Community Corner
Video: Team Pain Skateboard Park Under Construction in Greater Brandon
The skate park's street-course design features a 9-foot-6-inch bowl, radius ramps, stairs, rails, ledges, banks and more, amounting to some 10,000 square feet at Providence Park East.
Under construction in the Greater Brandon area of Providence Park East is an attraction that is sure to entice skateboarders from throughout Hillsborough County and beyond.
pegged the skate park at 10,000 square feet, with a cost of $500,000, but it was Chris Berry, a foreman on the job, who filled us in with some details about what the park will come to mean to those who love to skate.
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Berry should know.
He works for Team Pain, a company owned and operated by skaters, that for 30 years has been creating custom skate parks for communities and skateboarders worldwide.
Find out what's happening in Brandonwith free, real-time updates from Patch.
For Berry, his work is “a dream job,” he said, as he gave Brandon Patch an impromptu tour of the work under way at Providence Park East, south of Lumsden Road and north of Bloomingdale Avenue, at 5720 Providence Road.
“We’re a design-build company given a lot of freedom, as skateboarders, to adjust that design as we build it,” Berry said. “We ride it as we build it. We test it to get it right. “
He calls the coming attraction in Greater Brandon a “street course,” featuring a bowl, “like a swimming pool, 9 feet, six inches deep.”
Included in the course are radius ramps, stairs, rails, ledges, banks and pool coping, which is the term used to identify the stone or, in this case, concrete material used to cap the bowl shell wall.
As for Berry, his love of skateboarding started at an early age.
Not much interested in team sports, he took to the skateboard, a physical activity not dependent on a team of players.
“I’m supporting my family, living the dream, taking something I love and turning it into a career,” said Berry, who lives in Colorado but has spent lots of time building parks in Florida and other places, including Belgium.
Team Pain, he said, has built parks in Apollo Beach, Tampa, Dunedin, Sarasota, New Tampa, Inglewood and Naples. Coming soon, a park in Bradenton.
The skate park at Providence Park East is expected to be completed within six months.
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