It’s a hot July day on the southside of Atlanta, and the clacking of skateboards against concrete mixes with the hooting and hollering of campers and counselors as they explore the challenges that the Pantry, a DIY skatepark, has to offer. Lead instructor Matt “Atreau” Mercer is coaching camper Jack Broderick as the 16-year-old works on landing his first kickflip. The anticipation builds with each attempt, and Broderick’s encouragement comes from Mercer and other campers as they check in while they roll past.
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It’s the third day of a summer camp for skateboarders hosted by SkateATL, an organization that provides private lessons, group lessons, workshops, and, this year, summer camps. Mercer and his staff of pro skaters are spending the week with about ten campers, hitting up popular skate spots that most of the kids, ages 6-16, wouldn’t be able to get to on their own.
The campers start their day at the Old 4th Ward Skatepark, stretching and warming up before loading into a sprinter van to skate at other skateparks in the metro Atlanta area and even some street skate locations that are legendary in the skateboarding community, like the Black Box.
The skatepark at Old 4th Ward has much to offer, but traveling to different skate spots allows Mercer’s campers to become more well-rounded and experiment with new ways to interact with the environment around them.
“When you’re finding different unique locations, you have to advance your skating because you’re just getting variety, and then you just want to, you know, try new things, and then that helps you improve, and then you get the confidence to try to skate something else.” Says Mercer.
13-year-old Clementine Spear was one of the first kids to have a lesson with SkateATL, and she loves to street skate, “I want to street skate more, but since I’m so young, I can’t really go by myself. And there’s nobody that I can go with, so I’m mostly at the park.” But during camp, Spear got a week full of street skating with counselors like Lucy Heller, who helped her land her first ollie over a three-stair gap. She grinned as she recalled the feeling of accomplishing one of her goals. “It feels great. If. I mean, yeah, it’s really, really good.”
Heller loves to teach skating and gets invested in the challenges her students make for themselves. “A girl I teach at home landed a three-stair, and I screamed louder than she did.” Heller nearly lost her voice after screaming from the excitement of Clementine landing her own three-stair.
Skateboarding requires confidence and focus to execute a trick successfully; you must be hyper-aware of how your body interacts with the board and the environment. This is SkateATL’s first year running the camps, and the parents who entrust their kids to founder Allan Minter and the pro skaters have been seeing what a difference it makes for their children.
“I’ve been getting a lot of feedback from the parents saying that their kids are coming home saying they have more confidence, they are more encouraged,” Minter says as he watches over the skaters.
“We want all the kids to leave feeling confident in themselves,” said Mercer. “We want that to transfer outside of skateboarding. Usually, it does.”
Mercer’s been skating for more than 27 years. He said skating helped him find confidence and navigate adolescence with A.D.D., “This was something that actually helped me to focus like I had a hard time sitting still and focusing and concentrating on schoolwork. After I started skateboarding and really focusing on skating, it helped me to focus.”
Skaters see how the sport can influence their whole life. It informs how they see their environment and can provide a living philosophy and a great community. Mercer says that it’s a unique way to view the world, “Like we really view the world completely differently from everyone else. Because every time we walk out our door, even if it’s inside a building, no matter where it is, we are always looking at things and thinking, I bet I could skate that.”
Skateboarding has been known to be more than just a sport but a subculture, full of community that supports each other and works together to create spaces for everyone to enjoy their shared passion.
“It’s more than just a sport. It’s more like an idea or a culture, kind of like how they have, like religion and stuff.” 13-year-old Messiah Massey is a Counselor in Training for the camp, which means he’s expected to help. “I feel like this could be a religion because they’re sharing beliefs that we have that other people just wouldn’t have in general, like how land is land for everybody, not just business owners and land owners because we don’t feel like that would be fair for like the community or the world as a whole.”
This all started when Minter’s daughter, Stella, took an interest in skateboarding last year. They live just around the corner from the Old 4th Ward Skatepark, and he taught her the basics, “but daughters don’t always want to listen to their dads,” laughed as he told the story.
“Because every time we walk out our door, even if it’s inside a building, no matter where it is, we are always looking at things and thinking, I bet I could skate that.”
Matt “Atreau” Mercer, lead instructor at Skate ATL
So he tried to find a way to get her lessons and reached out to Stratosphere Skateboards, a local skate shop, to see if they could help. The shop put Minter in touch with Mercer, who has taught private skateboard lessons during his 27 years as a skater. Mercer has also worked with youth programs, camps, schools, and group homes. Watching the skater work with his daughter, Minter saw the potential for more.
“The first time Matt met with Stella, I was immediately like, ok, this guy is awesome.” Minter describes Mercer as someone with a big heart and noticed how encouraging he was when coaching his daughter Stella.
“So the light bulb went off in my head. I had some money to invest. And I basically just told him, let me back you.” Together, they started Skate ATL.
Mercer is grateful to have a partner that backs him up. “Going from being in a position where I’m kinda doing a lot the work on my own, the promotion, talking to the parents, networking, and coordinating, to having someone say, ‘Hey, let me do those things, and you just focus on the work.’ That’s basically what we’re doing now with Skate ATL.”
As for that kickflip that 16-year-old Jack Broderick was attempting, he finally nailed it, and it was the highlight of the day for most of the skaters.
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