Homegrown longboard businesses usher a new mode of transportation onto college campuses
photos by MATT NICHOLSON
They didn’t set out to create a revolution — all they wanted to do was skate. But in the early seventies a shabby bunch of teenagers from Southern California inadvertently changed American culture forever. Drawing from that history today, homegrown longboard companies are working to preserve the original and iconic style of skating, transforming its aesthetics in the process.
Over the past three decades, traditional skateboarding transitioned into two separate ideas: skateboarding and longboarding. The persona and technique of longboarding continues to embody the surf-inspired style of the 
original skater. In recent years, it developed astrong sub-culture and gave rise to a host of young entrepreneurs.
As an art student at the University of Oregon, twenty-two-year-old Dylan Hosey specializes in pressing creative designs onto the bottom of his longboard decks. “Skating has come a long way visually,” says Hosey, who regularly brings boards in as projects for his art classes. Hosey has been making longboards with his nineteen-year-old brother Michael since they were kids growing up in Cotati, California, the rural outskirts of the Bay Area. They pursued an interest in skating from childhood on, building a concrete half-pipe in their parents’ back yard. It wasn’t until the last four years, though, that the Hosey brothers became active in the customized longboard scene. Their longboard company, Devotion, draws from the idea of skating as a religion, an outlook that has only grown since its birth in early seventies surf culture.
Keeping in line with that attitude are twenty-one-year-old David Long and twenty-two-year-old Joey Muravez from Corvallis, Oregon. Long’s first board came from a piece of plywood on the side of the road. Years later, in the winter of 2006, their creations evolved into Boondock Boards, a custom longboard design and manufacturing company. They cater the cut and length of the decks, distinguishing their creations from more generic, mass-produced shapes.
In Eugene, Cascadia Longboards is another player in the growing Oregon longboard scene. Twenty-five-year-old founder Eric Myers crafts his longboards as clean tools for transit. “I think that with the university [of Oregon] and the amount of young people in Eugene, the idea of using it for mobility is useful as an alternative mode of transportation,” Myers says. One of the more successful homegrown longboard companies, Cascadia longboards are handcrafted and built for specific riding styles such as carving, cruising, downhill, and freestyle.
For this growing trend of young entrepreneurs, the idea of perpetuating an iconic style is pushing longboarding into a fresh arena of creativity. Along with innovative designs, the roots of this old-school style are still the movement’s foundation, keeping the tradition alive.
Above: Using a variety of media, ranging from acrylic paint to photo collages, Dylan Hosey brands his cruising creations with the name Devotion.
