Fighting fear with the skater girls of NYC
Girl Riders Organization looks to empower girls and women through action sports and co-opting typically male-centric public skate parks.
The last Tuesday of every month, the Girls Rider Organization hosts a ladies-only skate night at Homage Skateboard Academy in Gowanus. The sessions attract younger girls, whose fathers stand awkwardly watching in the corner, to middle-aged women who stumbled across a passion they never knew they had. This most recent session was welcoming, loud with girls yelling back and forth to each other.
GRO is a national non-profit that looks to empower girls and women through teaching them action sports and coordinating meet ups where members co-opt typically male-centric public skateparks. It was founded by Courtney Payne almost ten years ago; Payne was in her early twenties, struggling with depression and trying to pull herself out of it, about to finish business school in Indiana. She felt that something was missing from her life. That summer she ran into a professional skateboarder at a park where she was thinking about planning a music festival. At his encouragement, Payne took on skateboarding and quickly became obsessed. Over that summer, Payne ditched her music festival plans to skate instead, which helped her pull herself out of the rut she had fallen into. “All of a sudden I was happy and I loved life,” she said. But that whole summer she saw only two other girls skateboarding and wondered why there weren't more out there. “I felt I had a purpose in life to help girls benefit from skateboarding the same way I was benefiting.”
By the end of Summer, Payne knew that she wanted to do nothing more than skate. So, Payne sold the house she co-owned with her mother, bought a van and fifteen skateboards, and spent the next five years touring around the country building a league of Girl Riders. She hit 30 to 40 states each year, using Myspace to reach out to the local girls in each town. She remembers an event she did in California, where she consoled one girl who was in the corner of the skatepark crying. “She was judging herself to the point where she was in tears over her inability to skate,” Payne recalls. “But then she got back up and got skating. A year or two later she's riding for the Silly Girl Skateboards team. She went from someone that was really shy and quiet and afraid to speak, and now she’s one of the most outspoken people I know.” Payne also remembered an event in Kentucky when she gave a skateboard to a six-year-old who had lost her parents and was being raised by her grandmother. The girl was medicated for ADD at the time, but a few months later the grandmother got in touch to tell them that after taking on skateboarding she didn’t need the medication anymore.
" It’s us judging ourselves, and thinking, 'I'm not good enough.'"
Eventually GRO was getting too big for Payne to run it from the road. At the end of her last GRO tour, she was offered a room in a Brooklyn loft for a good deal, and decided to base the organization in New York City. “If I was going to show through GRO that anybody anywhere can make things happen through action sports, it was important to go somewhere that didn’t have the industry. New York is a place of creating new ideas, new thoughts, new everything. Plus the fact that in New York City, as a non-profit, I would be able to reach and help more girls per square feet than anywhere else in the United States. So I moved to New York.”
Outside of skating, GRO also participates in skate-oriented events around the city, like Skate Night at Leftfield Bar in the Lower East Side. Videos of women skating were playing on the TVs. “I love that we have the girls and the boys here tonight,” Skate Night's host said at one point. An old GRO sticker was stuck to the bar’s draughts, and skateboards hang from the walls. “Where do you skate?” was a common question after an introduction, and if the answer was “I don’t,” the response was usually something along the lines of, “You should! It’s easier than you think.”
This mentality is exactly what drives Payne to show that skating is not—and has never been—a boys-only sport. "Honestly the only thing you need to do anything in your life is to believe that you’re capable of doing that," Payne explains. "I think that’s one of women's biggest problems; it’s not the men that hold us back any more, it’s not a glass ceiling. It’s us judging ourselves, and thinking, 'I'm not good enough.' Or going to a skate park and being like, oh, the guys don’t want me here.' That’s not true." Skating, she stresses, is a great way for women to confront their fears and prove how capable they actually are.
"I think that’s really the biggest benefit from skateboarding," Payne says. "And if you get too cocky, your skateboard will throw you on the ground; it keeps you humble if you’re going too far to the other extreme.”
Written by Maggie Craig for Hope & Fear (read the full article here)
