XTREME Skate

By Brandon Ortiz
Skiff Staff

Wanted: friends.

Skateboarding experience preferred but not required. Will train.

If Skateboarding Club President David Elizalde, a junior graphic design major, had paid for a classified ad when starting the club, it might have gone something like that.

Special to the Skiff Trombetta practices his side planche on campus.

“When I started (the Skateboarding Club), it was to attract a group of people I would like to be friends (with),” Elizalde said.

It was basically for myself, to make friends. It was almost like putting out a flier, saying ‘be my friend.’”

Elizalde formed the club in August 1999. He wasn’t in any organizations, nor was he interested in joining any. All he wanted was a club for people to hangout and have a good time.

Mission accomplished, club members said.

Dustin Van Orne, a sophomore radio-TV-film and art history major, said that is exactly what the club does.

“It’s basically a ‘get together to have a good time’ club,” Van Orne said. “Not everybody skates or rollerblades.”

Van Orne joined the club 1 1/2 years ago when it was being formed. Like many members in the club, Van Orne said he does not skateboard very well.

“I can maybe stand up on it and go 10 feet without falling,” Van Orne said.

But skateboarding is not what the club is all about.

Josiah Miller, a sophomore philosophy and radio-TV-film major, said the club does not spend as much time skateboarding as it does hanging out.

“It is less of a skateboarding club and more of a social club,” Miller said. “I have met a lot of new people through it, and the people I have met are not just acquaintances I know with the club. They have become friends I hang out with.”

The club attracts a wide variety of people, members said. Chris Trombetta, a freshman nursing major, said the mix helps make the club enjoyable.

Special to Skiff Chris Trombetta, president of the skateboarding club, does a handstand on his board.

“(In the club) you can be yourself, relax and meet with a different group of people,” Trombetta said. “Everybody in the club is pretty colorful — (they are a) very outgoing, crazy kind of bunch.”

Trombetta said members are not like the average TCU student.

“Usually we get people that are kind of odd,” Trombetta said. “They are usually people who do not exactly fit in with the rest of the people at TCU — the people with different colored hair, unnatural hair and baggy pants. People that aren’t clean-cut (and) modeled after everyone else.”

If members do not fit in at TCU, there is one place they said they do fit in: Ol’ South Pancake House and Family Restaurant. Almost everything from official meetings to the club’s Christmas formal happens at Ol’ South.

“We are pretty much sponsored by Ol’ South,” Elizalde said. “It is kind of like a sacred place for the Skateboarding Club. Anything of great significance occurs at Ol’ South.”

The club meets on a semi-regular basis to eat and have coffee at Ol’ South, Van Orne said. Afterward they skate for a while and hang out.

They have become regulars at the restaurant. Over the course of several meals at Ol’ South, a running joke started on the hair style of some customers.

“We go there to laugh at the people with mullets,” Trombetta said. “There are more mullets over there than you will ever see.”

The Skateboarding Club has accrued a fascination of mullets, Van Orne said.

“We have a couple of running jokes on mullets,” Van Orne said. “It is a humorous subject.”

But not everyone is laughing.

“We don’t make fun of the mullet.,” Elizalde said. “We kind of fear the mullet. We have the utmost respect for the mullet. I fear that if somebody showed up with a mullet, they might overthrow me, because they would be so powerful. That is how much we fear the mullet.”

The club had its winter formal at Ol’ South. Members rented out a private room to eat and dance and were asked to dress up.

“It was like a fake formal,” Van Orne said. “A lot of people wore thrift clothes. A couple of people wore Dickies jump suits.”

Club Secretary Bekah Branstetter, a junior mechanical engineering major, said some members went all out.

“There were people who had their shirts tucked in, which was a big deal,” Branstetter said. “They had on ties that were 20 years old, belts that had spikes on it and chains. They were looking sharp. To the average onlooker, we looked like complete trash, but we were dressed up.”

Even with people dressed up in leisure suits, Dickies coveralls and business suits, restaurant workers were not alarmed, said Branstetter.

“There are some weird people at Ol’ South,” Branstetter said. “I don’t think they react at all.”

Skateboard Club members are clean-cut to the restaurant’s norm, Elizalde said.

“We would be lucky to be considered the norm,” he said. “We are straight-laced to the people that go there.”

Club members may be considered straight-laced at Ol’ South, but it is the opposite on campus. Elizalde said the club is comprised of members who do not go for the clean-cut image.

“If there is a stereotype at TCU, it is almost the other side of that,” he said. “Kind of like the khaki pants, frat-boy type of image. I think it attracts people who aren’t attracted to that. There is not really another club like that.”

The Skateboarding Club is different from most clubs, Elizalde said. Whereas most clubs have one defining feature, the Skateboarding Club is “like an organization that has no purpose.”

“There are fraternities and sororities, then there are service organizations, and then all other clubs have one defining characteristic,” Elizalde said. “You have to be a certain ethnicity, or you have to have one special interest. The Skateboarding Club sounds like an interest club, but the only criteria is if you want to have fun.

“You get the benefits of an organization with the luxury of limited responsibility,” Elizalde said.
This is what gives the club its appeal, he said.

“In college everyone is wanting your time,” Elizalde said. “Everyone wants you to join their club and do this and put in these hours. They ask you to be a part of things, give them your money. What is cool about this club is that there is no responsibility and no fees. If you come once, you are considered a member.”

The laid-back atmosphere originates from the top.

“(The club leaders) are also procrastinators and irresponsible,” Elizalde said. “Sometimes (members) don’t get e-mails and sometimes there won’t be meetings. People just understand and they don’t care.”

Brandon Ortiz
b.p.ortiz@student.tcu.edu