To our BV Skate Community,
I know that word has spread in advance of our official announcement that we plan to decommission the skate park in the Sports Center at Bolton Valley this fall… and that some people are feeling pretty disappointed about it.
It’s true. We have made the decision to remove the skate features and re-finish the old tennis courts back into use for tennis and pickleball.
When our family first got back to BV in 2017, the old tennis courts and the field house in general were in rough shape. We knew we wanted to fix the space up and make improvements to the Sports Center in general, but funds were tight and other projects had to take priority over major improvements to the Sports Center.
Cue Talent Skatepark announcing in the spring of 2018 that they were shutting down and offering up their features, including the bowl, for anyone who had space to house it. Well, our Finance Director at the time (now our General Manager) is a skater and he suggested that we put the bowl down on the old tennis courts. And, while we weren’t yet certain what the long-term plan for the Sports Center fieldhouse space was, we saw an opportunity to do something in the meantime that would be additive to our resort and local community. And as is so often the case here at Bolton Valley, things sort of organically evolved from there with our staff and a few members of our awesome community adding some other skate features to go along with bowl. It’s been really fun and we are so grateful to all the folks that came out and skated with us the last few years, including our beloved summer campers.
Okay – but why go back to tennis and pickleball over the skate park? I can hear you asking, maybe not without some irritation and even outrage. Well – it’s two reasons really.
First – which I expect may feel like salt in wound to some, but I want to be transparent – pickleball especially is so popular right now because it’s really approachable and accessible to almost everyone. It’s an activity with a broad appeal and something that we believe will be an activity that our hotel guests as well as the local community can all enjoy and make use of.
Second – and even more compelling for us as a resort – is that the massive features that make up a skate park just aren’t agile for other uses whereas the open courts allow us to reconfigure the space for a variety of uses to support not just the activities themselves, but provides a big, open space that can be used for events, conferences, and so on.
And while I know that this explanation won’t be enough to reconcile everyone to the decision, I do want you to know that we are working hard to re-home all of the features we can, including the bowl. So even though they won’t be at Bolton Valley, they will hopefully remain in our broader community and available for you to continue to enjoy in their new home.
We’re grateful that we were in the right place at the right time to be able to adopt the bowl and provide a pretty sweet skatepark (so I’ve been told) here at BV for the past five years. Thanks to everyone who came up and made good use of it! While we are sad to see it go, we are also ready to embrace our next step for the resort and we hope you will support us as we continue to find our way.
Lindsay
We hope you’ll consider joining us at the BV Skatepark sendoff – also a fundraiser for the nearby Waterbury Skatepark project. We will continue to support efforts to get this nearby skatepark off the ground, as we have the last couple of years. This will be the 4th event we’ve co-hosted here at Bolton Valley supporting the Waterbury Skatepark project (the previous 3 contributing over $20,000 to the cause to date):
