Jack Boulware

Big-wave surfer Zach Wormhoudt inherited his father’s love of skateboarding — and his company. Today he’s head of the industry’s top skatepark design firm.

March 9, 2007 | Zach Wormhoudt walks through the entrance of Derby Park in a quiet coastline neighborhood of Santa Cruz, where three people languidly skate up and down the skate park’s graffiti-covered walls, killing time on a weekday afternoon.

“Every Sunday, all the skaters — from amateurs to some of the biggest pros — come here for a Derby Cue. Barbecue, beers, it’s a big party,” says Wormhoudt.

Nobody knows this park better than Zach. His father designed it back in the mid-1970s, when skateboarding was experiencing a renaissance due to development of the polyurethane wheel.

When city officials asked Ken Wormhoudt to add a skateboard element, the 45-year-old landscape architect walked into his own backyard — where his two young sons had constructed homemade skate ramps — and enlisted their advice.

Recognized as the world’s oldest public skate park, Derby, which was completed in 1976, remains an institution among Santa Cruz skaters. Its deceptively steep banks have challenged three generations of shredders to answer the question: “Can you skate Derby?”

Zach grew up watching the park come to life, and later helped his father’s company, Wormhoudt Inc., grow into the industry’s premier skate park design firm. Zach inherited the operation after his father died in 1997 from pancreatic cancer. The 37-year-old now has two sons of his own, and is juggling the design and construction of 30 skate parks from California to Massachusetts to Tel Aviv.

The park is surprisingly quiet. The only sounds are the wheels of three skateboards against concrete. Contrary to public opinion, skaters are taciturn creatures, talking little, more focused on their moves and avoiding wipeouts.

Zach watches them for a moment. “Dozens and dozens and dozens of broken elbows, wrists, ankles over the years,” he says with a knowing chuckle.

Skateboarding has come a long way since adrenaline-crazed kids hunted down empty swimming pools in the Dogtown neighborhood of West Los Angeles in the early 1970s. Today the United States is home to about 2,000 skate parks and 13 million skaters. The industry, whose estimated worth is $5 billion, is pumped by magazines, movies, retail shops and extreme competitions funded by major corporations. Some studies point to skateboarding as one of America’s fastest-growing sports. You don’t need to live near the ocean to enjoy skating — all you need is a board and a stretch of cement.

During its 44 years, Wormhoudt Inc. has designed more than 100 parks in the United States and overseas, including the nation’s largest, the $2.5 million 80,000-square-foot Louisville Extreme Park in Kentucky. Upcoming Wormhoudt projects include a 45,000-square-foot park in San Jose and a new skateboard facility in Venice Beach in Los Angeles County.

Wormhoudt doesn’t advertise; it never has. Its reputation has spread through word of mouth. Zach Wormhoudt’s laid-back demeanor sets the pace at the company, which is based in a nondescript corrugated building on the west side of Santa Cruz. He’s also a big-wave surfer, charging the monster waves of Maverick’s in Half Moon Bay when the conditions are right. Designing skate parks is just his day job.

Wormhoudt says the differences between skating and surfing culture are surprisingly different, given they’re both board sports. “At almost any surf break in the world, it’s protected by thugs in the water,” he explains. “Their cars are getting waxed with messages, ‘Go back to your town.’ Everyone’s so territorial. But at a skate park, the thug covered in tattoos smoking a cigarette, will go up to a little kid and give him advice. The images are totally flipped.”

Ken Wormhoudt’s legacy to the skate park industry is public workshops. He pioneered the method of asking skaters for input, inviting youth to meet with park designers and city officials, and providing them with modeling clay to depict what they want in a skate park.

Zach Wormhoudt continues this tradition, listening to skaters’ requests for half-pipes, stairs, rails and snakes. “The workshops are all over the place in terms of feedback,” he says. “If you ask 10 different skaters what they want in a skate park, you get 20 different, non-negotiable answers. They don’t want rules. They don’t like it when there’s staff there. And parks can never be big enough.”

“I have nonskater friends who say, ‘You have the greatest job in the world!’ My friends who are skaters say, “I don’t envy you.’ ”

Although San Francisco is considered a birthplace of the skateboarding scene, it offers just one skate park, in Crocker Amazon.

“It’s similar to a lot of densely populated cities along the coast,” Wormhoudt says. “Any open space is heavily sought after by who knows how many groups. I think skaters are still pretty outraged they don’t have a nice landmark skate park that’s appropriately sized.”

Another small skate park, Potrero del Sol/La Raza Park in the Mission District, is under construction, and a third is in planning stages at Golden Gate Park.

A skate park usually begins with city officials, who approach Wormhoudt for help in designing youth facilities. One of two scenarios develops, Wormhoudt says. Either the town is progressive and wants to provide some relief to public property damage by skaters, or the town simply wants to build a park so it can hand citations to skaters.

As Wormhoudt points out, “If your town doesn’t have a skate park, your whole town is a skate park.”

Every project meets with some level of resistance in the community. Some believe a skate park will lead to gang activity, fighting or even kidnapping. The workshops are where skaters meet citizens and a consensus is reached.

Wormhoudt works with civic leaders to determine a site for a park that’s amenable to everyone. Skaters prefer a park with high visibility, like a tennis court. They don’t want to be tucked away behind a government building. Ideally, a park can be integrated into the surrounding landscape. One Wormhoudt project in progress in Cambridge, Mass., will actually be located beneath a freeway with the park weaving around the offramps and support columns.

Every park is unique in that water, soils and grading differ at each location. There are now contractors who specialize in building skate parks and who have learned what works and what doesn’t. Certain cements last longer. More rebar infrastructure means fewer cracks. Seams and surfaces need to be smoothed over to avoid catching skateboard wheels, known as “wheel bite.” And skaters prefer the coping, or edges on the top of the park, to be swimming-pool tile because it sounds cool underneath the wheels.

Zach Wormhoudt drives across town to check out a new Wormhoudt-designed park. Its official name is the Santa Cruz Skate park at Mike Fox Park, but it’s already being called just Mike Fox, after a young local businessman who died in the 1970s.

Workers are finishing up the 15,000-square-foot facility, which sits across the river from the boardwalk, about two miles from Derby Park. Compared to Derby, Mike Fox incorporates 30 years of skating culture, all crammed into one futuristic landscape. Portions mimic the topography of a suburban city, with railings and steps. Another design element, a 10-foot-deep basin, replicates the look of a swimming pool, complete with mock drain and underwater light fixture. Wormhoudt has even designed a 17-foot diameter full pipe in the shape of an ocean wave.

Crews aren’t yet finished, but that hasn’t stopped local shredders. At night, in total darkness, skaters sneak inside the construction site and try out the new bowls and full-pipe. This “poaching,” as Zach Wormhoudt calls it, leaves black wheel marks on the brand-new concrete. The crew spreads around dirt when they leave for the day to dissuade the poachers, but it isn’t working. Wormhoudt just smiles. What are you going to do? They’re skaters.

“This thing was just a drawing in our office.” He looks out over the park, a project his father had begun 16 years before.

“To me that’s the most special part. It’s the park my dad started. We’re just finishing it.”

(This article first appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle)