Sunday, September 9, 2012

Hosted my first DH race and Slide Jam in Highlands County


Hosted my first Longboarding race in Highlands County. The event started at 10am and I woke up at 8:45am.
I woke up pretty late and had to rush out to the event location. On my way out to the location, I realized I had left the waivers at home. Rushed back to my place, grabbed the waivers and headed back out. Met up with my sponsor Blake from Califlorida and had him follow me out to the race location. Lucky, when I got there nobody had arrived yet. People started to show five minutes later. While people started showing up, I noticed the weather wasn't looking too good and was rushing to get people signed up for the event. After everyone was signed in, I waited around a few minutes to see if anyone else was going to show and that's when it started pouring down rain and when I realized I had to get this going right away. It rained hard for a solid 3 minutes then it stopped all of a sudden. I headed over to the starting line with the skaters and started setting up the brackets. It was a heat of 3 skaters and a total of 18 racers. I had my buddy Cody take charge of the starting line while I was spotting the small intersection. I also had two other spotters at the turns and my buddy Barney at the Finish Line. The first two skaters that reached the finish line would advance to the next round. After the the first round we had unpleasant company. BACON! The cop told me I had to shut down the event, but he was friendly. Apparently, the church I spoke with about having the skaters park in their parking lot were the people that called the cops about the event. Talk about being a two faced! After they said it was cool for us to park there for the race. I told the cop we would be out in ten minutes and he left, so I rushed to get the race finished before the cops came back. The weather got really bad by the time the final heat was up and that final heat was as intense like the weather. It poured hard, but lucky the weather was on our side by the time the skaters got down the hill and we walked back to the parking lot once the race finished. After announcing the winners of the DH race and giving away some swag, we got the slide jam under way and after the Slide Jam, we announced the winners of the Longest Slide, Best trick, and Highlands County skaters best trick. I wanted the locals to have a chance at winning something in the Slide Jam, so I made a separate division for them. Here are the results!


 DH results

Photo by Reed Bowman 

Longest Slide Winner - Shay Bradford
 Photo by Reed Bowman 

Best Trick - James Alessandrelli (Califlorida Rider)
 Photo by Reed Bowman 

Best Trick from Highlands County - Justin Kane on the left (Local) 
 Photo by Reed Bowman

Click on the name for Additional Photos

Photos by Blake Parsons

Photos by Reed Bowman



Video By Brian Balboa