Not a crime after all

By Jason Cohn

While Santa Clara is a university that provides excellent facilities for its students who play anything from NCAA to intramural sports, there is a group of students who find there is no support for their athletic activity of choice: skateboarding. Skateboarding is a popular activity amongst many Santa Clara students, yet there is no place where students can hang out together and skate.

For those of you who dismiss this activity as only a trend that will lose popularity, consider this: a 2000 survey done by the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association found that 11.6 million Americans have skateboarded. That is more than baseball (10.9 million) and hockey (6.1 million).

For you business majors out there who want to know how that translates into dollars and cents, skateboarding is a $3 billion per year industry.

In other words, skating deserves to be recognized with the same legitimacy as any other athletic activity that students like to participate in on campus.

Another misconception about skateboarding is that it's extremely dangerous compared to other sports. That's far from the truth if you consider a report by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission which concluded there are many other sports that are much more dangerous, including football, baseball, basketball and soccer. These sports all have a higher percentage of participants injured than skateboarding. In the case of football and baseball, the percentage was more than double than injuries from skating. Yet skating it is the only one of these activities that you can get in trouble for doing on campus.

If the administration feels as if students should not be allowed to skateboard anywhere around campus, perhaps they should consider appropriating a small amount of money to build a ramp where skateboarders can go. This way, students who choose not to participate in activities such as intramurals will have a chance to create their own sense of community by doing an activity that interests them.

It's time to stop ignoring popular activities like skateboarding because they don't fit into the standard mold for what we consider sports. For all the money our school puts into athletics, a couple thousand dollars would be a cheap and easy investment to appease a large group of students who would finally feel like they have a place on campus to call their own.

Contact Jason Cohn at jrcohnstead@hotmail.com or (408) 551-1918.