Team USA Teen Minna Stess Takes On Gender Gatekeeping In Skateboarding And Gaming

At 14, she’s the youngest member of each the USA Skateboarding Nationwide Group and gaming and esports group XSET. However neither her youth nor her gender are holding Minna Stess again from charging ahead in each skateboarding and gaming, decided to carve out a spot for herself—and for different ladies.

It’s no secret that skateboarding and gaming are nonetheless predominantly male industries. Whereas skateboarding participation numbers damaged down by gender are little-tracked, the shift in professional skateboarding demographics has been marked. Solely 5 years in the past, in 2015, did Nike SB

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signal its first feminine professional skater, Brazil’s Leticia Bufoni. The next yr, Adidas adopted swimsuit, signing Nora Vasconcellos to its skateboarding staff.

After all, when the Worldwide Olympic Committee in 2016 permitted skateboarding for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics (now being held in Summer time 2021), ladies’s skilled skateboarding growth turned turbocharged. As nations around the globe started quickly constructing nationwide groups within the hopes of successful certainly one of six first-ever medals awarded to feminine skate boarders (three in avenue and three in park), the ripple results carried all the best way down within the type of endorsements, sponsorships and nationwide funding.

In October 2019, Stess was formally named to the 2020 USA Skateboarding Nationwide Group in Ladies’s Park. She was engaged on securing her qualification to symbolize the USA in Tokyo by means of Might 31, 2020, when on March 24 the IOC introduced its determination to postpone the Video games till 2021. Stess had been making ready to journey to Peru for an Olympic qualifier in mid-April, adopted by one in China, the Dew Tour and the world championships.

Within the World Skate rankings, Stess is twentieth general amongst feminine park skaters and sixth amongst her Group USA counterparts. That will at present hold her out of competition for qualification, however the last qualifying occasions of the yr are indefinitely postponed whereas the Covid-19 pandemic continues to unfold. The postponed 2020 world championships, particularly, are a direct qualifier, with a berth secured by the winner.

Along with her skateboarding profession on pause, Stess has been isolating at dwelling together with her household in Northern California, simply outdoors San Francisco. Her coach is positioned in Southern California, however within the meantime, she’s been doing on-line exercises with USA Skateboarding coach Jessika Alexander and dialing in her using in her yard skate park.

With one other yr to coach, particularly for an athlete on the qualification bubble, and given she’s remained wholesome, Stess can see a silver lining within the Video games’ postponement.

“Everybody was getting drained and touring each different month, and now the athletes get one other yr,” Stess says by telephone. “Corona’s not ending, it’s nonetheless taking place, so I’m simply ready to listen to about completely different competitors dates, which in all probability received’t be for awhile. We simply gotta wait one other yr. It’s one other yr to coach and get higher.”

Throughout her hiatus from skateboarding, Stess, a leisure gamer, joined XSET. The esports and gaming model was based by longtime gaming business executives from FaZe Clan who sought to create a brand new gaming group targeted on variety, illustration, inclusion, and fairness.

Stess is to date the youngest member of “The Set,” and joins different distinguished feminine avid gamers like TV host and producer Erin Ashley Simon and prime Fortnite streamer “AshleyBTW” Morales.

“I’m excited to play video video games and symbolize ladies within the gaming business and skateboarding,” Stess says. Whereas she herself has at all times felt snug at largely male skateparks and within the mostly-male on-line gaming neighborhood, she acknowledges that these areas are nonetheless not snug for a lot of ladies.

“I’ve realized over time it doesn’t actually matter what different folks assume. I’ve been skating my entire life and I’ve at all times gone to skate parks with guys. They’re like, ‘She’s a lady and he or she’s really good,’ and I believe it’s humorous,’” Stess says.

In gaming, the place her most well-liked titles are Fortnite, Overwatch and Valorant, she assesses herself as “mediocre to fairly good at among the video games, too.”

“Different ladies must see that it doesn’t actually matter what others assume,” Stess continues. “It may be intimidating generally, it’s annoying, issues ought to change. I’ve simply realized to not care about what anybody thinks. When ladies see different ladies skating or gaming it turns into normalized.” She finally sees her function with XSET as serving to “change the atmosphere for girls in gaming and growing the range.”

Many motion sports activities and conventional sports activities execs alike have expressed their need to ultimately turn out to be esports execs, too. Stess thinks it might be cool to see esports turn out to be an official Olympic sport and could be thrilled to see the Video games in any other case embrace gaming tradition, maybe by establishing gaming stations within the athlete’s Olympic Village. However Stess, whose skateboarding profession has but to even attain its pinnacle, is content material for now to maintain gaming as a pastime and focus totally on skateboarding, trying to win her first X Video games, Dew Tour and—hopefully—Olympic medals.

Not that she’s hurting for prime finishes. At 10 years outdated, she turned the youngest woman to win the U14 World Cup Skateboarding Championships. She completed in third within the 2019 USA Skateboarding Nationwide Championships Ladies’s Park last.

Although she skated avenue and vert early in her profession—attributing her curiosity in vert to her favourite skater rising up, Bob Burnquist, whom she met when she was six years outdated and who not too long ago invited her to skate at his home—park finally turned her chosen self-discipline for the creativity it permits. She enjoys various her strains and discovering completely different spots to hit her favourite trick, bottom air. Plus, she says, “I identical to flying by means of the air.”

Stess occupies a singular cut-off date in ladies’s skateboarding. She’s sufficiently old that she’s conscious that, for a very long time, ladies didn’t earn equal prize purses to males in sure occasions (and in some even immediately), and he or she’s watched the business develop quickly within the wake of the Olympics.

However she’s younger sufficient that being a feminine skater shouldn’t be prime of thoughts for her; she sees herself as a skater, interval, and thinks her skating speaks for itself.

“There’s no level in gatekeeping skating or gaming,” Stess says. “Everybody ought to be extra accepting, as a result of we’re all simply making an attempt to do the identical factor and have enjoyable. It’s fairly cool to be the instance for some youthful ladies.”