Numbers Show Everyone Quitting Skateboarding: Nerdsday Thursday Article at Skatepark of Tampa

Numbers Show Everyone Quitting Skateboarding: Nerdsday Thursday

Posted on Thursday, May 16, 2013 by Rob

I started with doing an analysis of our top 200 skaters over the years. Of course, the first question is regarding their ages. The steady increase in the average age of our top 200 customers has the same patterns we've found in past Nerdsday Thursdays like pros getting older, man ams getting more man, and general average skateboarder ages over the years.
After seeing the raw data, I thought I'd dig a little deeper. Out of all those kids that were in our top 200 customers in 2006, how many still remained in the top 200 over the years? You would hope that the majority still skates just as much as they always have. Unfortunately not. The following year in 2007, less then 50% of those top 200 skaters are still in the top 200. By 2012, only 19 of them remain. Good lawd what had happened??? 19? That number is so low I'm going to list all the damn names of you: Jake H, Dirt Weasel, Alex P, Alex U, Andreas G, Jack L, Andrew B, Louis S, Jordan P, Baby Drew, Cameron H (now a SPoT employee!), Vincent A (FSEC member), Khristopher D, Matthew M, Dimitri R, Max M, Sean S, Nicholas B. That's only 18 because the 19th one is "general customer" that we ring up new people under that aren't in the system yet. Thank you all for sticking with skating and being a part of SPoT and skateboarding for more than five years.
Now, there's a few assumptions, both positive and negative, that you can make about why the above data is what it is. So, I dug even deeper. Looking at that list of 200 top skaters in 2006, how many of them do you think skated at least once in the following years, not even being in the top 200, just skated one single time? This chart below shows that and it's alarming. Out of the top 200 skaters in 2006, by 2012, less than half of them have skated here at least once. Is it safe to assume they quit? There's more free parks around here, but damn, wouldn't you at least come one single time a year if you were still skating? Especially since we completely change the course every single year? I think it's safe to assume those kids quit skating. Damn, what are they doing these days? Rapping like Jereme Rogers? Getting old and fat? Who knows, maybe you have different thoughts on these data patterns? It seems like everyone is quitting skateboarding. You guys need to stop that quitting $h!t right now. You know what this reminds me of? Those grumpy old men that say they want skateboarding to die again because they love it so much. You just wish you were cool again, geezer. How could you not want something as amazing as skateboarding done by every new kid you meet? Try evolving and growing. Okay, that's the end of my rant, but still skateboarders are quitting like mad and that sucks.
And finally, I'm leaving you with a super nerd bonus, and that's the SQL query used to mine this data. From here, it's pulled into Excel for further analysis and comparison, plus putting it in chart form. Don't be scared of numbers and computers, kids. Learn this stuff now while you're young and you can do almost anything you want when you get older, just don't quit skateboarding.

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