Tom K was close, but Franky Villani wins best part from last week. His bag of tricks is endless.

Went to Saul’s feeling really exhausted after work. But it was so nice out and him and Jake were skating. I didn’t have my setup with me so I just rode boards form Saul’s quiver. It was pretty fun. I noticed how tight some of the boards turned. It was kind of eye opening. Maybe Indys can be good? Ha ha. I also did a kickflip on the Tsedeq board that is 10.5″ wide. And it felt good. Weird. Jake was ripping as was Saul. Jake had feeble to fakie and a bunch of front smiths. Saul makes tight carves look easy and always hits the coping. It’s rad. It was a fun quick little session even if it started to make me question my setup. Especially a smaller wheelbase.

Met Dave at the meetup curb at 7pm on a beautiful night. When I got there Dave setup a new board so I warmed up mostly solo except for a dude that stopped by for a bit. I had some fun ride on grinds and then slappy crooks. Tried to do them on the same curb all quick, but it didn’t normally work. Also added no comply 180 and switch front nose on the downhill curb, but don’t think I got all 4. Did a few other things, but when Dave was all setup we rolled into campus. After a brief spot check on a new ledge that was skate stopped we ended up near the long Baker hall ledge. We hit the weird sidewalk with the gap in it for awhile. We started just ollieing onto it and trying to grind the yellow curb. There was another dude with lots of energy pushing around and skating fast. On top of that there were people everywhere. Weird roller skates, scantily clad college girls, tons of longboarders, all kinds of craziness. It was messing with me for sure. Dave got the gap to manual. I played around in the area, but didn’t really do much. Then we hit the manual pad area that now has a barrier on it. Dave got a frontside wallride on it and a good b/s one. I had a little line of switch 180 off the curb, ollie up, terrible backside wallride then back 180 off. Also maybe technically a front 180 up fakie thrust on the barrier.

Then we ended up at this tall ledge which required a lot of pop and sucked our energy. I got noseslide, noseslide fakie, boardslide and front board on it. Came close to crooks and couldn’t ollie onto it. Dave got noseslides to fakie and tried to line them with halfcab noseslide which I think technically he did once. He also had some rad front noseslides.

After such a big ledge this little one felt pretty awesome. We played on it for almost an hour. Dave got front crook, numerous back 50s which are hard getting out so quick, front nosegrind to jib out and multiple f/s halfcab noseslides. So sick. I couldn’t get a front nosegrind which was frustrating. But didn’t struggle too much with back 50 which felt good, had a few front 50s, kind of a weird switch front willy that was supposed to be crook and my first (or maybe second) halfcab crook! I was really hyped on that. Fun night.

(setup null rabethica 8.5″ deck, venture 5.8 v-light, 1/16″ riser, venom 88a bushings, 52mm spitfire f4 radial slim green/black, new balance numeric 212 navy/grey size 11, spenco 3/4 thinsoles, footprints 5mm insole)