Professional skateboarder Atita Verghese is on a mission to get more girls in India to skateboard

Women, elegantly dressed in sarees, glide across the smooth concrete with their saree ends carefully tucked inside to ensure freedom of movement. Alongside them, young girls jump onto the skateboards as they navigate the streets, dodging obstacles, with the rhythmic sound of wheels rolling echoing through the air.

Such are the glimpses one can see on Girls Skate India, an Instagram page formed by Atita Verghese, a skilled skateboarder from Bengaluru. The page aims to encourage women's participation in skateboarding.

Verghese spends most of her days either skateboarding, teaching young girls and boys, or building skate parks. With skateboarding being her passion, she aims to empower other young girls and build a new generation of women skateboarders.

“For the longest time, I have been the only girl skateboarding with guys. Since there are only a few of us, it just gets lonely out there sometimes,” she adds.

Verghese is not only the first female professional skateboarder in India but is also the only sponsored skateboarder in the country with Vans (an American manufacturer of skateboarding shoes and related apparel) making her the first rider on its team.

She has been featured in the third season of Red Bull’s Skate Tales and has also cameoed in the 2021 Netflix film Skater Girl. In 2015, Verghese started Girl Skate India, an online community to encourage girls and women to start skateboarding, with the hopes to get more girls into skateboarding.

The beginning

An active child, Verghese was involved in sports since childhood. She credits her mother for supporting her athletic ambitions. “I played every sport in school and was also a national-level athlete by my early teens,” she says.

When Verghese was 19 years old, her friend Abhishek, who was a part of Holy Stoked Collective (a group of skateboards), introduced her to the sport.

“From the moment I first saw and tried skateboarding, I loved it,” she says adding, “For me, skateboarding is a mode of self-expression. It’s freeing and creative.”

From then on, there was no looking back. She became a part of the collective and helped in building the first free-to-use skate park in 2013. She has so far built over ten skate parks across India.

“Initially I did not think much about the less number of girls in the sport as I was very habitual of playing with the boys. However, after a few years, I realised that something was wrong. Eventually, the lack of adequate representation of women in the sport started playing on my mind,” she says.

With that thought, she started the Girls Skate India community in 2015. “It was not easy to be alone in the sport for so long. Through this initiative I aim to make the way easy for other girls and increase their participation in the sport,” she adds.

Girls Skate India is gaining traction, she says, without disclosing the number of participants in the community.

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Shraddha Gaikwad, a young skater from Pune started skating in 2018. “I came to Bengaluru for a competition in 2018 and there I happened to meet Atita,” Gaikwad says.

Whenever Gaikwad is in Bengaluru, she practices with Verghese. “Atita helps a lot in telling us techniques and tricks of street-style skating,” she says, adding, “I feel she has been a very big support and a role model for all the women who genuinely care about skateboarding.”

Verghese, now 29, has seen many ups and downs in her journey to becoming a professional skateboarder. She recalls that as a teenager she received a lot of unsolicited comments from strangers. She remembers people asking if she was a boy or a girl since she had short hair. Verghese specifically recalls an instance where a man told her to grow her hair and dress up like a woman to get more girls into the sport.

“People cannot believe that a girl can skateboard and so they make such statements. The worst part is that they said such thing loudly enough for me to hear it,” she says adding, “Such comments can be so unsettling for a teenager as you are already struggling to find your place in the world.”

Encouraging more women skateboarders

The Girl Skate India is a platform that works for promoting inclusivity in skateboarding. Verghese organises free skateboarding workshops for young girls which are often coupled with other workshops like photography, and painting.

“Skateboarding to me is not just skateboarding, it’s all this other amazing stuff as well,” she adds.

In December 2015, Verghese and the Girl Skate India team embarked on India's inaugural all-girls skateboarding tour. They visited Bengaluru, Goa, Kovalam (Kerala), and Hampi (Karnataka), uniting 12 female skateboarders from nine countries.

She believes that to improve one’s skating skills, one needs to practice more on a variety of surfaces, streets, obstacles, skate parks, and spots. However, there is a dearth of skateboarding parks in India.

Additionally, since there is a lack of government-owned skate parks, Verghese needs sponsors for conducting the workshops, which lowers the frequency of such meet-ups.

She believes that skateboarding has been a boy’s club, however, now the situation is changing as many women skateboarders are getting the limelight. But she says that this change is the result of the work female skateboarders who care about female skateboarding have been doing tirelessly for years.

“The field is slowly starting to level up but there's a lot more work to be done,” Verghese says.