Emerica Team 2002.

This was skateboarding.

I decided to do a week of group team ads. Team ads can be a little hit or miss, depending on how the art direction goes. For companies with smaller teams that actually skate together, they tend to occur more naturally. Otherwise group photos can drift into the territory of a forced yearbook picture, especially if a theme is involved. One positive is that you know who all is on the team at a given point. Or who is off the team, depending on how things are going.

This is the Emerica team from 2002. The picture was taken in either late 2001 or early 2002. You have Ed Templeton, Erik Ellington, Heath Kirchart, Tosh Townend, Andrew Reynolds, and Donny Barley. Everybody except Barley would have a full part in Emerica's This Is Skateboarding video from 2003. I like how Ed and Erik are both sporting sunglasses.

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My friend Steve passed away suddenly on Friday. He's in the Vision Street Wear shirt on the left. I'm standing next to him with our friends Jay and Paul to the right. The photo is from the late fall of 1992, probably during Thanksgiving break, but possibly on the front end of winter break. Steve’s brother Dan took it. Steve snapped a few other photos that afternoon. We went skateboarding at the college on a cold and dry Saturday. I don’t recall if it was a good day, so let’s just call it a day. Skateboarding was in a weird and frustrating place in the early 1990s so sometimes it wasn’t always fun. Jay broke his board and it looks like Paul might have cracked his, too. I think I landed an ollie down a bigger set of stairs that don’t exist any longer. Anyway, enough of my rambling on early 1990s skateboarding, take the time to appreciate your friends when they are around because you never know when they might be gone.

Transworld - April 2002 Volume 20 Number 4