From the moment I understood the concept of what a ball was, I loved sports. As often as I could I would have my Grandma pitch a wiffle ball to me, bring down a basketball hoop so I could impersonate Vince Carter, and put so much of my might into a kickball that my shoe would end up going further than the ball. Generally, I fared well in most sports I tried. I wasn't a phenom, but I was good enough to occasionally make an All-Star team and gain parental chirps of praise.

The exception to my decency in sports was skateboarding. I looked like a whale one a tightrope when I kick and pushed on my board, I had no balance, and I lacked a daredevil type attitude when it came to jumping down stair sets and trying new obstacles. An attitude usually required to excel at the sport. I skateboarded every day for years and progressed slower than virtually all of my peers. I never tried so hard at something and sucked so much at it.

In skateboarding no one cared how I performed, including myself. Sure there were some kids throwing themselves down rails to land a tee-shirt sponsor but everyone was on the same team. If I landed a new trick off my Library's center piece no matter how simple it was, I'd be getting the congratulatory fist bumps. I didn't have to suffer through parents yelling at their kids and each other over a church league basketball game, get pushed aside as a coach’s son played Shortstop over me, abide by a schedule, and besides when I showed my mom a new trick, no crowd watching me. It was just me and a piece of wood with four wheels. I did everything how I wanted, when I wanted, and answered to no one besides an occasional cop or security guard. In a way, I lived vicariously through the skaters of my town. I watched a buddy front side flip a ten stair, a trick that would have gotten applause at a professional contest. I was so hyped on witnessing that and seeing my peer’s progress so much at something we all loved, that I might as well had landed it myself.

Unfortunately like many of my peers, my home life was less than ideal while I was growing up and it really took a toll on me. If I went home and something defective was happening, if I was stressed over school, or if I was just feeling the occasional teenage blues, I'd grab my skateboard and head out. I quickly learned that I wasn't just skateboarding because it was a fun hobby, I chose Skateboarding as my escape. Some of my peers we're getting drunk in sumps, some we're acting out in school to get attention that they didn't receive at home, some were focusing on their education, and I was skating. All day, every day. I recently found a journal from my tenth grade English class I would write in. Besides a few blonde haired girls, the only thing I wrote about was Skateboarding. I would write down what new tricks I landed and what new tricks were on the horizon. I was obsessed and addicted. Skateboarding was my form of therapy and choosing to skate everyday was the healthiest and smartest decision I could have made.

I'd confidently tell any parent that they should welcome the notion of their child grabbing a skateboard. I believe skateboarding can teach kids a lot about themselves, who they are, and what they value. Many sports teach children more than just how to play a given game but I think skateboarding is like this Chemistry teacher I had who would incorporate modern hip hop dances into her lesson plan to go above and beyond to try to teach us difficult subject matter.

I spent months bleeding, spraining my ankles, and furiously throwing my board as high up in the air as I could as I tried to land a nollie heelflip. What many skaters consider a basic trick. I was so encompassed with landing this trick that I had a vivid dream about landing it. When I woke up and realized it was a dream, I felt as if Christian Bale had left the Batman franchise. Thankfully Christian stayed on for three movies and a few weeks after the dream, I finally landed a nollie heel. Next to eating a mound of cheese fries, landing that trick along with a few others I would go on to land yielded the most intrinsic satisfaction and pride I had ever felt. As a teen, I chose to put all my energy and effort into skateboarding. Not applying for college. Not acing an English paper about some kid who doesn't want to grow up, or finding a prom date. I put everything into skateboarding and learning tricks that my peers had already mastered. Till this day, I have no regrets about it. I could have been getting better grades, preparing for college, playing a recognized high school sport that goes on for 3 hours with only 1 hour of action, but I was learning about life through skating. I remember quitting Lacrosse because that was another sport I couldn't pick up. My parents urged me to finish out the rest of the season but I did not want to. Despite external pressure to stay in the sport, I accepted failure and quit. When I skateboarded, nobody told me that I had to land a nollie heel. That I couldn't quit. I told myself that. I pushed myself to succeed and progress as much as I could in skateboarding with very limited natural talent. That concept of hard work and self-motivation was something I had never grasped until I became a skateboarder. Eventually, I took what I had learned about hard work and perseverance through skateboarding and applied it to my approach as I went through college. One semester I juggled 18 credits, two jobs, membership in two campus organizations, and a demanding internship all at once. Throughout college I lost an election to become President of my Fraternity, flunked chemistry test that I had spent hours studying for, and had semesters where I bit off more than I could chew and consequently let people I cared for down as a result of it. I fell off my board, scraped up my knee, rolled an ankle, and then I got up and kept going.

Skateboarding breeds creativity. Surrounding my town were custom built, concrete, skater paradises in abandoned tennis courts, pools, and parking garages. We skated anything from tennis nets, traffic cones, and junk yard cars. We'd go through nearby neighborhoods and Manhattan to find spots to skate that were never built with the intention to have skateboarders jumping, grinding, and manualing up, down, and sideways through them. We thought they were built just for us. Last week I was in Manhattan and stopped dead in my tracks to stare at a building plaza and saw a 3 foot high ledge parallel to a 4-foot-high hand rail. I imagined myself jumping off the ledge and doing a crooked grind down the hand rail. My day dream ended when a buddy nudged me and asked "where, that one in the black dress?" I answered "yea. Her".

After skateboarders have spent years turning old corner tables into a perfect grind, a ledge into a manual pad, and a loading dock into a takeoff ramp, we take an innovative approach to everything. Professional Skateboarder Rodney Mullen tells a crowd in his TED Talk ("Pop an Ollie and Innovate!"), that if someone were to ask a regular person for advice and then ask a skateboarder for advice on the same subject, the skateboarder would probably have an insanely different answer than anybody else. Having a skateboarders method to thinking helped me in college as I aced a term paper entitled "The Rhetoric of 50 cent" — a topic that my professor urged me not to tackle, as I share my ideas in staff meetings and to upper management, and even as I write for leisure.

Skateboarding taught me what diversity was. I grew up in a middle class, predominantly white town. My friends reflected that. Before I got into skateboarding, I was very shy but after I got to meet kids from the next town over or even kids who lived in the five boroughs on national "Go Skate Day", I quickly had friends of all ages, nationalities, and baring all types of weird and unique personalities. For years I never went a day without having somebody to skate with or join me in making mall cops earn their paycheck. I was an outgoing, loud, and weird kid. I would randomly scream words that didn't make sense. I used to randomly scream something along the lines of, "doo dum da bad cow". My buddies thought it was hysterical and I was finally being welcomed for being my weird self. Skateboarders are some of the least judgmental people you'll ever meet. Two kids could have two completely different personalities, come from two different socioeconomic backgrounds, bare different colors on their skin, and because they both skate, somewhere along the lines they became friends who hang out every day.

You can get out crackers and surround the statement with it but I owe my life to skateboarding.

I am who I am because one day I chose to leave my baseball bat at home and pick up a skateboard and I never put it down. I'll always consider myself a skateboarder and have some sort of unspoken bond to not just the kids I grew up skating with, but to every skater I come across and the art of skateboarding. I haven't skated in a month and if I was to hop on a skateboard tomorrow, the feeling would still be the same as when I bolted out of my house after the first day of high school.