CCS to SLO: CCS Am Trip

A wise man once said that you’d never know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been. I’ve never understood that, because if I was driving forward I wouldn’t bother looking in my rear view mirror, but we decided to humor the wise man and take a trip into CCS’ past. With the addition of three new ams to the CCS Team we decided to give them a real life history lesson and take them to wear it all started. The goal of our trip was to find the location of CCS as it was called out on the back of one of the catalogs from 1991. Was this the very first location where skateboarding mail-order was born? Probably not, but it would serve as a time capsule for this new crew of dudes who were all born after 1994, and it was also a good excuse to spend a chunk of May on California’s Central Coast.

We grabbed the boys in L.A. where they all live, and started our journey up the coast. The new crew is Evan Wasser, Kanin Garner, and Zach "Ducky" Kovachs. Three dudes who couldn’t skate any more different from each other that all bring something unique and different to the table was a great way to set the tone for a skate history lesson. With only a few days to do a lot of skating we blasted through Ventura, Santa Barbara, and then to the birthplace of CCS, San Luis Obispo. There was more slap boxing than I had expected, and what seemed to be the longest night ever in S.L.O., but other than that we achieved our objective and found the location on the back of that catalog and ended up finding some relics of CCS’ past to prove that we were there. I don’t know if the kids really cared, but in the grand tradition of homecoming road trips with your parents, I was very proud that they put up with my nostalgia and didn’t kill each other.

The younger guys don’t fiend for coffee the same way us older fellas do, but for Ducky an adorable cup of hot chocolate will get the blood flowing just fine early in the morning.

We warmed up on a banked ledge in downtown Ventura where Evan got his legs going with a few Tail Slides.

It was a little early in the morning to go full Muska, but Ducky likes to get wild. This one push, Noseslide Fakie proved to be an even better wake up than the hot chocolate.

Kanin was coming off a freshly rolled ankle right before we left, but we had him come to hangout anyway. All of his restlessness from not skating led to him and Evan just beating the shit out of each other the whole time.

While Ducky warmed up with a Crook around this curved ledge something terrifying was happening at the apartments behind us, but even the scariest situation can be made fun by a puppy. We still don’t know why this was happening, but it was entertaining nonetheless. Until there was a knife involved.

Evan shot the curve with a Half Cab Boardslide, and Ducky shot himself on a Backside 50-50. For anyone under the age of 50, google what “Shoot The Duck” is and then you can laugh at my joke.

After a sloppy burrito session Evan went all Chris Pastras on the hills of Ventura on this Pop-Shuvit hill bomb line. For a kid who can do so much with his feet, Evan can’t seem to get his hands to keep food on his plate.

When your GPS takes you to the wrong spot, you can always skate flatground until the sun goes down. There’s no shame in flatground.

After hopping a couple fences in Santa Barbara we were in a big, hot ditch where you could kill yourself on a rock. Evan pulled out a few Back Tails and managed to save the skin on his face.

These days, if the handrail goes flat down and you just skate the down, you will forever look like a pussy. Ducky obliges the current state of skateboarding and Boardslides the whole thing.

Another thing you better take advantage of in today’s skate-scape is that if the ledge is even banked 2 degrees you better be rolling in on that thing. Evan pops a Lipslide into what I would just call a wall.

Ducky took the Front Board route and after landing on that curb about 16 times managed to get out enough to roll away through the sea of frat party’s and possible venereal disease that is U.C. Santa Barbara.

Sometimes the skate stopper makes the spot. Sometimes the skate stopper ruins the spot. And sometimes it literally does both things, back to back. Before sliding through these beefy chain links, Ducky hung his rail up and got pitched to the ground, proving that the stopper did its job. Luckily he caught the chain sleeping on the next try and slide through it with no problem.

This Feeble Grind in San Luis Obispo was a real battle to take all the way through and down and out, but Ducky is a masochist and put in the time needed and beat himself to shit to get all the way through those kinks.

By the time we made it to the O.G. CCS warehouse location there wasn’t much there to prove that we were in the right place, but when we saw the 25 year old stickers on the electrical box we knew that we were standing on top of skate history. Til next time boys!