Skateboarding isn’t something you’d expect an eight-year-old boy to learn, but Ryder Delerume, a junior, managed that.

“My older brother used to skate, and all his friends, they would all skate,” Ryder said. “So, I just kind of started skating because of him…It was cool to see him do it as a little kid, and I was like ‘that’s dope, I wanna do that too’.”

Growing up, Ryder admired his older brother’s skateboarding and wanted to learn it. At age eight, he learned his first skateboarding trick, an Ollie. Since then, he’s dedicated his time to skateboarding.

Even after years have passed, Ryder still faces the same challenge head-on: commitment. He’d watched a lot of people give up on skateboarding, but he never lets it faze him because he loves his hobby.

“I don’t know, it’s just… commitment and stuff,” Ryder said. “Just the fact that it’s hard at first, but once you start doing it more it just gets more fun and easier to pick up. It’s just that I had friends that quit, but it’s still fun though.”

As a sophomore, he started making kooks (a skateboarding brand) videos and clothes. He says his job is to film his friends doing skateboarding tricks, but he also draws the designs for their kooks shirts and delivers them for screen-printing and selling.

“We’re releasing two crew necks and then two long-sleeves,” Ryder said. “We’re doing black-and-white crew neck, and then we’re doing a grey-and-black crew neck, the same design, and it says kooks on it. And then we’re doing white-and-red long-sleeves as well.”

“I love Skateboarding so much, it doesn’t really matter what anyone else does, I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing,” Ryder said.

Skateboarding has always been his passion, and Ryder doesn’t plan on giving it up.