A couple weeks ago Hayden Ball sent us a text that said, “The music editor of City Beat messaged me and he wants to do an article on blading so we may be going back out to shoot!” Later it continued, “He called me and said he knows Jan. He saw our section online then Facebooked me.”

That was it. Through some six degrees of social networking, plans were made to get a sliver of mainstream press for blading.

Having seen our share of local media (all over the world) try to feature blading before with results that aren’t always, well, good, news of an impending story was met with a certain degree of skepticism. But in an effort to do a solid for Hayden, and see just what was going on, we headed over to City College to meet up with the guys for our photo shoot.

It turns out Peter Holson had been a blader, knew about some of our “legend” skaters, and was eager to get some blades back under his feet. That didn’t happen during our session as it didn’t look like his size 13 New Balances were going to make it in to our small Xsjados, but as he said in the article, he got to roll at the Esco Park. So we spent our time that Sunday chatting about the broad strokes of blading’s history, the central role SD has played in blading’s development, and the awesome diversity and brother-/sisterhood of blading.

It’s now a few days after the article hit the web and local newsstands, and the comments on the web seem 100% positive. Honestly, kind of surprised. Will it stay that way? Maybe. Depends on who is reading City Beat.

Emailing with Peter the other day, I asked him if he was thinking about getting back out on blades again. He said he was, but that he needed to find skates. That’s when we emailed Matt Morrison and Geoff Acers over at SDSF to find out if they had any used blades or enough parts around to build out a pair of size 12s. Turns out they did. Now Peter has a pair of skates to use, and blading took an opportunity for press and turned it in to at least one more blader. — ONE