Brando McCormack remembers when the skate bowl at Kanis Park in Little Rock began, as just a hole in the ground.
On Saturday, the park looked a bit different. Skaters dropped in, grinding and flowing across a professionally built extension of the Kanis skate park.
"If it's anybody that comes together in the community, it's skaters," McCormack said Saturday.
City leaders and community members gathered Saturday to officially open the new expansion to the skate park, which includes more than 7,000 square feet of new features.
The expansion connects a 1980s city-built skate bowl and a "do-it-yourself" area with obstacles built by a group of Kanis Park skaters starting in 2006.
The new expansion was funded through a $150,000 grant from the Coca-Cola Co. and the National Recreation and Park Association.
An additional $75,000 from the city paid for a number of upgrades around Kanis Park and helped pay for part of the expansion, said Leland Couch, a Little Rock parks planner who oversaw the project.
Among other improvements, the city built a pavilion, renovated the restrooms, upgraded parking lots and added a new batting cage to the park.
A number of city leaders were on hand Saturday morning for the opening, including Little Rock Mayor Mark Stodola and Ward 6 City Director Doris Wright.
The skate park expansion was designed with input from local skaters, who met with Couch to brainstorm about what a new addition should look like, Couch said.
"By no means am I a skate park designer," he said. "If I was just directed by Coca-Cola to go out there and do a skate park, and I designed it, nobody would come and skate."
Couch said he wanted skaters to take pride in the park and have some ownership in what the design looked like.
"It was just a huge leap of faith for those guys," said Georgie Launet, who became the unofficial liaison between the volunteer skate group and city officials.
Launet, who has been skating at the park since he was a teenager, said he hopes the skate park extension will help pass the torch to a new generation of skaters in Little Rock.
McCormack said the thoughtful design of the skate park is evident. There's a strong flow to the park, he said, and the new expansion does not have steep drop-ins like the bowl.
An additional $50,000 grant from Coca-Cola and the National Recreation and Park Association has gone toward a community skate clinic known as the Little Rock Rek Rollers, said Selandria Jackson, a recreation supervisor with the city.
Starting this week, children can meet with a skateboard instructor from 4 to 5 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays for free lessons on how to skateboard and navigate the new skate park, she said.
"We love to introduce our kids to new opportunities," she said.
The program already has about 40 people signed up, and Jackson encouraged all children ages 9-15 to stop by and participate.
Skaters at the park Saturday said they enjoyed the little things about the new addition: The flow of the new skate features, the feel of the new concrete, the sound the skateboards make on the new rim siding.
Skater Jacob Guidry, 22, said the professionally built addition is a smooth ride and offers less of a chance of getting road rash when a skater messes up.
While the new addition got much of the attention from skaters Saturday, Guidry said he still has a soft spot for the older part of the skate park.
"I've shed blood over there," he said.
Metro on 09/11/2016