SEQUIM — With a trio of contests, prizes, a raffle, a barbecue and some top skate, bike and scooter talent, advocates are looking to help raise funds for future improvements at the Sequim Skate Park.
“We’re trying to make the park better,” said Andrew Guimond, promoter for the skate park fundraiser set for Saturday at the skate park within Carrie Blake Community Park, 202 N. Blake Ave.
“Even parents in the community whose kids don’t skate say, ‘I would love it see it better.’ That’s what we’re going to try to do.”
Events on Saturday will include a trio of contests — skateboarding, bikes and scooters — with registration between 11 a.m. and 11:45 a.m. and contests starting at noon.
Admission will be by donation. Raffle tickets offering a chance to win a Lib Tech snowboard, will be sold for $5.
“The tentative plan includes three half-hour jam sessions for a best trick winner,” Guimond said. “If the turnout becomes massive, which we hope it does, the contest form can change. We can adjust to fit [it] at the time.”
Since 2017, skaters and cyclists and other skate park users have eyed a redesign of the now 18-year-old park through the Sequim Youth Skate Park Foundation, a nonprofit.
Foundation leaders and local skaters hope to raise funds over the next four years through donations and grants to add multiple elements and fix the park.
“We know Carrie Blake Park is a doorway to Sequim and we want [the skate park] to be a good representation,” foundation president Mark Simpson said in 2017.
The original design of the park leaves much to be desired, Guimond said. Obstacles are misplaced in a way that skateboarders and cyclists and scooter users wind up running into each other and the concrete chips in certain areas.
“The whole park doesn’t ride together functionally,” Guimond said.
Still, Guimond said, the park isn’t unusable.
“When I hear kids complaining [I tell them], ‘First, you have one. Second, you make it work,’” he said. “That’s skateboarding. People don’t give you skateboarding; you make skateboarding.”
Guimond added, “The best thing is that we have one. Any town that has one is great right off the bat.”
But the skate park could use a redesign, he said, even with some aesthetics — such as a chain-link fence he likened to a prison yard.
“[The fence] really doesn’t promote it as a sport,” he said. “People come out of a beautiful park and see us … as the local trash cans. Skateboarding is not like that anymore. We’re all older and have our own kids.”
The Sequim Skate Park holds a special place for Guimond. The Sequim resident saw his young son — Riley “Danger” Guimond — learn to ride bikes there.
“I was pushing him around in a stroller at that park,” Guimond said. “He loves cruisin’ around that place.”
Skateboarding is a traveling community, Guimond said, and he expects to see plenty of out-of-town talent at the park Saturday, from the I-5 corridor to Portland, Ore., and Bellingham.
“We could have a pretty good turnout on Saturday,” he said.
For more about the foundation or the event, see www.facebook.com/skatesequim.
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Michael Dashiell is the editor of the Sequim Gazette of the Olympic Peninsula News Group, which also is composed of other Sound Publishing newspapers Peninsula Daily News and Forks Forum. Reach him at editor@sequimgazette.com.
