How do skateboarders go professional? (2024)

Just like today, the first board companies in the early 1960s needed pros to help sell boards. They took the gnarliest and most talented teenagers they could find and boom – entered them into a pro contest.

As the sport evolved, it was still about selling boards, but the board companies focused on marketing and the value of the skateboarder meant skill, style and their ability to win contests. Throughout the Z-boys era, contests were the main endorsem*nt sealer, with photo ads in skate and surf magazines as the auxiliary marketing material. However, by the 1980s the two points of this scale would switch places.

Discover what it means to be a pro skater by watching the episode of Pushing Forward in the video player below.

Getting recognised

Documentation in both print and video began to outweigh contests. Skateboarders began to be judged not based on their ability to bring home a medal for their sponsors but on the photos and video footage they could create for full-length projects and the pages of Skateboarder, Big Brother and Thrasher Magazine. A skateboarder would prove his or herself to said sponsor with the amount of footage (and the quality of that footage) as a commitment to not only the brand but skateboarding. Instead of hoping paying competition goers would come and see your skater skate (advertising your brand), teenagers across the globe could pop in a VHS or flip through the magazines and watch them over and over again.

For many pro skaters it always began with someone in the industry first taking notice of them. Sometimes this is in the wild, random encounters, like Tony Hawk, who first saw Andrew Reynolds or Jamie Thomas, who first saw Elissa Steamer. Other times it was the contest circuit where someone would get noticed. Take Tampa Am in Florida. Felipe Gustavo was first discovered as a Brazilian phenom after winning the contest in 2007. The rest is history for Felipe.

Evolving as a pro

After a skater is discovered, a company will start sending him or her boxes of company goods. The skater then produces more footage and photos wearing and skating the product they are ‘flowed’. Afterwards, the company has a photo to send to the magazines announcing their newest amateur rider. A few hundred bucks a month is now sent with each box and depending on the footage and their ability to gel with the team, the rider will be invited on tour. Soon the association with said brand is so strong it's clear that the rider's on the team. If things continue in this direction, the board company will eventually turn the rider pro, adding their name to the bottom of a board and qualifying them to enter pro contests.

Although the ways in which skateboarders reach the pro ranks has changed over time, the accomplishment has never wavered in recognition and reverence from skateboarding and its peers. Truly, anyone who has ever stepped on a skateboard with the aspirations to go professional understands this feat is at the heart of the passion that drives skateboarding not only to new heights, but as an industry and an economy. That is precisely why this list was drafted in a way that reflects how these skateboarders influenced the professional landscape (and continue to do so).

How much do they get paid?

Professional skateboarders have always been paid by their sponsors and from the earnings of professional skate competitions. While these mechanisms have largely remained the same, the landscape has dramatically changed. Novel forms of entertainment like television shows, podcasts, reality television, video games and films have helped these professional skateboarders become some of the most influential of all time.

That being said, the majority of professional skateboarders are not afforded such opportunities. It is largely believed the average professional skateboarder makes US$1,000–$,3000 a month, with the mean somewhere around $30,000 a year. The top-tier skateboarders can make up to $10,000 a month, but these skaters make up less than 10 percent of professional skateboarders. There are many who hope that skateboarding’s induction into the Olympic Games will raise earnings but for a profession built by passion and has never been ‘about the money’, it’s hard to say.

What we do know for sure is professional skateboarders are some of the most unique and special individuals on earth, each one of them a piece of stained glass in the mosaic of the skateboarding industry.