The WFSA in 2025

So… we’re back!

I’ll spare you the full history of the World Freestyle Skateboarding Association – you can find that in the “About” section – but I thought it was worth addressing where the WFSA has been, my role in it, and what we’re planning on doing here.

I first became involved in the WFSA in the mid-2000s, back in the Bob Staton era. I was simply doing a bit of writing for F and “working” as admin in the original F!-forum – a role I effectively kept up when Denis Sopovic moved the forum to Facebook – but as the older members of the WFSA board left, the WFSA was left as a skeleton crew; essentially, it was Denis, Lillis and I, fielding questions about freestyle from outside organisations and not really doing much else. We didn’t have the time, the staff, or the capacity to do much more. However, it became more and more apparent that there needed to be some coherent organisation; people were all pulling in different directions, and a lot of energy was being duplicated by people continually reinventing the wheel.

Where this current iteration of the WFSA really started to take shape was when Christian Heise started running the Euro Freestyle events (which have now morphed into World Freestyle). A new wave of freestylers were coming into the scene, and a lot of my generation were starting to look at making more structured attempts at building the overall freestyle scene and community.

The first real project that was undertaken was the overhaul of the judging system; Lukasz Ciszak took input from people like Patrick Thies, Marius Constantin, Alex Foster, and myself to create an evolution of the JFSA’s style of judging, fine-tune it, and build a web app that judges could use to score runs on their phones in real-time. It’s been gradually refined over the last few years, and I can honestly say it’s the most comprehensive and considered judging system I’ve ever seen used in freestyle. It’s my hope that at some point we can make it publicly accessible and available worldwide.

Lukasz Ciszak (left) and Holden Bystry, organiser of the Tucson Thunderdome contests, at Euro Freestyle 2023

As for where the WFSA is going: a lot of my time has gone into this site, which I hope will be a one-stop-shop for people interested in freestyle skateboarding moving forwards. Everything has become splintered and isolated into separate disconnected hoppers, making it hard to really connect and parse different sources of information. For instance, Denis Sopovic is currently out in Brazil, and told me most of the freestylers there had no idea there was a community on Facebook for freestyle. One of the core goals of the WFSA is to start to undo this splintering and help reconnect the overall freestyle scene. Whether that works is as much up to you, the reader, as it is to us, the WFSA. We need your help and your support.

I say this knowing full well that one of the main criticisms of the WFSA in the past was that it, and the people behind it, were themselves isolated and out of touch with what was happening in freestyle. It’s my intent to try to make sure that doesn’t happen again. So, please, if you want to get involved – get in touch. We will happily take your contest and scene reports for the blog. The calendar is built in such a way that anyone can apply for access as an event organiser and post their own events – whether it’s a full contest or a small-scale local jam. And, of course, if you run a shop or a brand producing freestyle gear, you can let us know and we can add you to the retailer list.

More than anything, this is your WFSA. If there’s something you want to see the WFSA do or help with, again, let us know. This is a new era for the WFSA. We don’t have a board like the “old days”. Maybe one day we will need to set one up – we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. But for now, this is a community exercise with input from some of the world’s best amateur and professional freestylers – because it’s my belief that freestylers should run freestyle. No one else.

We built this. We own it. And we should keep it that way.