Math teacher and Skate Club adviser Dan Chestnut has been skateboarding for more than 30 years.
“I was playing music when I was a kid in punk rock bands. And back then, nobody skateboarded,” Chestnut said. “And the other people that were skateboarding were some of the punk rock kids. So I tried it out, and it was pretty fun. So then I kept doing it.”
Back when Chestnut was learning, there was no YouTube to quickly look up a tutorial of how to do a certain trick, or even really get started. He learned through friends and VHS skating tapes.

“It’s a lot of trial and error, which is a good way to learn in general,” Chestnut said. “It’ll take you like a month just to be able to get the board off the ground, of practicing every day. When you want to learn how to kickflip, it’ll take like, three months or a year of just trying to get the board to flip over right. And you have to try it hundreds or thousands of times so it works.”
When skateboarding, the most important thing you can have is consistency, according to Chestnut.
“You gotta keep doing it,” He said. “And you’re going to look like an idiot when you’re trying to ollie and you can’t ollie. You just got to keep doing it. I remember all the tricks I learned looked terrible for weeks and weeks and weeks until your body kind of gets the right muscle memory to make everything happen in the right sequence and the right timing to make the trick pop out.”