Newberg Skate Comp Returns for Ninth Year at Chehalem Skatepark

NEWBERG, Ore. — The Newberg Skate Comp returns to Chehalem Skatepark on Saturday, Sept. 12, marking organizer Daniel Buckwalter’s ninth year running an event he started in 2017 with a $300 insurance policy and donated boards from Portland skate shops.

Buckwalter, a 2010 Newberg High School graduate, said he began the contest after moving back to town. He found Newberg’s Chehalem Skatepark, located within Ewing Young Park, a bit intimidating as a skateboarder.

But the culture and people surrounding the park invited him in. The Newberg Skate Comp is a celebration of that culture, he said.

“I started going to the park a lot more frequently, and started to get to know more of the locals,” Buckwalter said. “I thought, ‘wow, this park is really cool, we have really cool locals, we should have a contest here.'”

What began as a single afternoon with 30 to 40 competitors has grown into a regional draw, pulling 80 to 90 competitors and an estimated 300 to 400 spectators most years, Buckwalter said. The count skips a pandemic-era gathering in 2020 that Buckwalter did not advertise or count as an official comp.

“It’s really become one of the premier amateur skate comps in the Northwest, which I feel so honored to even say,” Buckwalter said.

The competition runs across six divisions: Groms, for children skating their first event; beginners; intermediate, largely local skaters who ride daily but are not sponsored; a women’s division organizers have worked to grow; legends, for skaters 30 and older; and advanced, where sponsored competitors skate for cash prizes.

Two crowd features have become annual staples: a high-air contest in which skaters jump stacked boards out of the park’s bowl, a feat Buckwalter said has climbed as high as 13 or 14 boards, and a best-trick session on the park’s volcano, a raised, sculpted feature Buckwalter said few skaters ride outside of competition day.

Chehalem Skatepark’s own history predates the comp by nearly two decades. According to CPRD’s website, the project began with a petition from more than 200 middle-school-age skaters asking the district to build a place to skate. CPRD hired an architect and established the site at Ewing Young Park, and underground work on drainage and utilities began in July 1999 before the project paused that October for the rainy season.

In March 2000, CPRD hired Dreamland Skateparks, a young skatepark-building crew led by 27-year-old Stefan Hauser, to sculpt the concrete waves, bowls, hips, banks, and curbs that make up the finished design. The finished skatepark spans 29,000 square feet and used 15 tons of rebar and more than 670 yards of concrete, at a total cost of $307,266, including $70,000 in donations, according to CPRD.

That crew’s roots trace back to Portland’s Burnside Skatepark, the hand-built facility widely credited with launching the modern concrete skatepark movement. In a 2019 interview with the Newberg Graphic, then-CPRD Superintendent Don Clements recalled that the Dreamland crew arrived to pitch the project in a van and looked “more like a cult” than a construction outfit, but that their design experience won the district over.

The finished park drew national attention almost immediately. In the summer of 2001, Chehalem Skatepark hosted a stop on Tony Hawk’s Gigantic Skatepark Tour, an ESPN-produced series that sent Hawk and fellow professional skaters Shaun White, Bam Margera, Mike Vallely, Alex Chalmers, and more to skateparks around the country.

“It’s everything they say it is, I mean it’s amazing,” Hawk said in the skate video now published on YouTube. “It’s a mecca of cement. It’s just smooth, no kinks, you can just flow into any line.”

Vallely said in the same footage that Newberg’s skate scene did not depend on a visit from a national tour to sustain itself.

“What you see at a place like Newberg is that it’s great that the Tony Hawk tour rolls in, but whether it rolls in or not it’s not going to make or break the scene in Newberg,” Vallely said. “They have their own thing — they have their own sense of community that revolves around the park.”

CPRD’s website states that White, who was a teenager in the film and has since won three Olympic gold medals, 15 X Games gold medals, and 11 ESPYs, has returned to skate the park twice since, telling the park’s caretaker it remains one of his favorites for its size and its upkeep.

That scale is part of what drew Buckwalter back to the park as an adult. When he was growing up, the park had statewide, national, and even international appeal due to its unique design elements, but also because it is set up to accommodate all different types of riders.

“There’s one-foot drop-ins up to 13-foot drop-ins and everything in between,” he said. “It’s really conducive to progressing, because you can start off small and start gaining your confidence and start hitting bigger stuff.”

He said the range of experience levels has also made the park one of the more approachable places in the region for beginners to learn, in contrast to Burnside, where skaters are expected to already know the basics before dropping in.

Buckwalter, who now lives in Scappoose but remains a point of contact for CPRD skatepark issues, said the roughly 25-year-old concrete surface requires routine upkeep, and he works with CPRD staff on maintenance and repair needs as they come up.

He said growing the event’s community turnout is now as much a priority as the competition itself. Reminding Newberg residents that they have a world-class skateboard facility in their backyard, and maybe encouraging a few skeptical skaters to come and try it out, has become part of his mission.

“You should come see the kids and what they do on this park, and what kind of park you have in your town,” he said. “It is really incredible.”

Registration for the Newberg Skate Comp begins at 10 a.m. Saturday, Sept. 12, at Chehalem Skatepark, 1201 S. Blaine St. Helmets are required for all skaters, and the event is open to spectators. Learn more at the Newberg Skate Comp Instagram and Facebook pages.