C ross Academy Themes
Technical notes on reoccurring themes you'll see in most tricks
Cross Academy flow: cross, uncross, and up and down the board
There's a flow I use in most Cross Academy tricks from one type of stance to another. That means if I start a trick from a regular, side by side stance, it will end in a cross stance. If I start in a cross stance, I will end up in a regular stance. That is the usual flow. It doesn't have to go that way, because there are advanced variations where I'll go from cross step into a jump and land in cross stance. Or I'll start with a cross position and uncross in mid air and cross the other way. The only reason I'd do a trick without a cross in it is to show a rock bottom basic borrowed from new school or old school, like an ollie.
Another thing you'll see over and over is a shift from the back of the board to the front, then back to the tail. If you were to drag scroll a page, you'll usually see me move up the board as the board rolls from left to right, or I will move backwards on the board while the board rolls forward.
The setup for walking
One thing that comes from surfing that I used in both Cruise Power and Cross Academy is the idea of setting up a walk. When you're surfing, you use a turn or some form of stall to set up a walk and nose ride. There's a change in feel from the power of turning to the relaxation of walking. I tried to bring that feel to my skateboard projects.
In the Cruise Power project, the slide of a very long heavy skateboard has a very powerful and somewhat tense feel. So I used the slide as a power move to set up relaxed walking tricks. Cross Academy builds on that idea, using power to set up relaxed walking and nose riding, but in this style I use ollies and bonelesses more than slides. The board I use, a surf shaped street longboard with a kicked nose and tail, is very bouncy when ollied, but has good weight and glide for walking.
How the longer board changes street tricks
Whereas shortboards make the nose and tail almost indistinguishable, the longboards I use have a definite nose and tail. The tail is a better place to turn from, do kickturns, and do ollies. The nose is a good place to stand and do a nose trick or perch. There isn't much shifting position on a shortboard. When you're standing on a shortboard, your stance is pretty fixed and restricted to a small space, whereas on a longboard there are a lot of position and stance changes as you move up to the nose and back to the tail. In Cross Academy style longboarding, the different stances radically changes normal street tricks you see in magazines. It changes the orientation and decisions you have to make before you take off on a trick and after you land. For example, let's say you do a Cross Academy style pop shove-it on a 46 inch board. When you land, are you on the nose, tail, or middle? If you end up on the nose, you'll want to do something suitable for the nose, then you'll have to worry about getting back to the tail where turning works better. What if you land with a cross foot stance, will you walk up or back? These questions don't matter to a skater riding a 32 inch board. But for the longboard skater doing tricks, you will have to think about footwork and walking if you want to use the whole board.
How cross steps change street tricks
The cross step has a big effect on street. Skaters often cross their legs to start a trick, but they usually uncross for the landing. Skaters make a big effort to uncross, but cross steppers intentionally cross up. You start to ask yourself questions like, why should you be afraid to ride out of a trick cross stepped, if you're doing it all the time anyway? Why uncross out of a shove-it after you've pushed the board around? Why not just land it crossed? Or maybe you think about uncrossing from the shove and crossing the other direction, making it a whole new challenge.
Not surprisingly, this cross stepping stuff completely screws up the nature of labeling tricks for street skating (as if it weren't complicated enough) because it throws another stance into the equation. Now you have do do every trick regular, switch, and cross stance. And what's more, cross stance is kind of an ambiguous stance, not really regular, not really switch.
Cross stepping changes the syntax of new school tricks around, because the front foot constantly becomes the back foot, so it's really hard to tell what is really a backside trick and what is frontside.
Frontside/backside gets ambiguous in cross stances. Which is it, frontside, or backside, if your normal front foot is back and your back foot is crossed over, with enough body twist in the motion that you actually face the other side? I tried to come up with some ways to clarify the new stances and positions. It has to be made clear which was your original back foot and which was your original front foot, before any crossing or spinners.
