We are very proud to announce that one of our Fuel Dock team members, Nicole Hause, will be competing in the X Games this summer! Nicole is only a high school senior and is already ranked among the top five professional women skateboarders in the world!!
Don’t forget to tune-in June, 2-6 and cheer her on!!
The following article excerpts are from www.twincities.com – click here to read it in full.
“Eighteen-year-old Nicole Hause, a Stillwater Area High School senior, is ranked among the top five professional women skateboarders in the world. She’ll have to miss her high school graduation because she’s due to compete in the X Games in Austin, Texas, from June 2 to June 5, against the best skateboarders from all over the globe.
She has been traveling extensively and competing professionally since she was 15.
In 2020, she hopes to compete in the Summer Olympics in Tokyo. Olympic organizers have proposed adding five new sports to the Tokyo games, including skateboarding, and Hause plans to be on the first U.S. women’s team.
“I would be stoked to do it,” Hause said. “I’ve got time. I’ll be about 22, and that’s basically the prime age for skateboarding. It couldn’t be any better for me, really.”
Hause started skateboarding on the day she turned 10. She got a skateboard as a birthday present, but it didn’t feel right or roll fast enough, she said, so she upgraded to a “real” board — a Van Magera Element — from Zumiez at Maplewood Mall.
A few weeks later, at a friend’s birthday party at the Graffiti Skateboard Park in Stillwater, Hause found her calling.
“That’s when I was, like, ‘Oh my god!’ ” she said. “I could drop in, and I didn’t even fall. Everyone else was kind of struggling, but I knew right away what to do. It was so cool. That’s one of my best memories.”
Hause, who had previously done gymnastics, began spending all her free time skateboarding and persuaded her father to build a miniature skateboard ramp at their house.
“I said ‘OK, but you’ve got to help me put every screw in this thing, and wear all your protection; otherwise I’m tearing it down,’ and she always did,” Jeff Hause said. “She was so little that she could do backside airs on it, and it was only 8 feet wide.”
As Nicole Hause became more serious about skateboarding, the family, which includes mom Missy and older brother Scott, had to make a decision: Move to southern California, where most American professional skateboarders live, or stay in Minnesota.
“Almost every boy or girl who turns professional moves to San Diego County, but Nicole wanted to stay and finish high school with her classmates,” Jeff Hause said. “We had to try and figure out how she could stay with it and live in Minnesota.”
The solution? Move to a 3-acre lot in West Lakeland Township and build a new house and a $125,000 barn to accommodate a 13-foot vertical ramp. A “vert ramp” is a form of half-pipe used in extreme sports like vert skateboarding.
Jeff Hause, who with his wife owns JG Hause Construction in Bayport, has been building and remodeling houses in the St. Croix River Valley since the early 1990s. He had to carefully design the 2,500-square-foot barn to meet code. He modeled the large wooden ramp — with a 90-degree drop in the first two feet — after one owned by professional skateboarder Tony Hawk.
Nicole Hause spends about two hours a day practicing in the barn; other serious skateboarders often join her.
“It’s actually a foot smaller than most ramps I go to out in California, but I like it,” she said. “It’s definitely my favorite. It’s more extreme (than others) because that’s a 90-degree wall that you’re dropping into.”
On a recent rainy afternoon, Hause stepped off the edge of the ramp on her Hoopla Samarria Brevard pro model skateboard and began running through her trademark tricks: frontside air, blindside fakie ollie, frontside ollie, backside indy and invert to fakie.
“Invert to fakie is probably the hardest,” she said. “That’s where I go into a hand plant, but I go in backwards instead of forwards. It’s kind of a blind trick. It’s hard to commit.”
Hause, 5-foot-2 and 120 pounds, twists, turns and stays suspended in air for several seconds at each pass. Rock music blares in the background. Her boyfriend, Josh Markert, 18, of Stillwater, films her.
Hause has been competing professionally since a competition three years ago at the Vans Skatepark in Oceanside, Calif. “It just kind of happened,” she said. “I entered a contest, and they didn’t have a 15-and-over amateur division at the time, so I just jumped right in with the pros, and I’ve been competing in that division ever since.”
In April, she came in third at the Vert Attack X competition in Malmö, Sweden, and won 1,800 krona, about $221. “You never know what you’re going to get, but it’s worth it just for the experience,” she said. “The media you get from it is super-fun. It was a great contest for exposure.”
Hause’s sponsors include Bern Helmets, House Board Shop, Hoopla skateboards and 187 Pads. She also has appeared in commercials, including one for Subway.
She does not have a coach, preferring instead to train on her own. “I don’t like people telling me what to do,” she said. “No one can teach you how to do your style. A bunch of people all skating and working together — that’s what really helps you.”
All photos courtesy of Pioneer Press (www.twincities.com).
