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Anne Eggebrecht - a chick with a deck

Anne Eggebrecht is a skateboarder, an activist, kaospilot, and a charmer. She seems to live for skateboarding and for spreading this love to everyone around. This is why, in 2014, she started her volunteer project Skateducate which focuses on getting girls onto the skateboards.

She is one of those people that you meet and can't help lighting up. Anne Eggebrecht's energy is contagious and her passion for skateboarding will fascinate you. That is why her project Skateducate has so much success among girl skaters and the whole community.

The motivation

We spoke with her about what it means to be 'a chick with a deck', as she herself calls it; about the challenges and the rewards along the way with the project and in being a female rider. So where does she get her energy from?

"One thing is I just can’t stop. It is [skateboarding] part of my everyday life, part of my friends' group(...) The other is, there is a lot of progress involved, especially on the girls’ scene. So that also keeps me going and motivated...", said Anne.

Apparently, she will keep rolling. You can see it in her eyes that all this motivation will never end. But where will that take her personally, and what is the end goal of her Skateducate project?

"For me personally is just to keep going as long as I can and keep on pushing myself. I have a thing - if I don’t fall in a session, then it is a bad session, then I didn’t push myself (...)

(...) And for the project, in a way, I hope that I won’t need Skateducate anymore if that makes sense. Because right now, there is the need for having the girls’ skate sessions and to invite girls in a kind of ‘safe space’. In a way try to be hosts for all the new girls. But I hope that in the future there will be so many female role models out here so that people won’t need all that organization. I hope that it will be just normal to see a girl skater just like a guy skater.", answered Anne.

She admitted having moments of doubt, of course, moments where she thought that this is too hard of a task but she had her crew to support her and lift her up again.

Being a chick with a deck

This pushed us to the topic of being a female skateboarder, of being part of a community, and what are the advantages and the disadvantages.

Anne told us that skateboarding is about being a community regardless of whether it is boys or girls. It is just expressed differently and there is a need for it. The guys needed to stick together in the very beginning as well, and now, since girl skateboarding is on the rise, building this sense of community is needed. But what are the pitfalls?

"I think the hardest is that in a way we need to prove ourselves more. We need to really do a bit more, fall a bit harder; and not everywhere there are girls that are PROs, that are role models yet...but it is coming. I am working on it!", answered Anne with an optimistic smile on her face and continued:

"The advantage of being a girl skater is the same as the disadvantage. They underestimate you, they don’t expect much of you. So when someone does a sick trick people go, ‘Whow, did she just kickflip!?’'. Sometimes, you get a lot more credit for small things and then it is really fun when you start challenging the guys, and you win...oh my, it's priceless!".

What can girl skaters do?

In that line of thought, we decided to go a bit creative and asked her to finish the famous slogan from the '40s poster 'We can do it!'. Anne thought for a while and answered:

"We can do it and we do give a f*#k! We need to do the battle with ourselves and to challenge and push one another. We are not there yet to compete with the guys on skate level but we'll get there if we care."

We asked her to add something that she never got the chance to say in an interview about the Skateducate project and skateboarding in general and Anne lit up and smiled at us:

"The project began with empowerment and skateboarding was just the tool for it. Now, it is more about skateboarding and the joy of it. Instead of calling it ‘skateboard camps for girls’ we started calling it ‘chicks with decks’. And yes, we would drink beers at the camps, we would have fun because it was for all of us, and for skateboarding! So that is why the girls are addicted to it now, to the skateboarding drug, because it is all about it!"

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Nothing else will make sense to be said here, Anne Eggebrecht knows what she is talking about and we can only agree - it is all about the passion for skateboarding and there is nothing more addictive than the pure fun of it. There is no gender or prejudice when the wheels are rolling and ollies and kickflips are popping!