How to Organize a Skateboarding Competition

The venue decides the format, not the other way round. Run durations in the World Skate rules are given as ranges — park runs of 30 to 50 seconds, street runs of 45 to 60 seconds — precisely because the exact number is set per event "based on the size and layout of the FOP".

The field of play (FOP) has a headcount, and it is a safety number. The Street & Park Competition Rules put the maximum number of athletes inside the FOP in the hands of the Technical Delegate together with the Organizing Committee, set "to allow a reasonably low-level risk of collision among athletes".

Practice groups carry hard caps: a maximum of 12 athletes in park and 20 in street. Those limits can be exceeded only in contingency situations, and only once it has been determined that athlete safety is guaranteed.

Indoor parks: weather-proof, stable light for cameras and for judges reading amplitude. Usually tighter, which pushes you toward the short end of the run range and smaller heats.

Outdoor parks: more course area and better natural light, with weather as the standing risk. A rain date is not optional, and public parks commonly need a municipal permit.

Temporary obstacles: every portable rail, ledge or manual pad has to be anchored and load-tested before anyone practices on it. A course defect is the one failure mode that ends both the event and the organizer's reputation in a single afternoon.

The course walk is a job, not a ritual. Loose coping, blown-out surfaces, exposed edges and short run-out zones all get fixed before the FOP opens, because once practice starts the head judge and the Technical Delegate are judging a course you have already declared safe.

World Skate publishes five formats for street and park, and none of them is a jam session. Park is run-only; street has one pure run format and three named combined formats that add a single-trick phase. The full breakdown sits in the skateboarding competition formats guide.

The combined notation reads runs / single-trick attempts / scores that count. The third number is how many marks are added together at the end, each one capped at 100.00 — so a "300-point" street event is three trimmed means, not thirty raw scores.

The Olympic format is not a sixth option. Paris 2024 street was 2/5/3 and Paris 2024 park was three 45-second runs — one legitimate configuration of the park run format, not the rule. Copying the broadcast gives you "three runs of 45 seconds" as though the rulebook said so; it does not.

Two optional mechanisms change the shape of a final, and both have to be announced in the event bulletin before the event starts. First Wall Rebate gives a restart to an athlete who bails on the first trick of a run, taken within a maximum of 30 seconds from the bail and confirmed by the head judge. Golden Run sends only the top five into one additional final run, re-seeded in reverse order.

For a local contest, borrow the shape and shorten it. Twelve to twenty riders fit a two-run qualifier and a three-run final inside three hours; a field above about forty needs a cut. What you must not do is invent a format on the morning of the event — the format, the run count and the run length belong in the information athletes get at registration.

Categories decide whether results mean anything. At World Skate events the floor is not yours to set: the minimum competition age rises by one year each season — 11 in 2025, 12 in 2026, 13 in 2027 and 14 from 2028 onward — and eligibility runs on birth year under the Gregorian calendar, not exact birth date.

Events classified as Junior/Youth, and continental development events, sit at a minimum age of 12 from 2026 onward.

That floor binds sanctioned events, not your local jam. A municipal contest can absolutely run an under-10 grom division, and should. The honest version is to say which rulebook each division follows, so a 12-year-old planning a World Skate season knows what the published age table means for them.

Age divisions that work in practice: under 10 (grom), under 14 (junior), under 18 (youth/amateur), open, and an optional 30+ or 40+ masters bracket that reliably doubles entries in smaller towns.

Skill divisions: beginner (comfortable, landing basics), intermediate (consistent flip tricks, basic grinds), open (full repertoire and contest experience). Let riders self-select with the right to move up but never down — the alternative is an organizer arbitrating skill on the day, which never ends well.

Gender divisions: separate men's and women's results are standard, and a women's division is worth running even at small events. Where numbers are thin, a combined division with separate podiums is better than cancelling.

In JudgeMate each division is configured independently — its own format, run count, trick attempts and leaderboard — so a street open running 2/5/3 and an under-14 park division running two 40-second runs coexist in one event without manual bookkeeping.

A World Skate panel is not "three judges, or five if it's serious". The Street & Park Competition Rules give two panel sizes and they differ in a way that changes the arithmetic:

So a national event has five scoring marks from five people including the head judge, while an international event has five scoring marks from five judges with the head judge standing outside the scoring entirely. Either way five scores enter the trimmed mean.

Judges are sourced among World Skate International Skateboarding Judges and must agree to and follow the World Skate Judge's Code of Ethics. The pool is not open-ended: the Judging Certification Program (Level 01) takes active or formerly active skateboarders aged 18 to 40 with at least two years of judging experience at national-tier events or national championships and working English, and certifies them for international events sanctioned or approved by World Skate that do not award points in the Olympic World Skateboarding Ranking. National governing bodies may put forward up to 10 candidates per discipline, with a minimum of 3 guaranteed places for women.

The head judge owns the performance, the Technical Delegate owns the event. The head judge is the final authority on landed versus bailed tricks and on whether a trick was within time, approves competition documents before the TD signs them, and represents the jury to the event director, the LOC, the national federations and the athletes — but defers to the TD on every disqualification.

The TD is appointed by World Skate, has the final word on disqualification for competition or safety and health reasons, and must approve entry lists, the schedule, practice groups, starting lists and partial, final and complete results before any of them are released. An organizer who publishes a start list without that sign-off has created a problem that is not fixable later.

At a non-sanctioned contest, three judges is a workable minimum — but copy the structure rather than only the number: one person who is explicitly not scoring, who calls makes and bails and who holds the schedule, is worth more than a fourth score. Panel mechanics are in the skateboarding judge guide.

The athletes' meeting is a requirement, not a courtesy. The Street & Park Competition Rules put a meeting for all athletes, team managers and national federation representatives before the first day of competition, physical or online, hosted by the Technical Delegate together with the head judge and the event director.

It must cover at least the competition schedule, the contest format, the judging criteria and all important event information, and its time and place must be announced in advance, slotted into the event schedule and published at the venue. Where space is short, the TD may limit attendance to national team managers and designated athlete representatives.

National federations appoint a team manager per discipline during on-site accreditation, before their athletes practise or compete. That manager represents the athletes at riders' meetings and is the person an organizer talks to — not fifteen individual riders at the fence.

The judges' briefing is separate and comes after it. Six items, in this order:

1. Fix the bands. What does 60 mean at this event's level, and what does 85 mean? Agreement here prevents two judges sitting 15 points apart on the same run.
2. Walk the course as a panel. Which obstacles carry which difficulty, and what is realistically possible on them today.
3. Calibrate on live skating. Score two or three practice runs together, compare, and discuss the gaps before anything counts.
4. Name the criteria. World Skate publishes seven criteria for runs and four for single tricks, with no weights attached to any of them — the detail is in how skateboarding is scored.
5. Confirm the format and the tie-break. Run count, run length, how many marks count, which optional mechanisms are switched on.
6. Test the tooling. Devices charged and connected, one mock run entered end to end, and the independence rule stated out loud: no judge sees another's score before entering their own.

Pay your judges something. Free entry, food, merchandise or a cash honorarium — judging a full day is sustained concentration under public scrutiny, and an unpaid panel is a panel that does not come back.

World Skate splits registration into three distinct gates, and an athlete can clear the first two and still be marked DNS at the third. Copying this structure is the single cheapest fix for event-day chaos.

Gate 1 — event registration. Done electronically only, by national federations, within the registration window. Four athlete statuses exist: Country Quota (a fixed number per NF), Extra Quota (added on ranking position or previous results, with the maximum stated in the event bulletin), Pre-Seeded (entering at an advanced phase) and Wild Card (granted at World Skate's discretion, including organizer wildcards).

Gate 2 — event check-in. A time-limited, in-venue procedure at the accreditation office requiring a valid passport. Only after it is complete is the athlete eligible and added to the competition start list.

Gate 3 — competition check-in. An on-FOP confirmation before each round. An athlete who misses it is marked DNS and does not get the warm-up. The pre-seeded list is confirmed when practice groups are released, and a withdrawal after that point is not backfilled.

Seeding runs in reverse. Qualifiers seed off the reverse standing of the reference ranking, and every later round seeds off the reverse ranking of the previous round — so the leader drops in last. Pre-seeded athletes entering at the quarter-final are ordered by reverse reference ranking.

For a local event, three gates still beat one. Online entry two to four weeks out collecting name, birth year, division, emergency contact and a signed waiver; an in-venue check-in that hands over the bib; and a heat call-up that confirms presence. Publish the start list at least 24 hours ahead, and reverse-seed the finals — it costs nothing and makes the last run of the day the one that matters.

Minors need a guardian signature on the waiver, and at World Skate events the national federation carries that responsibility through its team manager.

Every judge scores on a scale of 0.00 to 100.00. The highest and lowest marks are discarded and the remaining three are averaged to two decimal places. That trimmed mean is the score for a run or a trick, and in a combined street format the counting marks are then added.

Tie-breaks resolve off the components, never a re-run. In a run format, the second-highest run separates tied athletes, and if those also match the jury votes, one vote per judge. In the combined formats the best run breaks the tie first, then the best single trick, and only then do the judges vote electronically.

Timing is tighter than most organizers expect. The athlete has 5 seconds to begin after the contest manager's signal. The clock is triggered by the timekeeper when both feet are on the board, on a chronometer accurate to 1/10 of a second.

A trick counts only if it was in progress before the horn: on flat ground the tail or nose must be popped before the signal, and on a transition all four wheels must be on the sloped surface before it sounds.

Trick Not Scored (TNS) is the athlete's veto and it exists only in 2/5/3. Both arms crossed above the head within five seconds of landing enters the attempt as 0 with the athlete still eligible — which is why a 0.00 in a trick phase is not automatically a fall.

A round needs completed runs to be valid. A minimum of two completed runs validates a competition round, regardless of format. A final can be validated on one completed run, but only if every competitor including pre-seeded athletes had an equal chance to compete in that round or a previous one.

JudgeMate setup, in order: create the event; configure each division's format, run count and trick attempts; invite judges by link; import or enter athletes; set the panel size and the trimmed mean; then enter a full mock run before the first rider practices.

Show the leaderboard. Live scores displayed to the crowd are the cheapest credibility an event can buy — and keep printed sheets and a calculator on the desk, because a scoring outage is a reason to continue on paper, never to stop the contest.

Helmet rules differ by discipline, and park is the strict one. Under the Street & Park Competition Rules, all park athletes must wear a helmet during practice and competition regardless of age. In street, athletes under 18 must wear one during practice and competition. Failure to wear a helmet where required may result in disqualification at the Technical Delegate's discretion.

A compliant helmet needs cranial coverage and security from a one-piece hard shell, internal padding that absorbs impact, and a chin strap with a buckle lock. World Skate names six suggested standards: AS/NZS 2063, EN 1078-2012, Snell B95-1998, Snell B90, US CPSC 16 CFR Part 1203 and ASTM F1447-12.

The concussion protocol is absolute. Any athlete suspected of a concussive injury must be removed from training and competition and may not return for the following 14 days, and must be cleared by a medical practitioner before competing again. World Skate appoints a concussion coordinator for each event to ensure that removal happens and that the athlete is monitored.

The Event Medical Official has the last word. The EMO is a qualified medical practitioner hired by the LOC and appointed by World Skate, and the official medical doctor must always be present and in proximity to the field of play. The EMO's judgement is final on every medical and health-related evaluation, the concussion protocol included — not the organizer's, and not the athlete's.

If the doctor has to leave, temporarily or permanently, a delegate of similar competence must be appointed and introduced to the TD before cover lapses.

At a local contest none of this is enforced on you, and all of it is worth copying. Mandatory helmets in the bowl, a named first-aid provider within sight of the course, and a written 14-day stand-down for a suspected concussion are three lines in a bulletin that change what happens on the worst day your event will ever have.

Event liability insurance sits alongside, not instead. Waivers allocate risk between you and a rider; insurance is what answers a claim.

No organizer and no head judge can change a published score. Once competition scores are approved by the head judge and published, they are final and not subject to any appeal. Any event-day plan that routes score complaints to the head judge between heats is describing a procedure the rules do not contain.

What exists instead is the Clarification Request, and it is a paperwork route, not a protest. It can be filed only in writing, on the dedicated formulary, available at the event accreditation desk during the event or online, and delivered to the World Skate Competition Secretary.

It may be filed by the athlete, or a legal guardian if the athlete is under 18, or the national team manager with the athlete's consent and co-signature — at any time during the competition and within 24 hours of its end at the latest. The TD aims to process it within 24 hours during the event and within one week once the competition is over.

Aggression toward officials is a disqualification matter, not a dispute: unprofessional, aggressive or denigratory behaviour — verbal, physical or digital — directed at World Skate, its technical officials or event personnel can cost the athlete the competition and their credentials.

Practice minimums are an organizer obligation. Athletes are owed at least 120 minutes of practice before competition begins, in sessions no shorter than 45 minutes, and only registered athletes may access the FOP. In park, athletes skate individually and must not occupy the course for longer than one competition run after dropping in. The TD can enforce this with a verbal warning or a reduced practice-time penalty.

Morning sequence, counted back from the first drop-in: T−2 h scoring, PA, accreditation and results display live; T−1.5 h course walk with the head judge; T−1 h check-in opens; practice run to the 120-minute minimum; final judges' briefing; T−0 go.

Contingency is planned, not improvised. The TD, after consulting the event director, may apply an alternate format — fewer runs counted, street dropping from Runs + Tricks to Run, altered heat sizes, shortened warm-ups, fewer phases — and it must be announced and defined in detail at least one hour before the affected phase begins.

If a competition has to be stopped outright, all skaters are marked DNS in the interrupted run or trick and the ranking is built on the number of runs or tricks every skater completed. If a finalist is disqualified before the final, the next highest-ranked non-qualified athlete from the previous round moves up.

Publish results fast, and know that publication closes the door. Approved and published scores are final under the Street & Park Competition Rules, so the version you put out is the version that stands — check the start list, the division labels and the counting marks before it goes live, not after.

The clarification window runs for 24 hours from the end of the competition. Keep the accreditation desk reachable and the formulary available for that period, because a written request filed inside the window has to be processed, and a route an athlete cannot find is the fastest way to turn a scoring question into a public argument.

Results, within 24 hours: full breakdowns — individual run and trick scores, counting marks, panel data. Transparency on the arithmetic is what separates a credible event from one people merely attended, and shareable JudgeMate result links do that work without a spreadsheet export.

Content: stills and clips while the day is still current, a recap on your own site, and athlete tags. This is the material that fills next year's entry list.

Feedback, split in two. Ask riders about registration, format, judging and venue; separately, read the panel's own scoring spread. A judge consistently 10 points off the trimmed mean is a briefing problem to fix before the next event, not a person to replace.

Close the loop publicly. Thank sponsors, volunteers, judges and riders by name, announce the next date, and keep the mailing list. Contests are communities that happen to keep score — the scoreboard is the easy part.

Athletes arriving at your next event will have read the rules from their own side; the companion piece is the skateboarding competition rules for athletes, and the wider cluster starts at skateboarding scoring and judging.