Major Skate
"Skateboarding is about people. I'm not selling skateboards or lessons: what I'm selling is confidence and self-motivation."
“When you walk in the doors of Major Skate, Bay City MI, you’ll be greeted by the most important thing—positivity. I'm not really selling skateboards, I'm not really selling lessons: what I'm selling is confidence and self-motivation because skateboarding is about people.
Parents bring in a child, likely a child who is very shy or not happy with other sports…and they leave with a smile. It never fails. They come in unsure and leave saying ‘I can do it. I want to come back.’ I see it all the time and it just fills my heart with joy. It really does.
After the positivity, you’ll see all the colorful wheels, boards, stickers, and ramps. There are so many things to skate here at Major Skate, and some you can't get anywhere else. There’s the halfpipe and the spine, which is beautiful. The next closest and best spine would honestly probably be at least an hour and a half away. Saginaw has one, but it’s like 9 feet high and hard to learn on, so there's nowhere else in the area you can learn on such a beautiful spine. Then it goes into a 12-foot vert wall, which is a little narrow, but it's super cool. I've never experienced anything like it before and it’s such a great place to learn.
I didn’t build the park with advanced skaters in mind—they can skate anything and have fun. I wanted beginners to have a place where they can skate from point A to point B without having to worry about stairs or having a gap they can’t skate. With the way the park is built, I can get any skater to get on and off the board, move back and forth comfortably, and possibly even riding down a hill, on the first day.
For me, opening Major Skate just really increased my passion about skateboarding. It's been phenomenal to meet some of these new friends and all these skaters I never would have met. It's been absolutely fantastic and it grows my heart and my passion even more. I will teach everyone from five to 65 how to skate. It's absolutely incredible to see them go from ‘I don't know if I can get on a board,’ to actually doing something they get so excited about.
I want this to be a place of positivity. This is the thing that I want to bring to Bay City.
I got into skateboarding because of my dad. when I was about *wee high*, maybe four years old, he told me about how him and his friends would skateboard on halfpipes. I just thought that was so cool. I wanted that to be in my life, too, so I would take his skateboard outside on the sidewalk, stand on the tail, stand on the nose, and go back and forth.
Eventually, I remember printing off instructions on how to do tricks: “To do a kickflip, put your foot at a 45-degree angle just on the side of the bolt. Then put your back foot on the tail…” You had to figure it out on your own. You’d skate to your friend's house, then go skate downtown, then skate back. It was just skating and drinking grape Kool Aid all day.
Eventually, I joined the team building the Bay City skate spark. That was a heck of an experience. We had a big skate crew back then with a meeting down at the community center where they brought in this designer from California. He wanted to take our thoughts on design, so he kind of pitched his ideas and took ours. We closed that meeting and did another one over by the Sage Library and that was where they gave us all clay models and every clay model had some sort of bowl or a halfpipe. He took all of our feedback, and that turned into the park that we know today.
I grew up and skated less, but then I started going back to skateparks. I wanted to get out of the office and was just skating for me. A lot of the muscle memory came back, and before I knew it, I became the “Skate Park Dad”, helping kids learn and controlling the flow.
To see a kid land their first kickflip, drop in, or ollie and see their eyes light up because they did it—that will keep me doing this until the day I die.
Parents started trying to give me money for helping teach their kids, but I’m like, ‘No, just bring me a Gatorade, this is what it's about.’
But that’s what planted the idea for an indoor skate park.
I'm like, “Maybe I could do this.”
And my dad was like, ‘Yeah, you should!’
So we just started driving around trying to find the right location. I could either build a park or I could buy a building, but I couldn’t do both. Luckily, I found this guy, Rob Kennedy, down by Midland Street building a coffee shop. I leased a couple of spaces from him, like just signed me up right then in there.
After finding a location, I needed to design the skate park and I knew I needed to go big or go home, so I started posting online for some help. Dave Shine, out of Minnesota, DMs me and says, ‘Hey, I’ve built ramps for the X Games. I built ramps for Steve Caballero for his backyard ramp and Tony Hawk, and I want to help.’
Honestly, I didn’t believe him, but I had to take the risk because it was all or nothing for me. So, I was actually at Army school, just texting him in between breaks, and ended up buying him a ticket to fly out here. He flies in from Minnesota, drives up from Detroit up to Bay City. It's dark and cold in February. There's only a utility light in the space as he’s walking around and I show him my business plan.
He looks at it and says, ‘Listen, I like your attitude and your motivation, but I think you're opening at the wrong time, with the wrong obstacles, and I think you have a terrible business plan. But, I really trust what you're doing here and it sounds like you really have a good understanding of the business, what you want to do and why here and why now. So, let me put together a plan. I'm not going to take your idea because it sucks, but I’m going to tweak it a bit and I’m going to give you something that will work.’
Three days later, he sends all the pictures, architecture, and the 3D designs for the final product. I saw it and loved it. He called me to walk me through it, but I’m like, ‘I see it.’ so I signed a contract to build the park before I actually signed the lease for the building, believe it or not. It was a big commitment hoping that the lease was going to work out, but I had to listen to him, because you cannot do something like this by yourself.
I have always wanted to join the Air Force and fly airplanes, so at college night in high school, I went over to the Air Force recruiters. They looked me up and down and said, ‘You're not going to fly with us.’
Just like that.
So my girlfriend at the time went over to talk to her friend's dad—a recruiter for the Army National Guard. His buddy overheard the conversation and was like, ‘Hey, man, we got helicopters. You can be a pilot for us.’ Next thing you know as a junior in high school, I'm like, ‘Mom, can you sign these papers so I can join the army?’
I learned how to become a tank mechanic. After that, I came back home and went overseas to Iraq. We went to a couple different places, one being Ramadi, where we helped the Marines by supporting all the M1s on the Army side of the house. It was just a very humbling experience to see some of the things that we've seen.
One story that I'll never forget happened on a Sunday. In 2008 to 2009, I was deployed with the Midland National Guard unit, the 1460th, and we went over to a place called Camp Bucca. Camp Bucca was one of the biggest detainee facilities in Iraq. Every Sunday, we would do visitation where the detainees got to see their families, their wives, their mothers, their grandparents and their children. As soldiers, we were able to go over there and play with the kids and keep them entertained.
I was playing ball with one little boy there. We would roll the ball back and forth, just having fun. I couldn't speak his language and he couldn't speak my language, but we still had a common connection in playing with this ball. Then we went over to the swing set, I would pull him back and push him forward and count ‘1, 2, 3!’in his language.
‘Wahid! Itnan! Klatha!”
We were laughing and laughing because, even though we couldn't really talk and have a conversation, he knew I was trying my best. We had a connection. He knew what I was doing and I knew what he was doing. It was an amazing experience.”
—Anthony Malenfant, Major Skate, and indoor skate park and skate shop in Bay City, Michigan
“All my elementary school friends had skateboards growing up, so I eventually conned my parents into getting me one. I just kind of messed around in the front yard, skating down the sidewalk…until I realized I live a block and a half away from the skate park. I started skating there and my friends took me under their wings and taught me the ropes.
The way they taught me was a mix of helpful friends and peer pressure. They taught me how to go down ramps, but then pressured me into going down the next biggest one, then the next biggest one. I just learned by doing.
I didn't really have much of a plan beyond skateboarding: I was just living my early 20s skateboarding and hanging out. I planned to move to San Francisco a couple of different times. The city life and the vibe there is just so laid back and relaxing, and I’d go over there for a few months and skate with friends because the scene was pretty cool there.
But I was paying $950 to live in my friend's living room with a Japanese paper folding wall behind a fold out bed. It was outside of the city, and my friend's family was just super welcoming, but living out of your suitcase in a living room for months is brutal. I wasn't making enough to find my own place, so one day I was like, ‘I'm going to go back home to just enjoy life, work enough to be happy, and skateboard as much as I can.’ And that’s how I came back.
Honestly, what’s kept me in skateboarding until now is learning how to skateboard— it never really stops. You can always get better. Knowing that I could learn something, but not being able to, but spend an entire day trying to and go home having not learned it. It just stews, but you keep trying and learning and you end up chasing that for 15 years.
When AJ first brought the idea for the indoor skate park and Major Skate, and no disrespect to AJ, I took it with a grain of salt. A lot of people in the past have said, ‘I’m going to do this’ and it never happens. So I say, ‘Dude, sweet! Let me know…’ expecting him to give up the idea…but then he didn't stop.
When he told me he was moving back to Bay City, that’s when I knew Major Skate was going to become a real thing. I can't take much credit for the labor-intensive early stages of Major Skate…but I held a couple hammers and drills! But I helped spread the word. I have a lot of friends in the skate community and people who have been told those great ideas that never happened ever since the old skate shop closed. There was always talk of a new one opening, but Major Skate was actually going to happen and I started spreading the word.
Honestly, I think the park is pretty much perfect. There were a lot of ways AJ could have done it wrong, and again, no disrespect to AJ, that was my fear right out of the gate. I was like, ‘Man, what if it's just a couple ramps, some dinky stuff, everyone hates it and all this excitement is for nothing?’ But for it to turn out the way it did, with both AJ and Dave masterminding the whole thing, it couldn't have come out better.”
“Honestly, Major Skate has reignited my whole sense of community. In 2020, I broke my leg pretty badly and that pretty much stopped any kind of serious skateboarding. Having skated for so long and then having to restart back from ground zero was super demoralizing and demotivating. I had lost the spark.
But then there came this brand new thing in my hometown, an indoor skate park and skate shop, that's turning heads left and right from people I used to see here all the time. It really brought the community back together in such a crazy way. People I have not texted once in the last eight years are sending me texts ‘Hey, I'm going today. Are you going?’ It's just a very wholesome thing. The excitement around it is I haven't felt in a very long time.
It’s already kind of had the effect that I wanted it to have. It’s something that everyone can come check out, whether they're into skateboarding or not. We had a contest recently and like eight people just walked in to check it out. With the Midland Street foot traffic, people walk by, hear the loud clunking of skateboards, and they come in. They get that experience, they see the people, they meet some nice positive people who enjoy skateboarding and they tell their kids. That’s how it blooms into something big.”
—Dominic Labella, Major Skate, and indoor skate park and skate shop in bay City, Michigan
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