Words by Deric Hardage
Photos by Tony Moreno, Nicholas Gibson & Kevin McAllister
Boardertown, the local skatepark/skateshop, had been shut down for a couple of years and the local skate scene had felt dead for a while. I had already been interested in trying to build something to skate out of concrete after skating Hermann’s Hole (Missouri Vortex) and Kanis park in Little Rock, AR when I was a lot younger. I found a spot in town and built a few really small ramps just to check out concrete for the first time. People started smashing the concrete and leaving broken glass everywhere so I stopped trying to build there. Mike Sidani invited me to skate in his backyard pool (Beaver Bowl), that was my introduction to pool skating.
Skating at Sidani’s made me pretty serious about the idea of building a pool to skate in the backyard since there wasn’t anything quite like it around to skate in my local area. I put a few months into stacking the walls out of rocks and saving up money to hire the work for the shotcrete. That’s when the northwest Arkansas guys started working on The Junction, a D.I.Y. by the train tracks in Fayetteville. It really showed us younger guys how possible it is to build things to skate with just the homies. After helping them more and more, I started wanting to build a park in the backyard piece by piece and do the concrete work with my friends instead.
I met Keenan Bishop around that time, he also helped work on The Junction and was into pool/transition skating, we were instantly best friends. He would come skate the metal and wood ramps at my house and wanted to help me build in the yard more than anyone. Most of my favorite memories are from those early days building with Keenan, just trying to find something fun to make life about and trying to change our lives through skateboarding.
We wanted to start with a flat 8×8 pad and a 90 degree stair pocket. It was fun not knowing how to do anything and just kinda going for it. I would get things ready through the week and Keenan would show up on the weekends to help. I had a bunch of lumber from the vert ramp at Boardertown, some free ½” rebar, a ton of rocks, and brought a lot of cinder blocks home. The first weekend we framed up the 8×8 slab out of 2×6 and put rebar in it. We built our first wall out of T posts and mortaring cinder blocks (no footers), and we also used some old tires for the stairs.
We poured our first slab and started building more cinder block walls. We did a lot of things backwards like pouring the bottoms first and doing formwork last, or silly stuff like screeding a flat wall horizontally. We were a couple of skate rat kids just trying to figure it out while having fun with it. I didn’t like formwork at first and wouldn’t think about drainage very often, things like this would make everything else harder or not turn out as good as it could have. I started learning to love the things that you don’t always want to do or think about.
We started getting better concrete tools and making our own questionable radius floats but we still didn’t have the best tools or the right techniques. Everything we were building had steep transitions, since we liked pools and wanted to build something that resembled one. We really wanted to build a loop too because there wasn’t one anywhere near us. Mike Sidani always talked about wanting to build one at the Junction D.I.Y. and I actually got the dimensions from him, a 7’ diameter circle in the front and a 6’ in the back.
We poured the bottoms and prepped the walls in 2022. We poured the stair pocket, flatwall, and the double death light pocket with a lot of local people and the Junction crew’s help in early 2023. The Junction was also demolished around this time. Later that year Keenan, my girlfriend Rachel and myself would start working for Pivot Custom on the new local skatepark in Van Buren.
Working for an actual skatepark construction company was the best thing that could have happened to us. The job taught us what tools to use, how to use them, and how to finish concrete much better. It paid for a lot of concrete later on and gave us a ton of scrap wood and rebar to build with. I learned about phenolic resin, where to get it, and how to make radius floats out of it by cutting the radius handles out of 2×4. Pivot helped us out a lot. We poured the bottom of the loop and poured more of the flat wall while working with them at the end of 2023. Then we poured the top of the loop and the rest of the bottoms in 2024, after Pivot was done building the Van Buren skatepark.
Since the first “room” with the loop was pretty much walled in and finished, we wanted to focus on building a pool now that we had more experience and confidence. The pool was the original idea for the backyard, it’s based off of a pool in Hawaii called the Angry Hippy pool I think. It was the first thing I drew out real plans for with actual measurements. Big thank you to my friend Brock for helping me stack the whole shallow end out of rocks. I laid out a top plate on the ground and Rachel helped me put some post up to hang it from. The Junction crew and the locals in town helped us add more fill, drive more wood posts, put kickers on, screw plywood sheets onto the posts, and put in most of the rebar.
Massive thank you to Always Hard for helping us with the shotcrete, it probably would not have gone very well if they weren’t there. We had four yards extra for the park and only prepped for maybe one extra yard. There were problems with the pump for a while so the first truck sat there long enough for the second truck to show up and wait on it. By the time the concrete was poured it went off really fast on us and we were spread out. Everything went super well considering. I thought I was about to pay a few thousand dollars (and hundreds of dollars from friends’ donations) for nothing to happen, or a mess to demo.
The weekend after the shotcrete we had our first bash/gathering to celebrate the pool and now we have the bash at the same time every year (4/20) in memory. We poured a late beam for the blocks to sit on since we made the top of the walls so thin with no bond beam. We cut and set all the blocks and the pool was finished.
After the pool was finished in May of 2024, Keenan and I went to a job in Dallas, Texas to help build the Bauchman Lake Skatepark for Pivot. I would come back home a few months later, and Rachel and I would continue building at the house. We needed to cut and chip the concrete and dowel in rebar from where the extra concrete left off from pouring the pool. The plan was to make a pocket around the backside of the loop.
The pool proved that we could be a lot cheaper and faster building the walls out of wood instead of cinder blocks, with the plan to strip the forms off of the back and backfill it with dirt and pour on the backside. My dad brought his skid steer over and moved some dirt into the pocket behind the loop, the roll in off the loop, and the hip light. Some of the locals and my friends working at the Bauchman Lake skatepark job came to help pour the pocket behind the loop.
The next week, I stripped the forms off of the back and my dad brought his skid steer over again to move dirt against the back side of the new pour. We prepped and poured the roll in and hip light, then started prepping the big wall all at the end of 2024.
We poured the big wall in January 2025, and in February 2025 we connected the big wall to the hip light. These pours were not great, we wanted to keep pouring concrete despite the cold and rain. This made the bag pours last more than 24 hours and resulted in a way weaker surface.
In March of 2025 I had a problem with my sciatica and wouldn’t be able to do much for a couple of months. My dad would bring the skid steer back and shape the earth some more for me to prep when my back was healed, he piled dirt and set the boat in roughly the right place to make the love seat pocket out of. He also mounded dirt for the pump bump/half volcano island type feature past the boat pocket.
I was finally able to push a shovel again in early May of 2025 and started cutting the weeds, shaping the dirt, and putting some form work together. We would prep and pour the first 1/3 of the boat pocket in May of 2025. The next month we prepped the main section of the boat pocket (2/3) and got a lot of help pouring that one. That’s when Rachel and I got a job building a skatepark in Bentonville, AR with CA Skateparks. We would prep and pour the last piece (3/3) of the boat pocket in a week after the last one to finish it before having to leave for Bentonville.
The job in Bentonville with CA Skateparks taught Rachel and I so much more. The crew taught us a lot and gave us a lot of constructive criticism. That job only being an hour and a half away from our spot meant we could get some scrap materials from them too. We got a whole truck load of perfectly cut transitions.
We didn’t pour again until spring of this year, 2026, getting a piece of the next big feature done and finishing more of the bottoms. The half volcano went very well, Rachel and I were excited to finally put the concrete down after having it set up for so long. It was refreshing to do a smaller pour with bags again, it’s a really laid back time if you have a good crew of homies that are down. Everything is a little slower paced with the bag pours and more people get to try to learn how to work the concrete.
The first bottom pour was next, we didn’t want to have just flat bottoms because it can be kind of a buz kill to not have anything to pump or redirect yourself on in the bottom. Rachel and I settled on an old worm pump bump idea which I had barrels stashed away for the fill. We laid the barrels out in the yard and started stacking anything we could against them. We poured the bottom in two sections. The first one was the tip of the pump bump and the surrounding flat bottom. After that we really needed a lot of fill and thought it might be a while until we poured again, but then my friend Jeremy told me he would order a whole truck if we were ready for it. So we set up an eight yard pour for a pump bump blending into a spine in a week and tailgated it with five people. That one was exciting, I thought we were gonna lose it but we got it shaped pretty well and sealed up mostly. Very proud of the team effort on that one.
That brings us to the present day, setting up more walls and leaving a few spots that will spit you into something new later on. It’s been a special four year long journey so far full of crazy good memories. When we started this it seemed so wrong and against the normal, it’s really cool that a lot of people are so stoked on it these days.
Huge thanks to my Dad and Mom, Rachel Flippen, Keenan Bishop, Chris Anderson, Mike Sidani, Mark Landry, Tristan Chavez, Jason McGrew, Preston Stockburger, Nick Gibson, Jdirty, Boon, Ben Horan, Always Hard, Brock, Tony Moreno, Jeremy Gathright, and anyone else that has helped make the place what it is through stoke, donations, and labor.
