Q: What can you tell me that’s going on with the skate club so far?
A: Not much. We kind of just started. Me and a few of my buddies had kind of our own little club, except it wasn’t official. Then we were like, “You know what, why not just make a club” because there’s a surf club, and there’s a skim club. We used to have a skate park but it closed. It got taken down or something so we said, “Why not have some type of group where we could bring some type of community together here at UNF like the skate community?” So we just decided to start the club. We have meetings here and there to plan skate trips and just skate around campus and have fun.
Q: Do you know most of the members in the club currently?
A: Most of them are this little group of friends that we’ve found from just going here, and we’ve all been skating around. We did put out a bunch of fliers and I did have a few people that couldn’t make it to the meeting that messaged me on the Instagram page of the skate club. So there are a few others that I don’t know, but most of the group I do know are twelve people from previous experience. We’re pretty much friends so members will get to know each-other.
Q: What can you tell me about Raymond Ramdass, the co-founder of the club?
A: He’s just the Treasurer of the Skate Club, so he’ll be handling the money aspects and figuring out stuff like T-shirts and how much we need. He was the founder in the sense that he was like, “Hey we should start something,” and that’s where I took the role and was like, “Alright, let’s actually do this.” So he was like the start of it and we all took hand and tackled it.
Q: You have a photographer in the club. What does he do?
A: He actually is the only person in the club who doesn’t skateboard. He’s my roommate Jordan Rutecki. He was a theater major and one day, he picked up a camera and offered to take pictures of us before the club started, and they were really good. He’s now in charge of our social media and he’s basically our historian. If anybody wants pictures, just ask him and he’ll take pictures of you.
Q: How long have you been skating since you came to UNF?
A: Probably since the beginning. I started in June 2016 and it’s still going on.
Q: Have you found new ways to get new members?
A: A few things that we’ve done already is Instagram and we’ve printed a bunch of fliers at the library and have been posting them around. Maybe we’ll set up a booth somewhere. We were also trying to have an event like a skate competition where we can give prizes. We have friends at Sunset Skate Shop so we can probably have a bunch of students join a competition to get them interested.
Q: How much preparation did it take for you to start the club?
A: There was a lot of procrastination. I tried to get everybody to start it and no one would do anything, so me and Raymond began to start it up. I got the advisor and roster to get everything set up.
Q: How do you feel about UNF’s Skate Park being taken out?
A: I don’t like it and no one else in the group does. I feel that we should have one because on campus they have a no-trick policy, so you can only skate. We have been skating on the outskirts of campus, like in the roads, and the cops will get mad at us but we have nowhere else to go. If we had a designated place to do tricks, we wouldn’t be skating on campus, we won’t be skating in the roads anymore, and I think that it would really help. We would run it smoother and it would be better.
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