Friday night at Carousel Skate Center — adult skate night — is kind of like going to a club.
R&B and disco music blare through the speakers. The lights are on low, flickering past a disco ball. A full bar is set up behind the concession stand.
But here, everyone’s on roller skates. And many of them move around the rink like they were born wearing them.
There’s 64-year-old Greg Cummings, who skates around the rink backward, weaving his feet in and out.
“When I first started, the whole idea behind roller-skating was if you knew how to dance, you were trying to adapt that over to roller skates,” Cummings said. “… That's still my style.”
Crystal “Chicken” Davis is another regular. When a Michael Jackson song comes on, she pulls a move called the coffin: She’s balanced on just her left foot, with her body held barely above the floor. She’s holding her right leg off the ground and perpendicular to her torso.
“Everybody has their own style,” Davis said. “… I'm like a smooth, slow skater.”
And then there’s Cadillac Drac, who's been skating in Wichita since the 1960s. When he steps on the rink, he glides into the center to synchronize with a group slow dancing. He says he picked up a sort of sliding technique from skating in Los Angeles.
“They skate sideways, and they move their feet and move back and forth,” Drac said. “And it's just beautiful to watch.”
Here at Carousel’s adult skate night, roller-skating is a skill, an art form, a social event and great exercise. But many who have skated for years — or decades — fear it’s a shrinking hobby.
Joyland’s skate rink, Skate East and Skateland North have all closed, leaving just three major rinks in town. And the ones that remain don’t have big crowds the way people who skated in the 1970s and ’80s remember.
“We stopped skating here in the ’80s, sort of,” Drac said. “I mean, you'd have … a little bit here and a little bit there. But it wasn't like it used to be.
“At Skateland North, when we went on a Sunday night, there was about 800 people in that place. And I'm sure it went past the fire marshal capacity.”
Skaters at Carousel did say that Usher’s Super Bowl halftime performance this year, famously on roller skates, led to a brief resurgence in the pastime. And a younger generation of Wichitans say the sport blew up on social media during the early days of the pandemic, leading to a spike in interest.
“What's really changed post-COVID is adults have gotten back into it,” said Austin Ottoway, who owns Carousel Skate Center. "... Really, through COVID, and largely social media, people have been exposed to a completely different style of skating. Mostly adults have been exposed to this.
“So, we see a lot of people starting to pick up and emulate each other and share different types and styles of skating.”
That’s what 32-year-old Meris Carte says, too. But she says her brand of skating isn’t always found at a roller rink.
“Because of COVID and social media, people were buying roller skates, and they were practicing in their kitchen or in their driveway,” Carte said.
Carte herself has been skating most of her life, joining a roller derby team when she was 18. After a concussion, she moved on in 2019 and looked for other skating communities.
She found park skating, where roller skaters use the ledges and bowls in city skate parks to learn tricks like 180s — half spins — and even cartwheels. Park skating doesn’t have the music or disco balls like the roller rink, but it does have the same focus on growing skills over time.
“When you're park skating, you get to experience weightlessness,” Carte said. “There's times when you're doing a cartwheel in the bowl, and I can feel like the absence of gravity. It's just a fun moment.
“And I always get to surprise myself as well. I'm building skills. I can see myself progress over time.”
Carte organizes a Wichita skate group on social media called the Flyover Skate Crew. In addition to park skating, Flyover sets up outdoor “river rolls,” which are open to anyone wanting to skate on the sidewalk next to the Arkansas River.
She says the social media page was a way of formalizing a rapidly-growing interest in group skates.
“The roller skating community, what I really love about it, is that it is super inclusive,” Carte said. “We have people that are all spectrums of the gender identity, of sexuality. And no one cares.
“We're just here to roller skate and here to have a good time and support each other.”
Roller-skating is popular enough in Wichita that a brick-and-mortar skate shop, Cherry Bomb Skates, opened in Riverside last August. The shop is for all types of skaters: from rink to park to roller derby.
Delaney Smith, 31, says that the sport’s growth in popularity is powering her store — and she’s seeing interest from all ages, from 2 to 75.
“If you scroll on Instagram for five minutes, I mean, you can see all these young people out here: Chicago, Houston, Atlanta, everywhere, just skating,” Smith said. “So, I don't think it's going to go anywhere at all. I'm not worried about it whatsoever.”
