Ideastream's Sound of Us tells stories Northeast Ohioans want to tell. In this latest installment, we are sharing stories about skateboard culture in Richland County.
In Mansfield, the largest city in Richland County, more residents are picking up skateboarding to find community and personal fulfillment.
One such example is 12-year-old Ruari Killian Doup, who not only performs flips and tricks, but has also used his newfound skating community to help him heal from emotional scars.
Rubber wheels whizzed by on a wood ramp as rock music played in the background. Ruari dropped in on a vert — a U-shaped ramp — on his bright orange skateboard before rocketing up the other side and flying head over heels into a pit of foam. He's been skating for a little more than a year.
“It makes me feel free,” he said. “It feels like nobody can stop you, like you can do anything."
Birds chirped and wind whipped around as Ruari's mother, Ashlie Clark, sat outside what will soon be her family’s home. They're in the middle of building a new house.
Clark sat outside surrounded by planks of wood, construction equipment and sawdust. She said the divorce from Ruari’s father was toxic and hit her son hard. On top of that, they lost their home as part of the divorce.
“I think he just really became introverted in those life-changing circumstances, and he wasn't the same Ruari that he had been growing up,” Clark said, adding that she's seen changes in her son since he started skateboarding, and that it's good to have the confident Ruari again.
“When we go out to the parks, he'll go up and meet people like it's nothing," she said. "He'll skate all day with strangers and make friends like it is nothing.”
On a recent day, Ruari sat on a metal bench at Stoke Run Action Sports Park in Butler and described how he learned to do a trick called a Frontside 180.
“That's like when you pop your board up and do an Ollie, and then turn, and you do a 180,” he explained.
For the uninitiated, an Ollie is a maneuver in which the skater kicks the tail of the board down while jumping to make the board pop into the air.
Ruari said it took him a month to get the basics down, but it was worth it.
“Because the feeling of landing a trick or something just feels like a good accomplishment,” he said.
And he learned something important.
“The best thing to really understand, never quit, never stop trying, you'll make it eventually if you give it time,” Ruari said.
More than skate lessons
In addition to finding fellow skaters at the park, Ruari also joined Skate Ohio, a Mansfield nonprofit that teaches kids to skate.
But BJ Price, president of Skate Ohio, said they teach kids a lot more than Ollies and Kickflips.
“To have others there like, 'I bet you could do this.' Having people around you who believe you can do better than you think you can," Price said.
Shereen Naser, a Cleveland State University psychology professor, said she has seen kids like Ruari and how those early childhood traumas can impact them.
“You can see a change in their personality or the way they're showing up," she said. "We might see internalizing things, they are not talking as much, they're not as outgoing. You might see a change in how they dress, their hygiene.”
Nearly two-thirds of American adults continue to feel the effects of such childhood trauma, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Parents, like Ruari’s mother, can help their children when they put them in supportive situations where they can overcome obstacles and build confidence, Naser said.
“We want kids to learn that challenge is OK, that they have the internal resources to overcome challenge,” she said.
Clark was nearly brought to tears by the changes she's seen in her son.
"I have no words to explain the happiness and the euphoria that I feel in my soul when I see him skate, because it is truly the happiest, the most free I have ever seen him," she said. "That's what I want for every kid, to feel the joy that I see in his eyes when he skates because it's amazing."
The sounds of skateboard wheels clanged on metal rails and ramps while Ruari and a new friend talked.
Ruari said he’s just getting started. After placing second in a local competition called the Skate Ohio Winter Sessions in March, he said he wants to keep improving and competing, while continuing to make friends whenever he visits the skatepark.
