He set his skate board on the cusp of the bayou and pushed off. He rushed down the bayou, hit a crack, and landed on his back.

Then, he watched his friend fall in the exact same way.

It was this moment that solidified his love for skateboarding.

Junior Alessandro Nardi began skateboarding during the winter of his freshman year, after being introduced to the hobby by his friend Blake Melton, now a senior at Eastwood Academy. Nardi said his “best memory” of skateboarding was skating on Brays Bayou with Melton.

“It was just so fun, that one skate session,” Nardi said. “That’s what really cemented my passion for skating. Skating with your friends really can make you realize how fun it is, and it’s kept me going for the past two years as a solo skater. It’s been on and off for sure, but I just keep coming back to it, and I really like the sport by itself.”

Despite no longer skating regularly and moving to Pearland — 30 minutes away from Nardi, Melton still enjoys the rare occasions when the two of them can skate together.

“It feels great to see him, having fun doing it, but what feels better is skating with him,” Melton said. “Even though I don’t skate as much, I still kept a lot of my skills. So when we get together and he has an extra skateboard on him, I can have fun with him.”

Mallika Mohan

Nardi executes an Ollie, a fundamental skateboarding trick which involves popping the skateboard into the air. He has been practicing his Ollie for two years.

For Nardi, skating is more than just a hobby. It was his lifeline when he started high school.

“I don’t know why, but having a real hobby for once, really took a lot of the pressure off of the beginning of freshman year,” Nardi said. “Starting high school was not a good time for me. I had zero real friends. The friends I did have were not good people to hang around and were a bad influence. When I got introduced to skateboarding, it gave me genuine joy. It was something I could do to pass the time and also be happier. It was a pretty rough time up until then, it really made my life a lot better.”

Junior Shayla Pacheco has known Nardi for two years and they have been dating for a year. She feels that skateboarding remains important for him.

“What I’ve observed from [Nardi] and skateboarding is that mostly he uses skateboarding as a mechanism to get away from life, whenever it gets hard,” Pacheco said. “[Nardi] kind of struggles with finding hobbies that he’s really into, but skateboarding is that one thing that he’s always held on to. It’s definitely the only thing that can really fulfill his need for a hobby.”

Aside from skating, Nardi also enjoys going to skate shops. A year ago, he built his custom cruiser board, a type of board meant for riding, rather than tricks.

“I went to Zumiez at Memorial City Mall and I built my first cruiser board, which I still use. I chose all the parts out myself, and I assembled it. I feel like there’s something special about building your own board, choosing the pieces, and seeing it all come to life.”

When building your board, you choose the deck, trucks, bearings, wheels and hardware depending on the type of board you’re making, whether it be a cruiser or a popsicle board.

“I was a newbie when I first got it, so I was surprised at how well it turned out and I’m appreciating it more,” Nardi said. “As weird as it sounds, I feel like it builds a connection between you and your board —it feels more special.”

Nardi also built a custom popsicle board that features a duck with Pacheco this summer. The name of the board is the Lucky Duck Death Wish.

“We went to the Galleria Mall and we went to the local Zumiez,” Pacheco said. “We spent a lot of time building [the board] together. I mostly picked the stuff. He said he really appreciated me coming, because without me his board would have come out bad. I made sure every color matched.”

Mallika Mohan

Nardi rolls his cruiser board on the ground while skating on his popsicle board. He custom built the skateboard, called Lucky Ducky Death Wish, at Zumiez, a skate store.

In his junior year, Nardi found a new group of friends, but is still looking for people to skate with. This led him to start Bellaire’s Skate Club, which currently has around 10 recurring members.

“I started Skate Club out of my passion for skateboarding and I wanted to get more and more into it,” Nardi said. “I felt like, if I make a club, I can meet people that share the same interests as me, and it also just forces me to do better. Since it’s a new club, we’re still figuring out how things work. We’re hosting meetings every two weeks on Fridays, and that’s going fairly well. We get some recurring members. We want to see if we can all meet up outside school sometime and skate as a group, maybe at a park, and we also want to give lessons.”

Nardi hopes to one day find a community that loves skating as much as he does.

“But I also want to experience skating with someone again, because I haven’t gotten that pleasure in a long, long time. So I really want to find a group I can skate with, or that person I can skate with. It’s part why I founded Skate Club. I really wanted to meet new people, and I also wanted other people to meet each other and bond over skating.”

From skate shops to skate clubs, Nardi said his experience learning to skate has taught him invaluable lessons.

“Skating tells you not to give up, even if you want to, because the thing about skating is you’re not going to land the trick 90% of the time,” Nardi said. “You try a trick and you bust your shin, your ankle and your knee. So it’s really just a matter of failing, getting back up and trying to learn from what you did wrong, and just repeating it hundreds of times despite it.”