There’s just something awesome about being in the streets with your friends, skating, laughing, and making memories together. It’s something we all do, at every level of skill, so it’s one of the truly universal shared experiences in our community. That feeling is the inspiration for this project that takes “lost & found” clips from 2019 and 2022 and weaves them into three montage sections for a quick tour through SoCal, the PacWest, and NYC. The years and spots have aged but some things never change. This is dedicated to those same days… the best days.

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After wrapping up JUST BLADE 2 in 2018, we started traveling and filming for a follow up project that may or may not have been a third installment in a JUST BLADE trilogy. But then 2020 happened, the pandemic shut down most of the world, and all the footage we’d capture in Seattle, New York City, and San Diego sat idle waiting for somewhere to land.

Then life happened and more time passed than anyone expected.

Even after a successful trip to Los Angeles for some street sessions around Blading Cup in 2022, we weren’t really sure how to put it all to use. How did it all fit together? It wasn’t very clear.

Then Spotify hit us with a couple songs that we wanted to use and this montage project was born.

It started in San Diego with a surprise visit from Jeremy Spira as he and the family did a SoCal trip in 2019, Sean Macgowan joined us for the day and a productive afternoon turned into these clips and a Spotlight feature in print Issue #25. That magazine premiered at Winterclash 2020.

Then more good fortune when Ichi Inoue turned up after Blading Cup 2019 for a trip that coincided with the Plastic Pushers crew visit. The groups linked up a couple times and we got Ichi in front of the camera for a few clips. Nice! Not a bad start to the project…

We also had clips from skating with Chris Couture, Jeremy Townsend, Allen Clark and Derek Macias in Seattle back in March 2019, so that had to get worked in too. Sean Macgowan came along for that trip and Drew Humphrey met us there, though somehow over the years all but one photo was lost. That sucks!

In October 2019 we were in NYC for Comic-Con. You know, work stuff. So we reached out to Jordan Baez and Pablo Muñoz to show us around. We met with Pablo earlier in the day and then Jordan met us as the sun was setting. We jammed from Manhattan to BK to chase down some lit spots and you can see the results. We’d planned to be back in the city two or three more times to get a comprehensive section handled, but again that wouldn’t happen. Sadly we didn’t have a photographer with us either. Maybe next time!

Heading into November 2022, with ONE’s usual Blading Cup plans thwarted by a last-minute Wes Driver trip out of town, Adam Bazydlo invited us to crash with him and his crew for the comp. We took him up on the offer and managed to hit spots around LA and Santa Ana with Michael Froemling (someone we’ve wanted to film for a long time!), Chris Calkins, Steve Steinmetz (coming out from behind the camera), and Adam who was the inspiration for the trip anyway. In just two days we managed to capture some exciting blading – some documented by Ryan Schude in Issue #27! – which ended up being enough to make this whole thing work.

And that’s the story. One project got sidelined and then we figured out how to put the materials to use… only five years later(!). Life is full of problem solving like that, so figuring out how to bring the SAME DAYS project together was just another example. Enjoy!

Thanks to everyone that played a part in making it possible.

[The END]

Photos by Steve Steinmetz and Sean Macgowan

See Jeremy Spira’s full print profile in ONE #25 (2020)