The Flashback

One summer day in 2002, a 12-year-old girl walked into a large arena.

From afar, she saw a ramp of some sort. Something was going on but she couldn't hear anything.

As she drew closer, her eyes widened with excitement and awe. The screeching sound of metal and the smacking echo of plywood pierced her ears.

Women aggressively spun 360 degrees in midair off a huge ramp as fans cheered and the bright lights of photographers flashed.

The girl, Amelia Brodka, saw a skateboarder around her age. She was Lyn-z Adams Hawkins, 13, who was skating at ESPN's annual multi-action sporting event, the X Games 9 in Philadelphia.

For the first time ever, women's skateboarding was an official X Games sport.

That's when Brodka said to herself: "This is exactly what I want to do."

Amelia Brodka at her home in Vista, California. (Photo by Laurie Maemura)

Today, at age 29, she is the one being looked up to by a younger generation: From her home base in Vista, Brodka juggles life as a professional skateboarder who plans to compete in the 2020 Olympics, a business owner and competition operator, and an all-purpose champion for women's place in the sport that changed her life.

Brodka, a communication and narrative studies graduate of University of Southern California, made "Underexposed: A Women's Skateboarding Documentary" in 2013 to raise awareness about the girls and women who are changing the sport, while advocating for greater pay for female professionals and the restoration of the sport after it was removed from the X Games.

For her, the beauty of skateboarding is not just about landing a trick or perfecting a run. Especially for women and young girls, she says, it's about self-expression and self-empowerment: "Everybody is just trying to be their best self, and competing in skateboarding isn't really about competing against other people. It's about competing against yourself."

The Trailblazers

Skateboarding was not one of Brodka's obsessions while she was growing up in Poland and New Jersey, where her family moved when she was 8 years old.

"I hadn't even seen a skateboard in all my time in Poland," Brodka said.

"Once I moved to New Jersey, it didn't really seem like there was a lot of skateboarding either. Skateboarding, I think, at the time was mostly prevalent in California."

But after attending the X Games, she was inspired to start skateboarding and joined a small crew of boys.

"Other skaters would call me a poseur because they thought there was no way that I was also a skateboarder because I was a girl. At the time, there were no other girl skateboarders that I knew of," Brodka recalled.

In fact, long before she was born, women were skateboarding, albeit in small numbers.

In 1965, Patti McGee won the first professional competition for female skateboarders at age 19 in Santa Monica. A few months later, she was featured on the cover of Time magazine doing a handstand on her board.

The Pro Skateboarding Student

Brodka attended skate camps throughout her adolescent years before she turned pro at age 16. When it came time for college, she said, she applied to schools near skateparks in California because that's where skating culture was booming.

In 2008, Brodka moved to Los Angeles to pursue her bachelor's degree at USC. Every weekend, she drove to San Diego to practice her skating.

Two years later, her hard work paid off. Brodka was invited to compete as an alternate at X Games 16 in Los Angeles and continued to train, though she would end up not competing.

A year later, she was set to skate in X Games 17, also in Los Angeles. But with the games just two months away, competitors were devastated to learn that ESPN had decided to cancel the women's Vert event, in which skaters do tricks on ramps and inclines.

ESPN organizers believed the event failed to fulfill specific factors.

"We look for sports that have a solid year-round infrastructure, a growing participant base, an established annual competition schedule, rising youth talent pools, ample access to courses, low barriers of entry into the sport and myriad other factors," the network said in a statement.

This is when Brodka began to examine the lack of support for women skateboarders. She consulted with a photographer friend who had also wanted to improve the visibility of female skaters through his images.

Press play to listen to the story of when Amelia Brodka asked friend and photographer Julian Bleecker, "Why wasn't there any support?"

(Photo courtesy of Wikipedia Commons)

"Someone should make a documentary," she recalled telling him.

"You should!" he replied.

She did not know how to operate a camera or edit, but that was all it took.

While continuing her studies, as well as her skating, she became a filmmaker.

Brodka's website for what eventually became "Underexposed" describes her approach: "By analyzing the media and marketing tactics of the skateboarding industry, we can learn how to promote an increase of opportunities for girls and women who want to pursue skateboarding."

"The film is not whiny, accusatory or full of finger-pointing. It is merely an examination of the current opportunities available to female athletes in action sports, particularly skateboarding."

Brodka interviewed trailblazers such as Cara-Beth Burnside from 1970s and Mimi Knoop from the early 2000s, current professional skateboarders such as Nora Vasconcellos and Allysha Bergado, and skateboard industry executives.

At the time, Brodka said, marketers did not think that "women's skateboarding was profitable or would even be a return on their investment in making women's products."

She and her producer, skateboarder Brian Lynch, dived into the poor brand awareness and marketing tactics of the sport, such as ads that featured models who clearly did not skateboard.

Their message: Women deserved better.

After Brodka graduated in May 2012, she continued to push Vert events for women's skateboarding. She flew to cities across the U.S. for public screenings of "Underexposed" and visited schools to spread its message.

They formally released their completed 85-minute film to streaming services in February 2013.

With the impact of her documentary, Brodka became a role model for girls as she continued to the themes of drive empowerment and female participation at contests.

After one public screening, Brodka was approached by a viewer who asked, 'What's next?'"

"Quite honestly," she said, "I didn't have one in mind at the time. ... I just immediately said I want to do a women's skateboarding event."

Exposure Skate Is Born

Brodka's first event, which she called Exposure Skate, came to fruition in San Diego. It was finally an opportunity for girls as young as 4 years old to participate in women's Vert and Bowl skateboarding and even compete for money.

From there, Brodka said, she decided to turn the mission of empowering women and girls through skateboarding into a nonprofit organization. "There was not really another organization that was doing that at the time."

According to Neftalie Williams, a longtime skateboarder and an adjunct instructor at USC who serves as the first professor of skateboarding business, media and culture in the U.S., the annual Exposure Skate events are a "tremendous and indispensable element of the mission to advance the role of women in skateboarding."

Brodka said Exposure's focus on girls and young women is intended to provide an extremely supportive and caring environment for girls in all age groups to progress and accomplish tricks together.

"They high-five their friends and they get that feeling of of joy, of community, of accomplishment. And it's a really empowering thing," Brodka said.

One ethos of Exposure, she said, is "to build and nurture these up-and-coming amateurs and pros, and to create a way for them to be able to make a living off skateboarding or to be able to showcase what they're doing to other companies so that they can then get support to continue this progressive sport."

In addition, Exposure introduced adult women's clinics for older women this year.

"Skateboarding is a pretty scary thing to learn because everything seems like it would point to you getting hurt," Brodka said.

"The whole reason that I do what I do with Exposure is to see someone getting excited about something that they just accomplished, something that they were totally afraid of doing. Whatever their age, they were scared of that trick."

Increasing Prize Parity and Participation

While working through Exposure to increase the ranks of girls and women in the sport, Brodka continued seek ways to advocate for skaters in the professional ranks.

Three or four years ago, she recalled, "the prize purses were a third, maybe a sixth, of what the men were earning at these contests. And now it's almost been across the board, all these bigger events, they're doing prize purse parity for women and for men.

"You can see in the performance of the skateboarders how much the level of women's skateboarding has increased with the rise of the prize purse. It's really helping to contribute to the growth of the sport."

Vans Park Series, a park terrain-based international contest, has committed to equal men's and women's prize purse at $700,000. Vans Combi Girls Pool Classic, one of the biggest events for girls and women, has increased its prize purse to $68,000. The prizes for women have finally equaled those for the men, said Kristy Van Doren, the granddaughter of Vans' founder.

Rob Meronek, founder of the Boardr, a skateboarding events company, has noticed the influx of girls and women entering contests who now "can make a living at it."

"It's one of the awesome byproducts of participation itself and skateboarding for women increasing so much over the last five or 10 years," he said.

More Nonprofits for Girls

Micaela Ramirez is founder and president of the Poseidon Foundation, a nonprofit organization in San Diego whose mission is to encourage girls to pursue their passions, accomplish their dreams, and grow self-esteem and leadership through skateboarding.

She grew up reading skateboard magazines and met skateboard legends Jen O'Brien and Cara-Beth Burnside at skate camps. Like Brodka, Ramirez recalled seeing Lyn-z Adams Hawkins drop into a Vert, which gave her confidence to try it herself.

Similar to Brodka's Exposure Skate, Ramirez hosts Ladies Day, where girls and women travel from Europe, Canada, Brazil, Hawaii, New York and Colorado to meet other female skaters and learn how to perform new tricks together.

"It's so important for us to have these tangible places and events in communities so that we can actually have contact," Ramirez said. "At the end of the day, they're receiving that positive reinforcement ... knowing and feeling that empowerment. ... That's a confidence boost."

Ramirez hopes that when girls attend skate meetups, they can see the positive attributes when the shared beauty of confidence and self-esteem come together.

Instagram's Skate Community Flourishes

Back in 2013, Brodka recalled, photographer Michael Burnett of Thrasher, a leading magazine in skateboarding, asked for her Instagram username so that he could post a photo of her.

"I'm like, 'What is this?' I got one because he was about to post something," Brodka said.

Female skateboarders have embraced Instagram to connect and support others while spreading the spirit and passion of their sport for the future generation of girls.

Instagram is the main social networking tool that Brodka uses to discover up-and-coming skateboarders around the world.

In the pre-Instagram days, Brodka said, "within the culture of skateboarding, self-promotion was weird. People just didn't do it."

In a transformational digital shift, Instagram has become the fastest way for skateboarders to get noticed by the public, especially brands and even media outlets.

"The amount of people just making their own videos and promoting themselves and putting their own stuff out there has really has shown these companies, 'Listen, there is clearly interest in girls and seeing girls and women skateboarding and there's growth in it,'" Brodka said.

Korean American skateboarder Eunice Chang, known as @notcheetos on Instagram, is on her own skateboarding path. She is considered a "micro-influencer" with her more than 42,000 followers.

Eunice Chang at one of her favorite skateparks in El Sereno, California. (Photo by Laurie Maemura)

"Traditionally, you would save all your video clips and then you save them for a skate video. ... Now we just post to the 'gram," Chang said.

While Chang uploads skate clips with friends wearing sponsored products sent to her, she also scours the endless scroll of inspirational footage made by girls and women around the world.

Chang's favorite Instagram accounts include Skate Like A Girl, GirlsWhoCanSkate, GirlisNotAFourLetterWord, and Girls Shred Clips.

"Personally, I like to see what they do because I'm not super-technical or like the gnarliest. I'm not going to jump off a building [to perform a trick]. So it's fun to see how creative people get," Chang said.

When Chang travels, she is also often contacted by other users who invite her to skate fun spots.

As with other aspects of skating, Brodka sees Instagram as a tool of empowerment.

"Instagram has definitely brought a lot of opportunity to the girls because they were able to show what they're doing on their own terms as opposed to hoping to go shoot with a photographer or hoping to be sponsored by a company that would then promote them," Chang said. "Now they could just go out and do it themselves."

Next Stop: The 2020 Olympics

The growing visibility of women's Vert and Park, or street, skateboarding is proof that promising world-class athletes are adding to the next generation of role models and equality. The 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games will bring a new first: The addition of men's and women's skateboarding.

"I've always been excited about the concept of skateboarding becoming a part of the Olympics, especially because, quite honestly, I feel that the addition of skateboarding is hugely responsible for the increased support of women's skateboarding," Brodka said, referring to the announcement in 2016.

Brodka won't be at home watching. She has been polishing her tricks at an Olympics-inspired training facility in Vista in hopes of qualifying for the Polish national team.

"For the first time in my life, my mom calls me and tells me I need to skate more. And I told her, I've been waiting for her to say that for 18 years," Brodka said. "All my aunts and uncles that live out there are always calling and wondering if I'm still doing the stupid thing where I'm falling over all the time."

Although some fear that the Olympics will represent the mainstreaming of the sport, and a risk to its creative tradition, Brodka sees mostly upside.

"We should look at all the opportunity that it's bringing to people who love skateboarding around the world," she said. "And it's going to be inspiring more and more kids to skate that maybe would have never heard of it."

The Future of Women's Skateboarding

Women's skateboarding has experienced a trajectory of historical accomplishments: a progression of talent and participation, prize purse parity, supportive nonprofit organizations, Olympics recognition and a thriving online community.

As more young girls discover skateboarding, the previous generations of women who paved their way for visibility, exposure and opportunities are remembered for their persistent and unstoppable contributions even during the sport's downfalls.

Trailblazer Burnside, who is currently involved with Vans Combi, said she plans to be an announcer for future events. Her voice and visibility are crucial to girls who want role models.

Brodka hopes that more girls around the world are inspired to pick up their first skateboard at a contest and continue to "express themselves and share the joy of skateboarding."

The teachings of Williams of USC coincides with Brodka's: "I believe it's important to showcase the prowess of male and female skaters together whenever skateboarding is presented as a tool for cultural diplomacy."

Williams adds: "Skateboarding should be seen as an activity that everyone can participate in and where their voice is respected because their narrative contributes to skateboarding culture as a whole."

"The language of skateboarding is what really, really, really has helped me understand how this silly little toy, four wheels, trucks and a piece of wood can really impact and make a difference in your life or my life," Micaela Ramirez said.

For her part, Brodka believes that girls and women have obliterated the stereotype that "the quintessential skateboarder was some dude chugging a beer, covered in tattoos."

"He can be standing alongside a little girl in a dress and maybe they're even doing the same tricks," she said, "but they're just as good as each other."