WEST POINT — By spring 2012, skaters in West Point will have their own park.
West Point”s Inline and Skateboarding Experience, or WISE, will be a 3,000-square-foot skate park located at Marshall Park. The park will feature a bowl, rails and an outer ring for inline skaters.
The park will be funded through a $100,000 Outdoor Recreation grant from the Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks, which was awarded to the West Point Growth Alliance on Aug. 19.
Constructing a skate park was originally suggested by the Mississippi Main Street charrette team that visited West Point in spring 2010. A state Main Street charrette team also offered suggestions to the cities of Columbus and Starkville, during the same time frame.
As one of the more expensive goals laid out by the West Point charrette team, the Alliance formed a skate-park committee of local skating enthusiasts, elected officials and parents to iron out specs and needs of local skaters.
“We did our research, looking at the skate parks in Tupelo and Oxford,” said Martha Allen, the Alliance”s director of community development . “We liked the one in Oxford because you couldn”t climb under it and it was built by Grindline, a reputable contractor. It won”t be as large as the one in Oxford — about 10,000 square feet — but we”ll be able to add on to it once it”s successful.”
WISE will be located next to the recently completed nine-hole disc golf course in the “highly-visible” Marshall Park, which Allen said was the suggested location because of its safety and centralized location. The park is near downtown at Main Street and Old Aberdeen Road.
“Plus, we have a walkway that connect the entire city so almost any child in any neighborhood can get there,” Allen said.
There currently are 16 skateparks in Mississippi registered at skateboardpark.com, a directory of skate parks. There is a small skateboard park in Columbus at Propst Park, and Caledonia also has a skatepark at Ola J. Pickett Park.
“I have a skate-boarder that is 10 and he”s expressed to me before about how he”d like to have a place to skate,” said skate park committee member Kathy Comer. “Before, I had friends who would drive their kids to the skate parks in Tupelo and Tuscaloosa (Ala.).”
Comer, a former inline skater and lifelong West Point resident, suggested the inline skating perimeter of the park so boarders and inline skaters won”t get in each other”s way. The park will also accommodate cyclists.
Like present-day skaters, Comer found public skating space scarce as the popularity of the activity grew and cities and business owners became wary of the liabilities of people getting injured on their property.
“I”m in my 40s, so there was no such thing as a skate park when I was growing up,” Comer joked. “I”m excited that we got the grant and kids will have a place to skate in West Point.”
Allen and city grant writer Melanie Busby co-wrote the grant and submitted it to in March. Allen said she”d never written a grant greater than $5,000, so she leaned on Busby”s experience and the Grindline Skateparks Inc.”s engineering specs and graphics to make the grant as thorough as possible.
“We worked on it night and day for 36 straight hours,” Allen said. “We just had to sit, be patient and pray the saw the work and effort we put into it.”
Like Allen, skate park committee member Dave Ketcham was unsure of what to expect because other cities would each be competing for one of 10 $100,000 grants. He thought the skate park grant process was just “going through the motions.”
“You hear about these types of things all the time but you never know how and when they”re going to develop,” he said. “I wasn”t really optimistic. But after I got to know Martha and how hard she worked to get this thing, it was easy to get excited about it.
“We”re a big football and basketball town, and that”s really it,” he said. “This is something diverse that built a lot of interest in the community.”
Allen said she hopes to get material and construction bids out following the Prairie Arts Festival this weekend.
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