Dew Tour Shines A Spotlight On Midwest Skateboarding With Unlock The Spot And Battle Of The Shops Events

The heart of skateboarding is alive and well in the heartland.

Compared to the endemic skateboarding communities on the West Coast and East Coast, anchored by L.A. and New York, Midwest skateboarding hasn’t always enjoyed its fair share of time in the sun. (And with only about half as many warm and sunny days each year as Southern California, it’s fair to say Midwest skateboarders deal with unique obstacles to getting out on their boards.)

But the Midwest is, and has been for decades, a cradle of skateboarding talent. It has produced pro skaters like Sean Malto (Kansas City), Steve Nesser (Minneapolis), Rob Dyrdek (Kettering, Ohio), Rob Owens (Milwaukee) and Greg Lutzka (Milwaukee). And as the local skate scene enjoys more resources and more exposure, it’s sure to produce many more big names as kids increasingly see skateboarding as a viable career path.

A string of recent events sponsored by MTN DEW and Dew Tour has shined a bright light on skateboarding in the Midwest and the skaters, skate shops, brands and community organizers who have built the local scenes there.

As part of its national “Skateboarding is Unstoppable” campaign, MTN DEW hosted an “Unlock the Spot” tour that opened up typically inaccessible skate spots in five locations—corresponding with the hometowns of its pro skaters—for locals to skate. In the Midwest, that included Malto’s hometown of Kansas City, Missouri, as well as Des Moines’ Lauridsen Skatepark, which hosted Dew Tour for the second straight year.

Lauridsen, which opened last year and was the site of Dew Tour’s Olympic qualifier events, is always open to the public, but the Unlock the Spot twist was that locals could ride the actual Dew Tour contest courses before they were broken down—with the MTN Dew pro team.

In addition to Malto, that included Chris “Cookie” Colbourn (from Williston, Vermont), Mariah Duran (from Albuquerque, New Mexico) and Theotis Beasley (from Inglewood, California). MTN Dew also hosted two content creators, L.A.-based skateboarder Lamont Holt (@lamont_holt) and blind skateboarder and motivational speaker Anthony Ferraro (@asfvision), along the tour.

At each event, the skaters gave out fistfuls of cash ($2,500 at each stop) to locals in a cash for tricks contest, often putting down a trick themselves, with the local skaters having to match it.

On July 24, Malto’s Unlock the Spot event in Kansas City saw MTN Dew permit the Slabs in Gillham Park, a typically off-limits skate spot skaters would call a “bust” (since it’s not likely they’d be able to get in a solid line without getting busted by security or the police). Malto has successfully filmed a couple video parts at the Slabs throughout his career—he’s also lost a couple teeth there.

“I remember skating the Slabs since I was 13, 14 years old and never thought in a million years that we’d have a MTN DEW–sponsored event there,” Malto told me in Des Moines. “It was a little surreal seeing my friends I skated with there growing up still there skating and hanging out. It was really cool to see that come full-circle and also see the new generation of skaters coming out of KC.”

The day after the Unlock the Spot event at the Slabs in Gillham Park, Real Skateboards did a signing at Escapist, Malto’s hometown skate shop and sponsor, featuring some of its pro riders.

“It was really cool to see the teams coming through town,” Malto said. “It had a huge impact on my life growing up, and it’s so nice to be able to provide that now being a pro skater.”

The Midwest skate scene is still low-key, Malto says, but, realizing the strength and value of the industry there, brands prioritize taking the time to do trips and to support the skate shops there, rather than concentrating all their efforts on the coasts.

“I do think local skate shops around the Midwest are very, very important to the scene, and companies like Girl Skateboards and Real Skateboards and MTN DEWDEW
know the importance of coming out and supporting those communities,” Malto said.

One of Dew Tour’s signature events, Battle of the Shops, is designed to highlight skate shops from the area surrounding the annual contest. And given that Des Moines was host once again to this year’s event, Battle of the Shops 2022 provided a platform to Midwest skate shops in particular.

“We are committed to supporting the endemic space. Shop skaters are typically the best up-and-coming skaters around,” said Chris Ortiz, Dew Tour media and sports & competition director. “The Battle of the Shops gives them an outlet to showcase their skills to an international audience and hang with some of their favorite skaters who are competing in the pro comps.”

On July 30, five Midwest skate shops—Subsect (Des Moines), Escapist (Kansas City), Familia (Minneapolis), Eduskate (Cedar Rapids) and Infinity (St. Louis)—faced off for the title of the best skate shop in the region, as well as a cash prize.

Subsect, Familia and Escapist finished first, second and third, respectively. Des Moines natives Jake Kelley, 19, and Mirza Jasarobic, 24, represented Team Subsect, which, to no one’s surprise, made the most of its home field advantage and its skaters’ intimate knowledge of Lauridsen’s features.

“I was really nervous at first, but [the fans] really did end up pushing me to do well,” Kelly (below, center, gray beanie) said of competing in front of the home crowd.

“The local skate shop is the heart and soul of the skateboarding community,” said Malto. “It’s the place where you hang out, you watch skate videos, you have someone kind of explaining how to set up a board.”

In the Midwest skate community, Malto explains, there’s a closer-knit tie between skate shops that might otherwise be thought of as business competitors. “That’s the cool thing about Kansas City, and I’m sure a lot of these Midwest towns—they don’t really have room for competition, so we’re all friends still trying to just achieve a certain goal.”

Even though Malto is sponsored by Escapist, which had a big presence at the Kansas City Unlock the Spot event, his friend Weston, who owns Kansas City–based skate shop Studio, skated in the contest too.

“The local skateboard shop is the gateway for skaters in that city,” said Familia Skateshop owner Steve Nesser. Since he opened the shop in 2005, he’s watched skateboarding explode—not just in Minneapolis, where Familia is located, and not just in the Midwest, but across the country.

The local skate shop is everyone’s first sponsor, always. It’s probably their last, too. As Nesser put it, the shop is a skateboarder’s family, and their other sponsors become extended family. The shops support the industry’s brands on a ground level.

“We run this thing called No Team, Just Familia. You can be any level of skater; it’s more about helping people out and supporting them,” Nesser said. “We probably have 25 skaters, a pretty big crew. We kind of try to treat anybody that comes through our doors as we would a sponsored pro.”

In 2017, X Games held the first of what would be three consecutive summer events in Minneapolis. Even though the city’s skate scene is one of the most well-established in the Midwest, a skateboarding hot spot since the ’80s, Nesser started noticing some developments in the past five years—largely, seeing more young girls walking through the doors of his shop and its associated indoor skatepark, Familia Headquarters.

“For me growing up, having a local skate shop helped me connect the dots that I didn’t know I could connect,” said Duran, who’s on the Meow Skateboards pro team. “If you get to a certain point, they’ll say, ‘Hey, you’re doing really good, we’ll put you on the team,’ or, ‘You should film and send footage,’ and they’ll reach out for sponsors.”

It’s also so important for young skaters to be able to meet pros whose career they can model their own after—and skate shops can provide that access.

Since she’s returned to her hometown of Albuquerque following her appearance in the Tokyo Olympics, where she finished 13th out of 20, Duran has noticed many more kids—especially young girls—talking about pursuing skateboarding as a career.

“For me to be that person to have gone to the Olympics, be able to be sponsored by MTN DEW, and doing things like [Unlock the Spot], I think it guides the people who really love skating if they want to do it as a career,” Duran, who is hoping to make the U.S. street skateboarding team for the Paris 2024 Games, said. “It provides them a direction to be able to shoot for it.”

Because of the crucial role skate shops can play in helping skaters progress, skaters need to reciprocate by patronizing their local skate shops and putting their money into the local community rather than buying their gear online, a reminder that was hammered home a few times at Dew Tour’s Battle of the Shops event and hopefully resonated.

There’s also a symbiotic relationship that exists between local skate shops and local skateparks. If a community has both, like Des Moines now does, skateboarding is almost sure to flourish. But that process can take many years to play out—in Des Moines’ case, 20.

The forces that came together to make Lauridsen Skatepark a reality in Des Moines represent the perfect case study in building a local skate scene from the ground up.

“Lauridsen Skatepark wouldn’t exist without Subsect,” said Norm Sterzenbach, president of Skate DSM, the organization that seeks to support the skateboarding scene in central Iowa by facilitating relationships within the community.

“Kevin [Jones, Subsect’s owner] has been involved since the beginning,” Sterzenbach added.

The first barrier to getting skateparks in Iowa was liability. The state government had to pass a law that gave municipalities immunity. Incidentally, in high school, Jones’ wife, Kristi, was part of a group of students who went to the Capitol to lobby for a future skatepark.

“The Joneses have been involved in this since the inception,” Sterzenbach said. “Subsect has been a fixture of the local skate community; this is their 25th year. They’ve really helped be a leader to make the skate scene what it is because they recognize the need not just for the park but what more can we do, and have been talking with all the brands that come in about Skate DSM and what we do because it helps grow our local skate community.”

Sterzenbach points out that some communities may have had a skatepark in place for 40 years, with no one in the community having witnessed the process of getting it installed.

In Des Moines, citizens watched the Joneses, Skate DSM and others fight to get Lauridsen approved, and it gives them a deeper respect for the role skateboarding plays in their community, even if they aren’t connected to the sport or had concerns about increasing skateboarding’s presence in their city.

“We didn’t want to build the skatepark in some industrial park; we wanted it right here on the river, in the middle of everything,” Sterzenbach said. “That helps strengthen the overall Des Moines community, not just the skateboarding community. We’re a fairly fast-growing city without pro sports teams, without an ocean, without mountains. How to do you attract young people to Iowa? We have to be forward-thinking and progressive about what we want to have here, and skateboarding is a piece of it. Things like Dew Tour help with that.”

Skate DSM’s Get on Board project launched in 2022 and seeks to expose more kids to skateboarding by giving away up to 500 high-quality boards and helmets in the Des Moines area each year. As part of Dew Tour’s Community Day on July 28, Skate DSM and MTN DEW gave away 106 skateboards and helmets.

On July 20, Subsect also gave back to the community by hosting an event with Punk Rock & Paintbrushes, a coalition of artists composed of musicians and pro skateboarders, featuring skateboarding legends Brandon Novak and Christian Hosoi.

“Leaders of the city, political and business, have worked really hard to make Des Moines a cool place to be,” Sterzenbach said. “That puts us in a stronger place than a lot of other cities because we have a tight-knit skate community but we also have a greater community that supports them. We’ve proven that brands should come here, events should come here—they will not have a bad experience.”

For a city looking to build a skateboarding scene, Sterzenbach says, it’s important to work with local political and business leaders, as well as law enforcement, to be sure the sport is supported in the community. At Skate DSM’s first Get on Board giveaway event, they had the Des Moines police and fire departments. The fire department did a lesson on safety and what to do if someone gets hurt at the skatepark, while the kids signed a contract in front of a local police officer promising to wear their helmets at all times when they skate.

“When we were initially raising money for skatepark, everyone was saying, ‘No, skateboards destroy property, I don’t want them in my community.” We had to educate them, tell them maybe skateboarders are at your building because they have no place else to go. The skatepark gives them a place to go besides the street.”

Now, thanks to two decades of lobbying and fundraising from local stakeholders, Des Moines skateboarders have an 88,000-square-foot playground on which to skate—and, having witnessed the pros earn medals at Dew Tour, a real goal to shoot for when they do.

Economic impact figures for Dew Tour 2022 aren’t yet available, but organizers were optimistic based on the foot traffic throughout the festival and its activations, as well as the national media exposure.

“Dew Tour last year brought in so much excitement around skateboarding,” Sterzenbach said. “The fact that so many people within the community at large are so heavily invested, it was really a validation to a lot of parents. The sport is much bigger than perhaps people realized, and it’s a good sport for kids to get involved in. It helped us sell the benefits of skateboarding because we had real validation to back it up.”