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An origin story

THE STORY
OF DETOUR

Before it was an initiative, Detour was just a bunch of kids with skateboards.

Hoosick Falls, NY Five kids, one crew Now: Ogden to Salt Lake City
Four of the original Detour crew crowded around a kitchen table full of fast food, left to right: Salvatore Rizzo, Kris Hansen, Marc DiFusco, Taylor Walrath

Left to right: Salvatore Rizzo, Kris Hansen, Marc DiFusco, Taylor Walrath.

01

How it started.

Detour started when a handful of kids in Hoosick Falls, NY found each other through skating. They were around 11 years old. Taylor was the new kid that year, seventh grade, and skating was how he found his people.

It didn't happen all at once. A kid with a board meets another kid with a board, and within a year or two that turns into four or five of them who are always hanging out. Eventually the group settled at around five. The more time they spent skating and getting into normal kid trouble together, the tighter they got, until there wasn't a day that went by without seeing each other.

"I was the new kid in 7th grade. I had an interest in skating, like most boys did in the early 2000s, and it led me to a small group of kids locally who also skated. We tightened down over that first and second year into about 4 or 5 of us who were always hanging out."

Taylor
Two of the original Detour crew on a bridge, holding their skateboards
Two of the crew, boards in hand.
02

The name.

Nobody sat down and planned it out. The crew wanted to be a team, the way they saw the sponsored skaters be a team, and the name came out of pure kid chaos: a street sign, the idea of taking a different path, and it stuck. Detour.

Outside the crew, almost nobody knew what it meant. Inside it, Detour was everything: the name, the club, the identity.

"I think collectively we wanted to be a team, like how we saw the sponsored guys. We ended up settling on the name out of pure childish chaos. Naturally skating goes against the grain, and we just happened upon Detour based on some street signs and taking a different path, or at least so I remember."

Taylor
03

The crew.

They skated everywhere: streets, driveways, stairs, whatever smooth ground they could find, and each other's houses. The real home base was a local tennis court they called the Courts, mostly unused and smooth enough to skate flat ground and games of SKATE for hours. It wasn't always welcome. They got hassled, and arrested more than once, for skating a tennis court.

When they weren't skating, it was normal kid stuff: PS2, especially Need for Speed Most Wanted, paintball, building forts, cliff jumping at the local spot. The one thing none of them cared about was organized sports.

They didn't run with the popular kids or the jocks. They liked emo and punk music, kept mostly to themselves, and got labeled weird kids and misfits for it. They weren't trying to cause trouble. Skating itself was enough to make cops, business owners, and other kids in town treat them like they were.

"We had a local spot called the Courts. While it wasn't always skate friendly, we've been arrested a couple times just simply skating the tennis court, it was the local watering hole. A nice day didn't go by where we didn't make our way down there. We spent equal, if not more, hours at that simple flat-ground spot than we did in school."

Taylor

Being different was a love-hate thing. The clothes, the style, the way they carried themselves, it confused a lot of people who weren't in it. They got picked on for it more than they'd like to admit. Mostly, it didn't bother them much. If anything, they kind of enjoyed it.

A skater from the crew doing a trick off a stone ledge outside a government building, with other skaters in the background
Skating whatever was in front of them.
Two of the crew posing with a No Skateboarding sign
They knew exactly how welcome they were.
04

The identity.

Detour stopped being just a name pretty quickly. It went on shirts they made themselves with Sharpies, on notebooks, on cars, and eventually on their own skin. They put together homemade logos and small videos, mostly because they wanted to be seen and recognized in some way, and they had the restless energy of a bunch of kids with nothing but time and a shared obsession to burn it on.

Nobody outside the crew really understood what Detour meant. That was kind of the point.

Four of the crew in front of a hand-painted Detour SK8 star mural, holding their skateboards
The name, spray-painted onto a wall, star and all.
A car spray-painted with graffiti and the word SKATE across the back bumper
Even the car got the treatment.
05

A broken deck meant something.

Everyone rode whatever worked: name-brand decks, hand-me-downs, cheap blanks. Nobody had real money for gear. So when a deck broke, it wasn't just an equipment problem, it was a real problem, because that kid couldn't skate with everyone else anymore.

Sal remembers breaking a deck once, right after his dad had told him a new one was coming soon. His dad's money didn't come through when expected, and Sal was devastated. The crew found him an old deck to get by on until his dad could eventually get him a new Almost Impact Support deck. Not being able to skate felt like being cut off from the crew, like losing a piece of who he was.

"On the occasion someone did break a board it was a mad scramble to find them a replacement. If we couldn't afford one, which was the norm, someone had a used, beat-to-shit deck that would get them by for a couple weeks until they could convince their parents of the dire need for another one. Later in life we stocked up on some cheap Canadian maple blank decks as backups if anyone were to bust one. Even if they kinda sucked."

Taylor

Taylor remembers it too, breaking his first real pro board, a Baker deck, while learning nollies, and waiting weeks for a replacement. As a kid, that wait felt like forever. It was the first time it really landed how expensive skating could be when you didn't have much.

The rule was simple. Nobody should be unable to hang out with the crew because they didn't have a board.

06

Growing up, and apart.

The crew felt like family. Everybody could count on everybody. But eventually people got older, and older means people move. First across town, then across states, and it got a lot harder to skate together after that.

For a while they fought it. Taylor got a car and would drive around picking everyone up, including Sal, who'd moved the furthest, to skate new spots wherever he'd landed. Sal was devastated when he first moved away from the crew. Everyone kept skating in some form, but mostly on their own.

Around 11

A handful of kids in Hoosick Falls, NY find each other through skating. The crew forms, around five of them.

Teenage years

Sharpie shirts, homemade logos, the Courts, and a shared rule: nobody gets left behind over a broken deck.

Growing apart

People move, first towns, then states. It gets harder to skate together. Everyone keeps skating, mostly alone.

Years later

Sal starts thinking about bringing Detour back. Taylor's reaction is pure nostalgia, and he's in.

Today

Detour Skate Initiative: the same idea, grown up, pointed at the next kid who needs it.

07

Bringing it back.

Years after the crew scattered, Sal started thinking about bringing Detour back. His reasoning was pretty simple: why not. It felt like something they were always meant to bring back as adults.

"When Sal wanted to bring Detour back I got pretty nostalgic. I mean, life happened and we all moved in different directions and grew into adults, and in a way almost forgot about the past that created us. I'm pretty happy, even if it doesn't mean much to anyone else, to remember and speak about what we experienced and what we tried to create."

Taylor
08

Detour
Today.

Back then, if one of us broke a board, the crew found a way to get him back skating. Detour Skate Initiative does the same thing now, for a kid who doesn't have a crew with a spare deck lying around.

The goal was never to make every kid a skateboarder. It's to make sure a kid who already loves it doesn't have to stop just because they can't afford a deck.

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"To the kids today, Detour, or whatever it is you want to call it for yourself, is a reason, an excuse to express yourself unconditionally. We clung to skateboarding and it never let us down. It made our friend group tighter and gave us a purpose when it felt like we didn't have one. I hope everyone, in some big or small way, can be a part of something similar. It doesn't have to be skateboarding. Skating just happens to be our shared passion and outlet."

Taylor
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