Joy Rides

Shine Arslanian, 7, gets ready to skate down a ramp at a SkateMD clinic in Sacramento on March 15.

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It’s still hoodie and beanie weather on a spring morning at the 28th and B Street Skate Park near the American River when Deven Esquivel steps onto the surface of a skateboard for the first time in his 5-year-old existence. Donning a mohawk-topped helmet, he already looks the part of a daredevil rider.

Having broken his wrist a few weeks prior, Deven is also wearing a brace. But judging from his wide grin, that broken wrist is the last thing on his mind. Having been cleared by his doctor for this morning’s adventure, a bimonthly clinic hosted by the Sacramento-based nonprofit skateboarding organization called SkateMD, he is beaming in anticipation.

With the assistance of instructors lifting his upper body, he drops off the curb and grinds a rail placed along the floor. Grinding is when the skateboard’s trucks—those aluminum alloy chassis that connect the board to the wheels—slide along the edged top of a concrete or wooden ledge or down a handrail. That “grinding” sound is part of the foundational soundtrack in skateboarding, authenticating the experience for beginners like Deven.

Once his wheels hit the ground again, he keeps one knee on his board and pushes with his other foot, “knee boarding” across the skatepark, steering with his hands on the nose of the board.

He’s hooked.

And while the feat is remarkable enough, given his age, size, broken wrist and complete lack of experience, it’s all the more so, considering that Deven was diagnosed at birth with Down syndrome, a genetic condition which often results in developmental delays.

Deven Esquivel, 5, is all smiles as he learns to skateboard at a SkateMD event.

His mother, Cristal, says that when she first heard of SkateMD—which celebrated its 10th anniversary last November—and considered enrolling Deven in its program, she “was really nervous, because I know he definitely has a difficult time with balance and coordination.”

But now she has no doubt that her decision to enroll her son in the clinic turned out to be the right one. “He had the biggest smile on his face, like, ‘Look at me. Look what I’m capable of doing on my own,’ ” she says. “Being on a skateboard, with that wind hitting his face, he had no fear. He was just free.”

That’s exactly the kind of reaction that the organization’s co-founders, Melanie “Mel” Biesecker and Andrea “Drea” Bibelheimer, hoped for back in 2014 when they first conceived of SkateMD in Drea’s Auburn home, which boasts its own built-in skatepark in the backyard. (The MD stands for their first name initials—when they realized their combined initials were MD, it reminded them of WebMD, and the name was born.)

Both women—longtime skateboarders themselves—had worked in the charity sector, but this would be their first attempt at building a nonprofit from scratch. Mel, who works for a not-for-profit renewable electricity pro- vider, had extensive community volunteer experience with organizations like Loaves & Fishes and dozens of other local nonprofits, and worked in philanthropy and grantmaking for Wells Fargo. And Drea spent nearly a decade with the California Rural Indian Health Board (supervising the nonprofit’s Head Start programs for low-income families) and currently serves as the senior corporate social responsibility manager for an investment firm.

SkateMD provides loaner skateboards to riders at each clinic.

By 2014, the two were already discussing holding events for kids with disabilities (Mel had hosted a skate event for children back in 2010), but the impetus for finally moving forward was a stomach-turning bullying incident against a child with autism that went viral. The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge—where people submitted to having ice water poured over them to raise money for ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, a neurodegenerative disorder with a low survival rate—had become a global phenomenon that summer. It proved a highly successful campaign, generating millions of dollars for research. But in a Cleveland suburb, a group of teens convinced a 15-year-old boy with autism to participate. Instead of pouring ice water on him, however, the group poured a mixture of urine, spit and chewed-up tobacco on him, and then filmed the episode with the victim’s own phone and posted it on Instagram.

When Drea first saw the video soon after its release in September, she called up Mel crying. Mel drove from her home in Grass Valley to Drea’s house in Auburn the same night to try to figure out how to take action to “reverse that unkindness.” They sat down at Drea’s kitchen table, opened a laptop and started brainstorming ideas.

Their solution: Hold a skate clinic for kids—ranging in age from 5 to 17, with physical, developmental, emotional and familial challenges—with the intention of giving them the confidence they needed to excel in life outside of the skatepark and, of course, to spark moments of joy. Since skateboarding was what they both knew, it was the natural vehicle for such an enterprise. “We wanted to connect skateboarders with the disability community and hoped there was an anti-bullying aspect as one of the benefits,” says Drea, even though it might seem counterintuitive to those who don’t know skater culture.

The fact is, skateboarding can be intimidating for anyone. It’s loud, fast and improvisational by design. It requires balance and core strength while moving on four wheels. But since it’s not a team sport, there’s also no peer pressure. There’s no shot clock or other countdown timers forcing action within strict limits.

And since they’d both worked in the nonprofit field already, they had the organizational backgrounds to set their wheels in motion quickly, and they held the clinic just two months later, on Nov. 8, 2014. But it soon became clear that this event wouldn’t be the last. (The recent July clinic was the 60th one that SkateMD has hosted.) Filing to set up a nonprofit of their own, they determined that the organization would be both run and staffed by an entirely volunteer team—a rotating group that numbers around 70 people for any given clinic. “None of us are paid,” explains Drea. “We like our day jobs. We do this as an extra joy hustle.”

SkateMD co-founders Drea Bibelheimer (top) and Mel Biesecker at a skatepark in Yuba City on April 21

Without needing to worry about overhead costs, the group has been able to focus fully on producing its skating clinics, which take place mostly in Sacramento’s skateparks, with occasional events in Chico and Napa. Over the last decade, the gatherings have proven so popular that they typically fill all 25 spots on the first day of online registration, and there’s almost always a waiting list. Cristal Esquivel says it took her about a year and a half to get Deven into his first clinic.

As news of the program spread, Drea and Mel began fielding requests from all over the country wanting to know how to replicate their program in their areas. The two of them give advice when they can, but stop short of any formal consulting, having decided long ago to focus on building their success here at home, one child at a time.

One of those children is Otto Hoeft of Roseville. Otto’s mother, Adriane, grew up in the ’90s as an avid skateboarder—one of the only girls she knew of in the largely male-centric skater culture. Such was her love of skateboarding, which continued into her 20s, that she dreamed of someday having kids who shared her passion.

Otto was her first child and, for a while, was an active baby boy. He was walking by 8 months when most kids start between 10 and 15 months. “But one morning, at 17 months old, he couldn’t stand,” she recalls. “He just couldn’t get up. He couldn’t bear weight on his legs.” After a series of tests, Otto was diagnosed with an extremely rare neurological disorder, transverse myelitis, an interruption of the body’s nervous system caused by inflammation along the spinal cord. The Cleveland Clinic says there are only one to eight new cases out of a million in the U.S. every year. It left him paralyzed from the waist down.

He attended SkateMD’s very first clinic in 2014 when he had just turned 6. “He was really little when he started,” says Adriane. “He was scared because it was something he had never done before, and it’s pretty loud.” It was also the first sport he’d ever tried.

Without the use of his legs, Otto skates by sitting on the board with his legs crossed and utilizes his upper body strength—developed by using a wheelchair since he was 20 months old—to steer.

Now 16, Otto has participated in dozens of clinics over the past decade and they’ve given him the confidence to try other adaptive sports, including wheelchair rugby, floor basketball, water skiing, archery, and riding a recumbent bike, which he powers with his arms. “He’s even talking to his high school track coach about finding a way to participate,” Adriane says. “Everything that he’s been interested in came after SkateMD. Now he’s like, ‘OK, I can do this.’ ”

Mel and Drea may have conceived of the idea of SkateMD and understood the power of skateboarding, along with the ins and outs of community organizing, but from the beginning they knew they needed partners who had experience serving children with disabilities, because they didn’t.

“I said, ‘Let me call my friend Erik.’ He worked at Easterseals at the time and volunteered at the Skate for Kids event I did,” Mel recalls.

As Mel and Drea began to assemble their “working board” (no mere quarterly office meetings for this group; everyone is hands on), Erik Nielsen was a natural fit—a board-certified pediatric physical therapist who has been skateboarding since the late ’80s.

While Erik was studying at Sacramento State, during a perceptual motor development course, his professor had invited him to participate in a five-day-long, overnight summer camp for youth with physical disabilities. “I was way outside my comfort zone,” he says now. “I’d never done anything like that. And I just fell in love with it—seeing kids thrive and enjoy what they’re doing.” As he pursued both undergraduate and master’s degrees in physical therapy, he focused on pediatrics “to get that little taste of that camp life every day.”

Today, when he’s not volunteering with SkateMD, Erik works with children from birth to 3 years old experiencing delays in hitting motor skill milestones and identifies red flags for conditions like Down syndrome or cerebral palsy. But SkateMD is always in the back of his mind: “I chase people down in the community, like, ‘Hey, you might be interested in this. We do clinics for kids with special needs.’ ”

Sahasra Gangisetty attends the March SkateMD clinic at the 28th and B Street Skate Park.

Erik partners with Andrea Battle, a pediatric occupational therapist who joined the board in 2019, to pair volunteers, aka “skate buddies,” with the appropriate child for each SkateMD clinic. Andrea grew up skateboarding in Napa and has worked at California Children’s Services in Sacramento for nine years, helping kids with cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophy or related spinal disorders.

“Some of the kids have issues with noises or crowds. Many are limited in their ability to participate in other activities, because of their social skills, activity level or physical ability,” Andrea says. “Just coming [to a clinic] and socializing a little bit is a huge win. Standing on a skateboard for a few minutes is massive. We do a good job of not making it feel like you’re going to therapy.”

With its northern wall missing, the American River’s cool breeze glides into the semi-enclosed skatepark that houses a large assortment of wood ramps, rain or shine. Large quarter pipes anchor both sides of the facility to help skaters generate speed, and small grindable boxes and jump ramps dot the large swaths of flat ground with plenty of room to push around.

As volunteers gather an hour before the clinic participants, they receive one-page sheets about the kids they’ll be working with that day, with helpful information based on Erik and Andrea’s pre-clinic conversations with each child’s parents. A handheld buzzer notifies each volunteer when their assigned skater has arrived.

“Our adult skateboarders say, ‘I always wanted to do work in the community, but I couldn’t find my thing,’ ” Mel says. “And now, this is their thing.”

“It’s so interesting to have all these cross-generational volunteers who are 14 to 60 years old and are friends,” Drea adds. Some have beards full of gray hair while others are still in high school.

From left: SkateMD board members Erik Nielsen, Mel Biesecker, Andrea Battle, Drea Bibelheimer and Patrick Guild.

When the kids arrive, they choose their skateboards. Meanwhile, a SkateMD instructor shows other volunteers how to position themselves at the nose and tail of the rider’s board, placing their feet near the skateboard’s rear wheels like a brake, preventing board movement so the child can find their balance. As the boys and girls get comfortable on their boards, volunteers hold their hands or sides, encouraging them to bend their knees as they begin to roll across the skatepark, adjusting their balance to this newfound feeling.

Once it’s time to ride, some kids zoom across the park with their assigned advisors barely able to keep up, while others cautiously traverse the ramps while holding the adults’ hands. If a skater is about to fall, volunteers act as human harnesses and lift them up and away from the ground to avoid injury.

That sense of freedom is what motivates Gwen Hall in her job as a certified therapeutic recreation specialist at the Shriners Children’s Northern California hospital in Sacramento. She also comes armed with nearly 20 years of experience volunteering for a nonprofit in Chico that specializes in adaptive recreation—sports that have been modified for people with disabilities. It’s a program that over the years has offered everything from an adaptive form of skateboarding using wheelchairs to rugby and waterskiing. Though she herself hasn’t skated since she was little, her volunteer experience sparked her passion, and career, in pediatric physical therapy.

“I work with kids with acute illness and injury, so they have brand-new injuries,” she says. “They may never be able to walk again when they could walk last week, and they’re saying, ‘I can’t do this. I’m never going to be able to do this again.’ And it’s my favorite part of my job to say, ‘Yes, you can. Absolutely  you can. Let me show you. Look at this skatepark. Let’s go skate it. There are no boundaries.’ ”

Gwen says the value of recreation is particularly important for kids. “Play is a universal language of children. That is how they communicate. Kids don’t have that [adult] language yet,” she explains. “Play is where they can express themselves—their mood, interests, personality traits—as well as their physical abilities.”

A few weeks after the March 2025 clinic, Mel and Drea are in Drea’s living room and the sounds of skaters emanate from outside, where there’s a swimming pool built to skate, not swim, with the sound of grinds along the edged top of the pool’s walls increasing throughout the conversation.

At this moment, the two women are weeks from announcing they’re stepping down at the end of this year from the five-person board they created, along with the fifth board member, Patrick Guild. Erik and Andrea will continue to manage SkateMD flanked by many of the same longtime volunteers, while recruiting new board members.

For Andrea, her goal is to keep the program “the same for as long as possible” and to gradually integrate changes to their well-oiled machine. “Drea and Mel’s energy is always going to be something that I try to channel,” she says.

Ian Bohlander prepares to roll into action.

The vibe is reflective in Drea’s living room. Mel considers SkateMD “one of the best things that I’ve ever done in my life.”

Still, stepping down from the board is bittersweet given the decade-long community that continues to fuel the program into its next years of programming, clinics and skate sessions centered around kindness and compassion.

“When we started, we thought we were giving,” Drea says, “But then, how much we got from it, it’s…”

Mel finishes her friend’s thought—one they both share. “It’s immeasurable.”

Fortunately, when it comes to the impact of the program, that feeling is not one that is exclusive to its founders.

Every clinic concludes with a “skills demo” in which each skater gets to showcase one thing that they learned that day, and to be showered with applause from their peers.

At the March clinic, Yessica Cervantes brought her 11-year-old son, Lincoln, who has been diagnosed with autism and ADHD. Prior to skateboarding, Lincoln had tried team sports but found the downtime involved—when he wasn’t actively participating—to be challenging. But skateboarding, she says, is something where “he is able to control his own movements, and something that he has full agency over. And people on the spectrum don’t always feel like they have agency over things that are happening.”

With skateboarding, there’s no concern about slowing anyone down or disappointing anyone else on a team. It’s just you and the board.

Lincoln Cervantes celebrates after successfully dropping into a half pipe.

“The skater community, at its best, is one of the most open cultures,” Yessica says. “And when Lincoln shows up to the skatepark—the teenagers, the older kids, the grown-ups—everybody is quick to help him out when he’s doing something that is not working, or they clap when he does something really cool. And that kind of encouragement, that kind of open positivity, is really, really powerful for someone who’s on the spectrum. There’s not a lot of positive feedback that an autistic child—at least my autistic child—gets from random people.”

But there certainly was on this day.

Throughout the session, Lincoln practiced something called “dropping in,” where the skater places the tail of the board at the top of a ramp and leans their body forward to ride down the ramp. And as the day progressed, Lincoln was “dropping” into taller and taller ramps, with onlookers cheering him on. While he opted not to drop into the biggest bowl on this day, the support he felt from everyone all morning made a lasting impact on him.

Weeks after the clinic, Yessica says, “He has told every single person we’ve met [about that day], including somebody today. He will tell me, ‘Show them pictures. Show them pictures. Show them pictures.’ ”

She also explains how the program has helped him deal with his anxiety. During panic attacks, Lincoln concentrates on memories of riding his skateboard and the cheers he heard that morning. “He didn’t feel inadequate. He felt awesome, capable and courageous,” she says of his experience that spring morning. “It was the greatest day of his life.”