Freestyle Resources

The modern freestyler has more content and media available than ever before. What follows is not a completely exhaustive list of websites and information, but it’s a good collection of freestyle resources to act as a starting point for those new to the community.

Chatrooms and Social Groups

Facebook, unusually enough, reins supreme in this category – but for those avoiding the Zuckerberg, it’s no longer the only show in town.

The F-Forum

We start with a classic. The F-Forum has been around in one form or another since the first days of the “freestyle revival” in the early 2000s, and everything that is currently happening in freestyle owes its very existence to the F-Forum. Run and administered by the iron hand of Sweden’s Denis Sopovic since its inception as an old-school web forum, it now exists as a relatively family-friendly Facebook group. It’s also the biggest freestyle resource in the world as everything else gets posted there, so if you pay no attention to anything else on this list, you should probably still join the F-Forum.

Just don’t talk about 360s or World Records.

British Freestyle Skateboarding

The freestyle group for the British Freestyle scene is a little less active than its worldwide counterpart, existing almost solely as a means to organise events, sessions and trips. It’s also a gated community, but once you’re in, you should be able to find someone near you to skate with – assuming you’re British, anyway.

Freestyle Skateboard Collecting

Less about the activity and more about the products, Freestyle Skateboard Collecting is where to go to try to find that minty New Deal Lindgren or sell that highly-desirable set of late 80s Thunder Freestyle trucks you’ve been hoarding for decades.

World Freestyle Round Up

This one’s a special case: ostensibly dedicated to the World Round Up freestyle event held every year in Vancouver, you get the odd drips-and-drabs of unrelated posts that, for one reason or another, either haven’t been put in the F-forum or wouldn’t be allowed in there. Is it worth joining both groups? Probably not. But if you’re planning on heading out to Canada, you should probably check in on their group.

Always Will

Always Will is a web forum outside of social media, devoid of spam and adverts, mandatory Facebook accounts, and other such nonsense. It’s basically a home for the old, the cantankerous, and the thoughtful skater, with a dedicated section for freestyle. It’s new (and therefore relatively quiet in there) at the time of writing, but hopefully it’ll grow over time.

Freestyle Skateboarding Discord

Discord might be primarily known as a hang out for gamers, but there’s no reason we can’t fit into that niche. Started by Reece Archibald, this is a bit less serious than some of the other groups/platforms, with memes a-plenty. Join up and type *doatrick to see your dreams come true.

Media

The Freestyle Podcast

Updated sporadically but treated lovingly, the Freestyle Podcast has been running now for a few years, and has seen multiple changes to its lineup of hosts over that period. With discussion of the culture, the activity, the products, the events and the skaters, it occasionally veers towards profanity and controversy, but attempts to be as informative as possible along the way.

Broken Fingers Magazine

Now into its third year, Broken Fingers Magazine is the world’s only printed publication dedicated to freestyle skateboarding. Running as a non-profit (and often, if we’re honest, at a loss), it keeps all the back issues available both as individual manga-sized magazines and as year-end compilations. The print quality is exceptionally good, and the coverage is global, so it’s worth picking up all the issues for your library.

Information

The Freestyle Knowledge Base

Honestly, I didn’t know where to put the Freestyle Knowledge Base, but as one of the most exhaustive collections of freestyle-related data, it is well-deserving of its own little space. While appearing to be a wiki-style project, a very select group of freestylers curate it, and the information is (mostly) incredibly accurate. It’s worth dipping into just for the product info alone.