The vert ramp at the Encinitas YMCA was from the 2006 X-Games. It was 120’ long with two 18” extensions, a 60’ wide roll-in and a hip in the middle. After skating at the Y pretty much daily, I got to know the park staff pretty well, especially Heather, the skate park director. In the beginning of 2011, she gave me a heads up that they planned on renovating the park. Not that many people were skating vert there anymore and so they wanted to cut the ramp in half to make more room for other stuff. I asked Heather what they were going to do with the other half of the ramp and she told me they planned on just breaking it down and throwing it away.
My eyes popped and I asked her if I could have it. She told me, “I don’t see a problem with that,” but she had to confirm with Mike, the park manager. I went home almost giddy and told my wife, Courtney, I was getting a vert ramp. My dream was finally coming true and there was no doubt in my mind that it was going to happen. We lived in a small condo with no yard at the time and Courtney asked me where we were going to put it. I told her I didn’t know but would figure it out.
The next day, I called Mike and asked him about getting the ramp and he told me he had to contact someone else and ask and would have to let me know. I told some friends I was getting the ramp and pretty much no one believed me. But no one ever believed I would live in the United States back when I lived in Brazil either, so I shook it off and didn’t let it get me down.
A few days later I went to skate and Mike told me that the project wasn’t scheduled to start until the following year. I was bummed but at the same time I thought that it would give me enough time to buy a house or figure out where I could put the ramp. Courtney and I casually looked at houses online but life continued without much change. She got pregnant and my daughter, Makena, was born in February 2012.
A few months later, in June, I received a text message out of the blue from one of the big wigs at the YMCA, who asked if I still wanted the ramp and invited me to a meeting. So I went and met with him and Mike and he told me that half of the ramp had to be out of there by the first two weeks of October. I said, “no problem” and went home to tell Courtney we needed a house now.
We immediately started looking at houses and found one in Vista that we both really liked. We contacted Courtney’s realtor friend, Gina, and told her basically out of the blue that we found a house we wanted to buy. We put in an offer right away but didn’t get it and we were super bummed. The clock was running out. We literally had three months to find a house, buy it and move the ramp or the YMCA would trash it.
We told Gina to keep looking, even though we had already looked ourselves and couldn’t find anything else that worked. It was hard to find an affordable house that met the needs of our growing family, and that could also hold a 50’ x 50’ vert ramp. Gina sent us information on a house in Vista, a couple of miles from Bob’s house, and we immediately went to go look at it. As soon as I got there I went straight to the backyard to look. As soon as I saw it I knew it was the one. I measured everything and there was plenty of space. It was on almost half an acre, with half of the property making up the backyard and half in the front yard. I felt it was perfect because the kids could play in the fenced-in front yard and I could put the ramp in the back.
My wife wasn’t as convinced. She didn’t love the house at first but I knew I would win her over. After a few visits to the house and a lot of begging and pleading, I convinced her to buy it. We began the process in July and closed escrow in early August and started moving in. The crazy part is that my brother and his family were scheduled to arrive from Brazil two weeks after we closed escrow and planned on living with us in this three-bedroom house. I thought they would be with us for just a few months before getting their own place but it ended up being nine months. It was hard living with seven people in a small house, but in a way it ended up being a super important part in getting the ramp moved and built.
At this point, the YMCA could not give me a time frame for when the ramp would be ready, so it was a waiting game. But there was still a lot to do to prepare the yard and so at the end of September my friend, Augie, my brother and I cut down some gigantic palm trees. Two days later, Augie showed up with a bobcat and somehow got it into the backyard. A bunch of us worked to level part of the backyard, which had a big slope in the back that we had to cut into in order to make enough room. Augie had to leave the next day and I had to learn how to drive the bobcat and finish the job.
Augie had gone to the YMCA and measured the distance between the sections on the ramp template and my brother and I started to lay the foundation for concrete slabs. We worked every day for over a week, and just the two of us laid the wood frames and leveled the dirt. My neighbor loaned us a tilling machine but it was still a lot of work for two people.
Around that time, the guy from the YMCA called and told me the ramp would need to come out in the next five days. At fist, they were going to hire a company to break down the ramp and have it ready for us to pick up. But then they told me they were keeping the Skatelite, which was one of the most expensive parts of the ramp. I went there and negotiated with the guy and offered to have my team break the ramp down instead of paying the company they hired, in exchange for giving me the Skatelite. We still had to pour the concrete and now I also had to figure out how to assemble a team and the equipment needed to break down this monster and get it to my house.
I called a few skater friends and got everyone on board to help break the ramp down. Augie had a good connection for renting big trucks and a forklift. In the meantime, my brother and I went and picked up a few day workers at Home Depot to help with getting the concrete poured. We started one day at 6am to get the concrete poured, and left several hours later to the YMCA to start breaking down the ramp. My crew and I first pulled off the Skatelite. After that Augie marked the ramp while I cut it, literally in half. We then cut our half into 40 pieces. They were still super heavy and big and would not be easy to transport. Each section was five feet wide and the transition pieces were roughly seven feet tall and weighed a ton with three layers of old, rotting plywood on top.
After cutting the ramp into sections, Augie and I knew we could never get them into our backyard. Augie had the brilliant idea of asking our neighbor, who has a huge, empty yard that borders our backyard, if we could drive a forklift through his yard to deliver the pieces. The neighbor reluctantly said yes, after I offered to replace the chain-link property fence with a new wood one.
Augie handled the forklift and began loading the sections on flatbed trucks. We took turns driving the trucks to my house to deliver the pieces, which we initially stacked in my neighbor’s backyard. We went back and forth between our house and the YMCA for three days hauling the pieces. Once we were done, Augie had to leave out of town for work and I had to figure out how to get the pieces from my neighbor’s yard into mine. I called Tony from California Ramps, who helped build Bob’s Mega Ramp, and asked if he could help. He agreed to come setup the first piece and then explained how to finish the job. I only had enough money at the time to rent the forklift for one day and we got maybe half of the pieces into our yard. Without more money, we had to haul the rest of the pieces into place by hand.
We pulled off the rotting plywood surface pieces and took the ramp down to its skeleton to make the pieces lighter. I hired a few guys and we literally carried the rest of the pieces from the neighbor’s yard into mine, and then into place, all by hand. Once the template was in place, my friends all pitched in some money to buy new plywood and supplies. We worked for several weeks painting and putting the plywood into place, and then retrofitting the frame to make it more secure. At that point it was mostly me, my brother, Bruno Passos, Christiano Goulart, Brian Fick and Jonathan Spooner. We worked all day, every day putting up support beams and trying to make the ramp as secure as possible.
We then rebuilt the upper decks and put those into place. We never had a plan, it just came together as we went along. Everyone who participated gave input and we made decisions as a team.
The last thing was to put on the Skatelite. I had enough sheets from the YMCA, but some of the pieces weren’t in great shape. We sort of had to puzzle-piece smaller pieces together in order to make it all fit. The ramp was about 90% skate-able and we had our first official session on March 10, 2013. We still had to finish the roll-in.
The original roll-in was 16 feet wide. We reduced that to two separate 4’ roll-ins with one on each side. We skated the ramp without the roll-ins complete for a good couple of months before we finished those off. They were bare to the ribs, without plywood or anything. It was sketchy but we wanted to skate so bad we didn’t care.
Once we finished the roll-ins, Bob Burnquist came over to skate and said he had some newer Skatelite that he would give me. He gave us enough to pull out some of the smaller pieces and it really helped smooth things out and made the ramp look a little more pulled together.
The entire process, from when we first leveled the yard to when we finished the roll-ins, took about nine months. Right around the time it was done, my brother and his family finally got their own place. It seems like it was meant to be, him staying here all that time and being my right hand man through the entire process. I still can’t believe how everything came together; everything kept falling into place at the right time, without any plans or anything. The ramp is now officially known as the B-Team Ramp. Everyone always asks what B-Team stands for. It means the “Brothers Team,” or “Backyard Team.” I really wanted to bring back the spirit of the backyard ramps of the 80s and 90s that I always saw in the magazines and videos from when I was in Brazil. We work really hard to keep a chill vibe and keep it real. This is the place you come to skate because you love to skate. So many skaters have come out of the woodworks and started skating again just because of this ramp. It reminds people of why they started skating in the first place. Our motto has become “No stressin’, just session.”
I really want to thank my brother Eugenio, Christiano Goulart, Augie Rodriguez, Brian Fick, Bruno Passos, Jonathan Spooner, Sanford Lopez, Alex Perelson, Paul Luc Ronchetti, Nick Bautista, Joe Gretzer, Jimmy Wilkins, Ozzie from Blue Tile Obsession, Tim Tyson, Bob Burnquist, Leonardo Ruiz, Magdalena Ecke YMCA, Green Issue, Triple 8, Sambazon, and especially my wife for putting up with the mess and stress. And I can’t forget the countless other people who came by and helped or donated or just showed their love.