On Sunday, a group of skateboarders came to Dyess Park along James Brown Boulevard, from 9 a.m. until the heat peaked after noon. They brought a grill with them, offering food plates — hamburgers or hot dogs and chips—for $5 to any kind strangers who might accompany them.
Though they also brought obstacles with them to practice on — skating is almost always in the cards when skaters gather — their chief aim Sunday morning was to help clean up the park: tend to the grounds, remove trash, weed whack the tennis court.
“Why not?” said Timothy Ryerson, who organized the cleanup. “This is kind of this is our ground zero, the downtown area.”While the city contemplates how to approach renovating the park — one of four SPLOST 8 projects to be funded by a $28 million bond approved by the Augusta Commission in May — Ryerson saw an opportunity worth seizing when he happened upon the park’s empty swimming pool (a common space for skateboarders to use).
“Our mentality is kind of do it yourself,” Ryerson said. “I don’t see anybody playing tennis downtown off James Brown Boulevard… but I know about 50 skaters from events that I’ve held who could utilize the space with a minimal budget.”
Ryerson launched his custom skateboard shop ROOTS (Rising Out of the Shadows) in 2020, while living in Jacksonville, Fla., after beginning to teach his young son skating and BMX bicycling.
He has since moved back to Augusta, where he was born, and is on a mission to revive the area’s skateboarding culture. One means of doing that is a holdover from his days in Florida: organizing events, such as contests and park cleanups, spreading the word mostly among the skater community.
“On the weekends I would just load a car, take my kid, and we’d go to whatever skate park around the city and kind of just start setting up events throughout,” said Ryerson. “So, it’d be like a park cleanup day, where we clean up the skatepark, whether we get graffiti off of it, or blow it down, or patch up some holes.”
He’s already hosted one such event in Evans: the “ROOTS 500 Rumble in the Jungle” at the Blanchard Woods skatepark, which included a racing and skating trick contest, also sold food plates, and had several skate supply and apparel shops sponsoring.
Ryerson’s homespun efforts to jumpstart Augusta’s skateboarding scene draws from his own memories of it, rekindled since he relocated last year. He makes note to mention local artist Paul Pearman, who holds the 1989 Guinness World Record for the longest skateboard jump.
“Augusta has always had a rich [skateboard] culture,” Ryerson said. “But it’s never gotten its shine.”
A military brat, Ryerson found an outlet in skateboarding, as a means to familiarize himself with where he lived, connect with its community.
“As a military kid, being in this military town, I was always like, ‘Where’s the skate park at? Where’s the skate shop at? Where can I meet friends?’” he said. “I’ve noticed that that outlet is non-existent anymore around here.”
But ROOTS is doing its part to change that, he says. Ryerson even sees the economic angle in helping the subculture thrive openly in the city.
“It seems unconventional, especially in Georgia, but a lot of business is actually derived from skateboarding,” he said, noting a group of skaters meeting could be, on average, anywhere from two to 30 people. “It starts on foot, and after you’re done skating, it turns into, ‘hey, let’s get something to eat,” which turns into going to Mellow Mushroom or Metro [Coffeehouse] or any of those places, to kind of congregate and talk to people outside of skateboarding.”
His impromptu endeavors are kind of grassroots means to give platform to a marginalized group: mostly young people of various backgrounds and family circumstances, bonded around this one activity, generally willing to pool resources together to coordinate meets and even produce merchandise, from T-shirts to stickers to skateboards (another impetus for Ryerson’s business).
“We’ll just build it if nobody else is going to,” Ryerson said, “You know, like in ‘Field of Dreams’ If you build it, they will come.”
Skyler Q. Andrews is a staff reporter for The Augusta Press. Reach him at skyler@theaugustapress.com.
