Freestyle contest advice – Part Two

Last month, Sarah Park-Matott and Sean Robinson listed reasons why we should participate in contests (‘Freestyle contest advice – Part One’). Skating with friends, competing against oneself, becoming a better skater—these are all pay packets worthy of hard yakka.

A positive mindset, focusing on such goals, can help with competition jitters. Preparation also helps. ‘Just skate’ is a given, but don’t forget to do the research.

Find out how the event is structured. Is it a bracket-style competition where you go head-to-head with another entrant, like in JFSA-run competitions or Tucson Thunderdome? Or is it a traditional skate contest, where all skateboarders go through their runs and are ranked accordingly?

Read up on the judging criteria. Contests will generally post this on their websites; contact the event organisers if you need help finding/deciphering it.

Since an event’s judging criteria can change from year to year, judges Tony Gale (Slatina Skate Open 2024), Denham Hill (World Round-Up 2024, World Freestyle Skateboarding Championships 2024) and Kevin Wessels (World Freestyle Skateboarding Championships 2024, Paderborn BBQ Skateboarding Contest 2024) have offered some general guidance on what they’re looking for.

Tony Gale

Rookies always make the same mistakes in competitions, so here’s a few points to consider:

1. Don’t go back for tricks you miss. Chances are you’ll miss them again and it’ll only make things look worse; I’ve even seen people spend 45 seconds trying one trick over and over again! Just move on to the next trick—the faster you recover, the faster everyone will forget about it.
2. Move around. Rookies always roll into one position and do rail tricks in one spot, and it looks terrible. Even if 90% of your trick set is rail tricks, try to move around the area as much as possible to do them at different points in the space. It’ll look better.
3. Diversify. 90% of your run shouldn’t be rail tricks. It shouldn’t be 90% kickflips either! Even if you can tell the difference between 20 subtly nuanced casper variations, the audience won’t—and the judges will be bored of seeing that many caspers. Mix things up.
4. Plan. Don’t go out there and improvise—you’ll forget some tricks and repeat others. Also, having a solid plan you’ve practised means you can swap to autopilot and relax a lot more. Nothing worse than panicking halfway through a run because you don’t know what to do next!
5. Do footwork—and do it right. ‘Footwork as a trick’ is not footwork. Don’t just tick a box in the middle of the run; footwork is supposed to be something fluid that fills the gaps, so make it smooth and fit it in between tricks.
6. Don’t do footplants. Just don’t.

Denham Hill

Judging a freestyle contest is notoriously difficult, not only due to the subjective nature of categories such as ‘style’ but also due to the judging systems which vary from contest to contest. Skating a contest feels easy by comparison!

As a rough idea, judges will be scoring you on:

• Variety. Did you display tricks from several categories in your run?
• Technicality. How difficult or technical were your tricks?
• Consistency. This is the biggest killer! Is your run seamless and fluid with limited bails or step-offs?
• Style. Very subjective! This can include musical interpretation. Is your run executed with flow, ease, and good technique?
• Originality. Have you included some ‘signature’ tricks in your run? Have you added your own personal touch to the execution of some tricks or the run overall?

Judges are looking for a run which balances all the key elements and showcases the very best work of the skater.

Some judges assign a lot of weight to consistency, looking for a run free of any mistakes. Consistency is important, but I [personally] value a stylish and technical, well-planned run with good variety over a ‘perfect’ run with no step-offs.

I can’t speak for every judge, but here’s an idea of what I’m looking for:

• I want to see a fluid and seamless run which uses the entire contest space.
• I like to see a good mixture of tricks from all categories, executed well.
• I particularly like to see some originality worked in there; I love to see skaters add their own personal touch to certain tricks, or even add in something I’ve never seen.

I can’t remember for the life of me who said it, but you should be able to see a silhouette of someone skating, with no other information, and know who is skating right away. I think that’s a sign of a skater who truly has their own individual style and technique, and that’s what I’m looking for in a contest run. No pressure!

Kevin Wessels

I will give you a little inside info about our way of judging tricks and the breakdown we use to give tricks points.

Firstly, stances are not factored in, so it doesn’t matter if something is nollie, frontside, backside or switch, etc. Also, setups don’t make a difference. We just judge the tricks.

Some tricks are easy for one person and hard for another. It’s not fair to judge a trick difficulty on own experience. Because of this, we look at the difficulty of the manipulation of the board. First we start off with a 1-point trick—this will be a stationary shuvit or kickflip/heelflip rotation. Tricks like tailstop fingerflips are great examples of this category. Then you got the rolling variant which adds 1 point to the trick, so a rolling fingerflip will be 2 points. Then you can combine the trick like a varial rolling fingerflip. We will give 1 point for the shuvit, 1 point for the flip and 1 point for doing it rolling, so it will be 3 points.

There are a lot of oddities that will fall out[side] of a category like impossibles, truck transfers, manuals and so on.

• Impossibles will get more points…because of the technicality.

• Truck transfers are some of the hardest tricks because of the little room for error and physical requirement and usually start at 7 or 8 points.

• Manuals have a cap on difficulty of the manual…A normal manual has a 3-point cap; if you can show proper balance, like [in] a g-turn, you can reach this cap. But a Swedish nose manual can go up to 8 or even 9 points because of the difficulty.

This is usually what we use as a reference for judging. Sometimes tricks will get debated during the run; we will always communicate with each other to make sure we’re on the same page. But this is a little insight on how we judge the difficulty of tricks.

This is only a small part of the judging of course—a perfect run won’t only be working with difficult tricks if there is no style, flow, footwork, etc.

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Here concludes the second part of our series on freestyle contest advice. The third part, which will feature thoughts from Paolo Virgilio Demurtas, will be posted on September 30, 2024.