If you like to laugh and then cry, you’ll probably enjoy visiting the website for the Texas X Sports Park. I went to the Leander City Council meeting on Thursday where the proponent of this concept presented before the council. He’s not asking for public money, but he needed the council to change the zoning of the land he wants to use. As he talked about all the horseback riding, mountain biking, golfing, basketball, roller hockey skating, gymnastics, RV’ing, and finally skateboarding that will take place in this eXtreme facility, I kept expecting that he would break into a song about monorails. The Leander City Council ended up approving his zoning change, so now he can drum up investors to fund this $66 million boondoggle.

The next day I talked with Matt Tolbert, the proponent of the Texas X Park by phone. I asked him if he knew what it was going to take to build a skatepark requiring pads, fees and a long commute that would be competitive with the multiple free public skateparks that will be conveniently scattered throughout the region. By the time the Texas X Sports facility is up and running, there will be free, public skateparks available in Lakeway, Smithville, Austin (3), San Marcos, Round Rock, Northwest Metro Park (Travis County), and Williamson County (in a regional park). At these facilities, skaters won’t have to wear helmets, knee, and elbow pads like they will at the X Park. Matt responded that this is exactly why parents will want to drop their kids off at the Texas X Park rather than a public park– required safety gear and supervision to ensure drugs aren’t available as he asserts they are in public skateparks.

Whoah! Now this is quite a change of business plan. Matt’s idea for drawing skaters to his pay-for-play X Park isn’t to build a compelling skatepark. It’s to build an anaemic daycare facility. An Extreme Sports mecca that promises to not be too extreme. He’s not targetting the entire Central Texas skateboard community with his enterprise- he’s going after the subsection of skaters that are young enough to need dropping off places by their parents.

When he said this, the whole thing became a lot more clear to me. Matt’s not trying to sell the Texas X Park to skateboarders. He’s selling it to parents and investors. It’s one of those business proposals that looks great on paper, but lacks the legs to carry it down the street. It brings to mind the metaphor of a father trying to buy clothes at the mall for his 16-year-old daughter. There’s a serious disconnect between what he thinks she’ll think will be cool and her version of cool. But in this scenario, Matt Tolbert isn’t the parent. He’s the guy at the mall trying to sell uncool clothes.