By Kevin McClintock

kmcclintock@joplinglobe.com

They affectionately call it “Skater Wednesday.”

For an hour or two each week, sales team members from the Joplin-based American Ramp Co. will head outdoors, skateboards in hand, with the intentions of blowing off steam.

Sometimes they’ll tackle the half-pipe at Schifferdecker Park. Other times, they’ll motor over to Autumn Ramp Park to assault the ramps and bowls, the ledges and the wedges, the hips and the gaps.

It sounds like fun, and it certainly looks like fun, and when you talk to the guys grinding it out or attempting to grab some air, they’ll tell you it’s loads of fun.

But it’s also work.

Sorta.

“So much of what we do here is what we love to do,” said veteran salesman Tyler Woods, who sports an ARC logo tattoo on his right arm. “From top to bottom you have guys here who skate and that’s their passion.”

Selling what they love

Some of the key positions at American Ramp are filled by veteran skaters.

They pitch and land sales, help design the courses and they’ll even skate a park once it’s placed down. And if something doesn’t work, if something doesn’t quite feel right, it’s ripped out, corrected and immediately replaced.

It’s one of the reasons why ARC is the world’s largest skatepark provider, said Chief Executive Officer Jim Moss.

“I don’t pretend to be a skateboarder, I’m more on the business side of it, but guys like Tyler and (ARC Owner Nathan Bemo), they skate because they love it, and they’d do it whether they were selling skate parks or not,” he said.

If the ultimate product “isn’t something they wouldn’t want to skate, it’s not something they’re going to sell.”

Being skater-owned is a huge advantage for ARC in its industry, he continued. “We’re one of the few (skatepark companies) where skaters are involved in all operations, where we have people, whether sales or installers, who can skate the park once it’s done.”

This skating expertise, surprisingly, is rare in the skatepark industry, where most of ARC’s competitors are playground equipment manufacturers with little background in skating.

“We basically have to cater to two different groups of people,” Moss said. “The actual owner of a park is the city, and they’re mainly concerned about the aesthetics — it has to look good, it has to blend in with the (surrounding) civic landscape.

“But skaters don’t care how it looks, they’re more concerned about how it’s going to ride, how well it’s going to skate.”

See the dilemma? Build something that looks great but rides terribly, and skaters will stay away in droves. Build a park that’s a skater’s dream but resembles a rundown parking lot, and city residents might sneer and complain.

“So we have to put both those modes together,” Moss said. “And we can, and we do.”



Bridging the gap

It’s an interesting dynamic.

Skate parks are usually borne because a town has no skate park, skaters are subsequently bored, and business owners complain when skaters use their handicapped areas as improvised ramps. So pressure is applied to the town’s park director. And though city officials do the best they can, most don’t really understand what comprises a skatepark or how such parks are pieced together.

Enter ARC and its professional skaters.

“What we try to do, what our sales team and our designers try to do, is put this all together to come to a consensus that makes both sides happy,” Moss said. “We’ll tell them we’ll work with them to where it’s affordable, it fits within your budget and within your space and allows something for most in your community to enjoy.

“It doesn’t do any good for us to have this skatepark out here with all these huge skate ramps if nobody can skate them and so it just sits there, empty.”

ARC’s skate vets also help city officials steer away from home-drawn designs which simply don’t work, at least from a skater’s point of view. For example, placing a pyramid in the center of a concrete pad with four start ramps at all four corners only creates a traffic jam that will turn even novice skaters against it.

About 90 percent of the time, Moss said, ARC employees are able, either through conversation or specific sales techniques, to turn a proposal around that otherwise would have been disastrous for the client, as far as money wasted on a park which proves unpopular to skaters.

“Our guys are skaters, they’re able to really relate to (young) skaters in these design groups, but they also have the professionalism to impress the park board and the city council, and that’s why (clients) feel so good about American Ramp Company,” he said.

The company has constructed parks in Joplin, Carthage, Neosho, Aurora and Nevada, to name only a few found in the area. But they aren’t a regional company. ARC-built parks can be found in 49 of the 50 states — only Hawaii has eluded them so far. They also have parks scattered throughout the world, stretching from Ireland to Israel.

In fact, ARC has built, or is in the process of building, 63 parks since the first of this year. In 2009, 240 parks were pieced together in more than 30 countries.

“The joke among us guys,” said Mark Leone, a veteran skater and skilled skatepark designer, is “what part of the world are you in today?”

Currently, parks are being built in Maryland, New Jersey, Alaska, Australia, Wyoming, Pennsylvania, Florida, Ontario and Alberta, Canada, Montana, California, Indiana, Oregon and Idaho — “and that’s just April,” Moss said with a grin.

It helps that ARC is the only manufacturer in the world that can build a park however a customer prefers, be it steel, wood, a hybrid of the two, pre-cast concrete or in-ground concrete.

ARC’s ability to “bridge the gap between the kids and the public” is one of the true strengths of the company, Leone said.

To further explain how they can directly help, Leone told a brief story about a past gathering between skaters and town officials, with the latter knowing next to nothing about skating or skating lingo. When a skater mentioned they’d love to have a “grind box” included in the plans, the adults immediately blanched.

A grind box, by the way, is a simple wooden “box” in which skaters can slide their boards across, but the adults didn’t know that, of course. ARC officials did, thankfully, and they intervened and smoothed out any potential wrinkles.

It’s moments like that, Leone said, where ARC can step in “and help out with every facet. And that’s a huge key.”



Try one out

American Ramp Co. has shipped some ramps over to The Bridge for this weekend’s JoMoPro BMX contest. The ramps will be set up in the parking lot so that skaters and BMX riders can try them out. The three-day JoMoPro contest concludes today.