Our Biggest Season Yet
What a summer.
Camps. Drop-ins. A free skate program all summer with the City of Spruce Grove. Monthly meetups with ESA. And our first ever competition. Here’s the recap.
Lessons, 7 days a week
We ran skateboard lessons every single day this summer. Seven days a week, all season, spread across Spruce Grove, St. Albert, Capilano, Century Park, and Strathcona.
Dozens of new students came through and tried skateboarding for the first time, ages 5 all the way up to 47. Doesn’t matter if you’re a kid or an adult, it’s never too late to start.
Camps: our first summer running them
Three weeks of camps this year. One at Foam Fighters, two out at Grovenor Community League.
August 4-6 sold out. 20 kids, full house.
That tells us the demand is there, and we’re ready to go bigger for 2026/27.
But honestly, the numbers aren’t even the best part. We watched kids land tricks they’d been chasing all week. We watched friendships form in real time. A camp family is starting to grow, and that means everything to us.
Free Try-It Sessions at Spruce Grove
Five weeks. Free. One goal: get a board under as many first-timers as possible.
We ran these in partnership with the City of Spruce Grove at Wheeled Sports Park, and a few dozen kids stepped on a board for the very first time. Some weren’t even from Alberta. They tried it, got hooked, and went and bought their own setups.
Make It Rad: learn-to-skate and the biggest crowd we’ve had in years
August 22, this year at Callingwood Skatepark. Make It Rad is always a highlight, but this year Project Rad donated a 1-hour learn-to-skate drop-in right before the jam.
Watching kids try skateboarding for the first time, right before the jam? Incredible.
No official headcount yet, but our best guess is 30-40 kids throughout the day between the jam, the learn-to-skate, and everyone just hanging around. That’s the most youth we’ve seen skateboarding at one event in over 5 years.
We also donated gift cards to the Make It Rad silent auction. Every dollar raised went to ESA. It’s all going to a great cause.
Free monthly youth meetups with ESA
We also kept up our free monthly youth meetups with the Edmonton Skateboarding Association this summer. No lesson plan, no camp structure, just kids showing up to skate and hang out together.
We ran a few little games to keep things fun, and a couple of months were made better by donations from Otterly Rad, Rumor Boardshop, and The Source. Seeing kids build that community outside of lessons and camps and the big events is exactly why we do this.
Edmonton Skateboard Gromfest: our first-ever
August 29, 2-5 pm. Free to enter. Prizes for every kid who showed up to compete, presented by Project Rad & Velocirippers
20 kids competed in our first-ever Gromfest, a lot of them skaters who only picked up a board for the first time this summer. Watching brand new skaters go out and compete against each other, even just to have fun, was awesome to see.
Big thanks to our sponsors/donors: Otterly Rad, Alberta Nurses Association, and FMC Welding
We’re already planning year two.
What this summer proved
Lessons ran 7 days a week and brought in dozens of new skaters, ages 5 to 47. Camps sold out. Try-it sessions turned strangers into skaters. Kids kept coming back for the Youth Skateboarding Meetups just to hang out. Make It Rad drew our biggest crowd to Callingwood Skatepark in over half a decade. Gromfest gave us a tradition to build on.
Summer 2026 was proof of concept. Fall/winter 2026-27, we’re coming for you.
Project Rad Skateboarding runs youth skateboarding lessons and camps in and around Edmonton. All ages. All skill levels. All welcome.