and looked for new places to skate. And maybe they were out kind of late, in a few places they weren’t supposed to be.

Skateboarding.

That kid was Walter Portz.

Walter grew up, got married, had children and built a business.

The lessons from Hilltop, those friends, that music and that skateboard? Those things all stayed with Walter. They shaped him and gave him a world view that guides what he wants to do today.

Which is to build a skateboard park for kids like him.

All kids. Boys and girls, big and small, all types and tones.

Recently, Walter’s friend and cohort in the adventure, DJ Paronto, started giving skateboard lessons.

You know who showed up?

Girls.

And then it was a thing.

Now, there are 25 young women, age 5 to 15, who come every other Saturday. They talk, they work on skills, and they help each other. They laugh when they fall, and they celebrate when they do something that, moments before, they couldn’t do.

They are the Belladonna’s.

The Belladonna’s might change the world. Or not.

It doesn’t matter.

Because, while the Belladonna’s are really cool, it speaks to something broader.

“Skateboarding can save a kid,” Walter says.

There it is. That’s the big thing, the driver, the dream, the delineation between the assumptions we make and the potential we miss.

It’s an old lesson, right? Don’t pigeonhole people.

The book and the cover.

Cinderella.

Jesus.

And yet, there’s the kid with a skateboard and tattered jeans, funny hair and a taste for different music. “That poor boy. Where’s his mother?”

Walter sees it a different way. He sees a kid who can get knocked down and get back up.

He sees creativity and energy and the drive to try … and try … and try.

He sees a kid who thinks.

“It’s the punk ethos,” says Walter. “How do you lift people up? How do you make a difference?”

Laura Kneip was one of those kids in the ’90s as well.

Only she was, you know, a girl.

“When I was little, it was girls can’t do that,” Laura says. “You are a girl, and you shouldn’t do that.”

But she did and so did her husband, Kyle.

And now it’s their daughters’ turn.

Scout, 11, and Willow, 9, are in the Belladonna’s. Laura knew DJ and brought the girls to a session in June without telling them beforehand.

“I didn’t know what to expect,” she says. “I didn’t want them to be intimidated.”

The girls didn’t look back.

“We tried the sports thing,” Laura says. “Nothing ever clicked. They didn’t really like being on one big team. I’ve asked Scout about it (skateboarding). She says, ‘When I’m in it, it’s all I’m thinking about.’ It’s a really great outlet for them. They like challenging themselves.”

Adulthood brings all sorts of realities, not the least of which is losing one’s parents. That happened to Walter, and so he started a new venture – called Helen’s Plan – to help people get their lives in order to minimize the legal and logistical chaos that’s left behind when they die.

He was inspired by his experience but also by the example his parents set. In both cases, the stories of their lives were filled with service to others. Not in some grand and glorious gesture, but in how they lived every day.

The lyrics and music of Bad Religion, it turns out, found a kid seasoned by lives well lived.

“What am I doing?” is the question Walter asked himself. “How do I help people and how do I change who I am, to put energy towards having a positive impact?”

Skateboarding.

The effort to build a new skate park in Sioux Falls picked up steam in 2017.

The vision is a competition-level skate park in central Sioux Falls. Not the rudimentary versions you see in the parks today but a full-on, in-ground, concrete facility for all skill levels.

The Sioux Falls Parks and Recreation Department provided land in Nelson Park near 10th Street and Cliff Avenue.

The money for construction comes from private donations, about $100,000 so far.

This fall, the Sioux Falls Skatepark Association will benefit from the Greater Sioux Falls Chamber of Commerce/Forward Sioux Falls Community Appeals Campaign. That’s a very big deal that will push the effort much closer to the $1.8 million it will take to build the entire thing.

If all goes well, the skate park should be open in September 2023.

For Walter, now 45 and president of the association, a skate park is more than a hangout. It’s a cultural experience, a place for kids who aren’t in organized sports, or who can’t afford them, to have an outlet for their energy and their passion.

It’s something that Sioux Falls, despite all the expansion of recreation options, still doesn’t have.

“There’s a hole there,” Walter says.

But it’s not something he expects the city to just build. He knows that’s not how it works. “We all need to be active participants in building the culture we want.”

Skateboarding has a lot of positive aspects for kids, Walter says.

First, it has a very low barrier to entry. You can get a nice new board for less than $100.

It’s not competitive if you don’t want it to be.

You can do it all day, almost every day.

It doesn’t have a screen.

And – to borrow the phrase – it’s rad.

Which brings it back to the Belladonna’s.

Walter and DJ know that it’s not enough to design a fancy skate park. If you want to build a community, there must be people, in this case skateboarders.

DJ was already working with a few daughters of friends. Bringing in more kids made sense.

“When I started getting at it, my main focus was to prepare them for the skate park,” DJ says. “I want to have a bunch of kids ready, so when that park gets built, we hit the ground running, hit the ground rolling.”

The space in the warehouse they use every other Saturday is small. It’s big enough for only six kids at a time. So they divided up the slots and started giving lessons to more kids.

Just by chance, 80 percent were girls.

That fits the ethos.

“I think we need to empower girls in any way we can,” Walter says.

Skateboarding.

The popular image is that kid in tattered jeans and cool hair. But it’s a boy.

The ethos is gender neutral. The ethos doesn’t care what you look like or what neighborhood – or country – you came from.

The ethos says we all deserve a chance.

“Every color, every creed, every shape every size – skateboarding does not discriminate,” DJ says. “There’s not a physical shape of a human that you could say is more beneficial than another for skateboarding.”

The thing is, despite the concept of the skateboard punk ethos, we don’t really know. For every kid who picked up a board and listened to Bad Religion and became a small-business owner with three kids, there’s another who burned out and faded away.

That’s reality.

What does that ethos look like today, to an 8-year-old girl?

Just guessing here, it’s probably not Bad Religion.

Walter gets that.

“For anybody who is vulnerable, this sport is an opportunity to build family, build culture, to travel, be creative, learn to make movies, take photos, start a band. It’s an ‘in’ for all that kind of stuff. It’s not the only in. But it’s something we can do to create a fantastic piece of community for these kids.”

Those experiences you discover from 12 to 18 years old, they shape you, Walter says. They are part of your DNA.

“It’s not just about the girls skateboarding. It’s about anyone who is underprivileged having an option. Not even necessarily financially underprivileged. In the case of girls, giving them an opportunity to do something that maybe wasn’t approachable before.”

The Kneip girls may never think about it that way. Kids these days.

It’s just not their reality.

But Laura sees it. She sees a group of young women who can do anything and celebrate when they do.

“It’s a really cool dynamic to have all the different ages and just the way they cheer each other on,” she says. “It’s like there’s no age there.”

And no fear.

“We kind of just threw them in there, and now they can’t wait to go.”