Julianne
Julianne
Pronouns:
She/Her
Years Skating:
As of 2020, three years total: one year of derby and two years in skateparks.Skating Style:
I skate goofy. Sidestance is my preferred way of skating. Although I tend to switch between fakie, prone, and sidestance a lot in my runs.
Skate Goals:
I’m still learning the fundamentals; I want to learn backside and fakie stalls, rolling drop-ins, tabernacles, and box and axle stalls. I want to get more comfortable with street, specifically rails and ledges. Skating switch in sidestance would be a nice bonus, and if I ever get comfortable upside-down; inverts, ho-ho’s, and miller flips are on the list.
Skate Set Up:
I had the shop take apart my old derby skates and use the hardware to build a custom set-up using a pair of hightop Vans. I’m currently riding Sure-Grip plates and trucks from the old skates with old style Chicks In Bowls sliders, but I’ll be switching to some wider CIB grind trucks as soon as possible. I usually use pretty soft Radar wheels but occasionally switch to harder ones whenever I feel brave enough to work on slides. I like softer cushions, and I prefer the wider Super Gumball toestops. Oh, and hockey tape, lots and lots of hockey tape.
How I Got Into Skating:
A friend of a friend (Shoutout to Jillian and Shannon!) was in derby, and that looked fun so I joined the fresh meat program in January 2017, and learned how to skate at the Spryfield Lions Rink that winter (Mad love to Jane, who drove me to almost every practice). Once the nice weather hit, I couldn’t bring myself to go inside for practice and soon I was skating exclusively outside on any paved surface I could find. I was invited to a few Chicks In Bowls meetups, and started following pro-skaters like Bomba Hache and Roller Travis Reynolds on Instagram; that opened my eyes to how much you can do on a pair of quads, and I found myself thinking about park skating constantly. I finally built up the courage to go to the skatepark by myself for the first time, and was immediately catcalled by a skateboarder before I had even set foot in the park. I went in anyway, confronted him, and have been going ever since.
Best Skating Memory:
Hands down skating with Duke Rennie in California. The scene is way bigger on the West Coast and I met so many amazing quad skaters out there.
What do you do other than skating:
I’m a preschool teacher, I like to draw and sometimes paint.
Bonus:
I’m not a typically sighted person. I have aphakia and binocular diplopia. The downside is I have weaker vision on the right side of my face and the upside is I don’t have any depth perception at all, so dropping into bowls and jumping off of things for the first time isn’t viscerally scary, just logically scary.