On Friday mornings, a group of fun-loving, colorfully-clad roller-skaters gathers on the boardwalk in Mission Beach to participate in Freeskate Fridays. At this weekly meet-up, anyone with a set of wheels is welcome to join a 10-minute skate north to Pacific Beach.
Along the way, they dance to music, joke, laugh, and enjoy each other’s company. Skaters of all abilities are welcome and often passersby in skates will join in on the fun.
This joyful event was started by Matt Tyce a little over a year ago.
“The Friday skate started as me and another person,” said Tyce. “We got together and said we wanted to start something on Fridays at 10 a.m., go out and skate and bring everybody together. And then, just by word of mouth and Instagram, basically, got a lot of people out here.”
Tyce is one of the founders of JMKRIDE, a shop that sells freeskates, which are made of small plates attached to two wheels. They are essentially roller skates minus the shoe.
“The best thing is they’re not attached so you can just put them anywhere, in a backpack, take them out, put them down and go,” Tyce explained before demonstrating one of the many tricks he can perform.
You don’t have to own a pair of freeskates to participate in Freeskate Fridays. In fact, the event is about bringing people from all worlds of roller skating together. Before the pandemic, skating was divided among those who only liked doing tricks at outdoor skate parks, dance skating in rinks, or skating on a roller derby team. COVID caused a boom in the popularity of roller skating, especially outdoors, and created a community that didn’t exist before.
“People would go out skating before but it was nothing like this,” observed one of the skaters present last Friday. When asked why they come out every week to participate, every skater simply responded: “It’s fun.”
“Roller skaters are the ‘funnest’ people,” said Miles, who works at a roller skating rink. “If you want to be around fun people that are hard-working because [with] roller skating, you have to work for everything. No one wakes up being able to do spins. So you’re around everyone here who’s really hard working. On top of that, they’re really introspective about themselves because they’re constantly critiquing their own skating ability.”
San Diego is particularly well suited for roller skating.
“It’s a different culture up there,” said Miles, who is originally from Sacramento. “Here you can skate all year round. At 9 in the morning, we’re out here on the beach. Sacramento, the Bay Area, that’s not possible, it’s not flat enough. You don’t really want to skate outside.”
Isabelle Ringer often participates in Freeskate Fridays. She owns Derby United, an outdoor roller skating facility that offers classes and roller derby, which is slowly coming back after a decline during the pandemic.
“Lots of people from lots of different backgrounds came out and found skating to participate in [during] the pandemic,” said Ringer. “Skating that felt joyful and safe for them, so sometimes roller derby people ended up at freeskate parks. They ended up at the beach… I think a lot of us learned during the pandemic, you gotta just do something that gives you what you need to feel good. So coming here on Friday morning makes me feel pretty good.”
Ringer said that she has already seen a decline in her business since the height of the popularity of skating during the pandemic. Now that the world has started to open back up, skating is in competition with social events like going to restaurants or concerts. Freeskate Fridays is part of an effort to give people opportunities to skate with others and find community.
“Skating has these rises and falls that we’ve seen all throughout time, so to be in a boom right now is amazing,” she said. “It’s amazing for all of the skate community and it’s amazing for the rinks, all the culture around skating.
“But we want to keep these skaters skating. We want to give them places to go and groups to be a part of and classes – anything to keep folks from saying ‘now that the world is back open, I’m done with skating; that was my pandemic hobby.’ Because then we have more. We have more meet-ups, more rinks, more skate parties, more camps and conventions, and all the things that we love, but we need a lot of skaters to keep it alive.”
FREESKATE FRIDAYS
To participate in Freeskate Fridays, meet with the other skaters at Hamel’s in Mission Beach at 10 a.m. every Friday. The skate to Pacific Beach begins at 10:30. All wheels and experience levels are welcome.
