Cara-Beth Burnside & Mimi Knoop Represent

I love it when all the right elements come together for a great event and some great causes: The Core Action Sports Winter Fashion Flurry this weekend in Denver was a textbook example of how to put the pieces together -- core charities, core brands, core athletes, solid media sponsors, and a cool event in a cool spot, with all attention on the ladies and all proceeds going to hugely deserving organizations. Bonus points for flying in Cara-Beth Burnside and Mimi Knoop for the skate demo: They're the best of the best and a huge part of how far women's skateboarding and action sports in general have come in the last ten years (see interview below).

CoreActionSports.com is a Denver-based web boutique specializing in women's skate, snow, surf, and wake apparel. Founders Courtney and Lisa Pugh put on this event to showcase the winter lines they're carrying and to benefit three organizations close to my heart: Adaptive Action Sports , Boarding for Breast Cancer (October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month) and The Action Sports Alliance. Each of those organizations are well worth checking out, making donations to, or volunteering with, and they complement each other nicely: It's awesome even to be able to mention each of them in the same breath. I'll let the pics suffice and won't say much about the fashion show itself, except to say that CoreActionSports.com presents an extremely well-curated collection featuring great brands like Nikita with legit cred as both core brands and fashion/lifestyle brands, a tough line to straddle.

Boarding for Breast Cancer is getting a ton of press this month and I'm going to focus heavily on The Alliance in a second, but let me take a quick second to turn you on to Adaptive Action Sports, an organization which now also includes the spectacular Amped Riders organization. Founder Amy Purdy was on hand at the Winter Fashion Flurry, proof positive of the AAS motto: "We believe no sport is out of reach of any individual." I promise you this: If you ever see Purdy ripping on the slopes at Tahoe, you will never guess she'd had both legs amputated below the knee when she was 19. Ditto for the Amped Riders skate team, a crew shredding pools, parks, and street scenes near you while kicking the term "disabled" to the curb and slapping a frontside on it.

Okay, back to the ladies. I'm an enormous fan of women in skateboarding and have now had several opportunities in the last few years to catch up with Cara-Beth Burnside and Mimi Knoop. The following interview took place with The Alliance founders early Saturday morning at the Denver Skatepark , in between live promos for the night's event on the local Fox News affiliate.

Fuel.TV: We last spoke at X Games, where you've been working through The Alliance to increase the profile of womens' skateboarding and other events for the last three years. Women's skateboarding has really exploded in the last ten years, largely through your efforts, the work of the All Girl Skate Jam, and the fact that there a now quite a few really great pros and just way more girls out there doing it in skateparks everywhere. Can you fill me in on where it's all headed in your mind?

Burnside: We're so stoked to see it grow so fast, and there's no other way to see it except as evidence of how much more there could be. We're trying to get some of our own events going on – we just wrapped up the Supergirl event, this Core Action Sports event is a great example of what we'd like to be doing more of, we're getting more demos on...

Knoop: Everything we're doing is about getting more opportunities out there for girls. We started The Alliance three years ago to fill a really obvious need. It's come a long ways in that time, but we still really have a long way to go in terms of exposure and really getting it out there.

Burnside: The main thing that remains is getting women's skateboarding and other action sports covered on TV, to really help promote what we're doing, get it out there, and encourage growth and progression in these sports in the same way that television coverage on the X Games and the Dew Tour has done for the men. To really push it out there, you have to really push it out there. Do you know what I'm saying?

Fuel.TV: There are now enough female skaters – vert riders, bowl riders, but especially street skaters -- to have really solid competitions and events and to attract really good sponsors. But outside of these events and the pros you both know really well, what's your perception of the growth of it all?

Knoop: Let me ask you the same question? What are you seeing?

Fuel.TV: Well, I'll say this... it used to be a pretty huge deal if I ran into a girl at the skatepark, and now I'd say it's relatively commonplace. Now I'd say just about every time I go out to a skatepark, I'll see at least one girl skating. Maybe not a ton, but way more than before. And in a place like Portland, you might very well likely be outnumbered by the ladies, and find they're all showing you up in the bowls. I think it's so rad.

Knoop: There are so many girls out there now who are so good, who are so gnarly, just really great skaters. Not great "girl skaters," just great skaters, flat out. But to really blow it up big, it's going to take a different approach. We'd love to be getting more from the X Games and we'd love to be on the Dew Tour, but we're also recognizing we're going to have to hustle to do a lot of it for ourselves, which is really how The Alliance came about. We're talking with some of the bigger companies in the industry now – the action sports lifestyle stuff for girls has really taken off, even more than the sports themselves in some ways – about some events for the Spring that we're really excited about but can't say a lot about just yet. One thing I can mention is that we're in the process of planning a girls' event around the Hula Bowl contest in Hawaii in January.

Burnside: I think to really get that momentum going and keep it going, there has to be events going on all year round, good reasons for all the top skaters to be out pushing each other, skating with each other, and inspiring each other. You can't just have one big contest at X Games and then say, "Okay, see you next year," if you want it to get really big and keep progressing.

Fuel.TV: Let me ask you about this weekend's event specifically, and the chance to use the work you've done through The Alliance to help other womens' organizations like Boarding for Breast Cancer.

Burnside: It was always a goal of ours to be able to work in unity with some of these other groups, and we're now in a great position to be able to build on the work we've done, the relationships we've made, and the athletes we work with to bring our skaters out to help raise money or help in any way we can. Boarding for Breast Cancer is such a great idea, and such a great organization, and it's so good for all these different women's organizations to be networking and getting involved with what each other are doing in a supportive way. It feels really good to be out there and be really united in some of the really critical common causes like this.

Fuel.TV: I want to change direction a bit, because there's a ton of hype surrounding Shaun White right now. I don't want it forgotten, CB, that you're the original snow/skate superstar.

Burnside: They're definitely a lot different, snowboarding and skateboarding, and in some important ways women in snowboarding got off to a better start than women in skateboarding have ever been able to match. As for Shaun... Shaun is amazing, and he works really hard. You can't just snowboard and then be like, "Oh, now I'm gonna go skate the vert ramp." I liked doing both because it was really similar in a lot of ways, but also because it was really different, and each had its own challenges: You could learn stuff in one and apply it to the other. Shaun's really taken that to a whole new level.

Fuel.TV: That's really the goal of The Alliance, to push it all to a whole new level.

Burnside: When you get all the top skaters together, they're naturally going to push each other and get in on that hype, you know? We're really stoked at the X Games each year to be out there, together. I'd like to see that happening more for the girls, just to keep the momentum going. If we were out there skating together all the time, the way the guys do, with everyone pushing, it would just generate so much momentum.

Fuel.TV: Mimi, in the context of this weekend's event, the Winter Fashion Flurry, I want to ask you about one of your sponsors in particular, because it seems like there is a lot of risk of coming off really corny by trying to combine fashion and skateboarding or snowboarding, but you're fortunate to ride for one company that happens to do it very well.

Knoop: There are a lot of girls out there in action sports -- surfing, skating, snowboarding, whatever -- and then there's also a huge set of girls, probably many, many times more, who are just into the lifestyle aspect and the look. I'm not down on that at all: I have a lot of friends who are totally not athletic but love skateboarding and love the styles that have come along with it. An event like this helps bring it all together. Riding for Nikita has been really cool because they've always used their athletes to promote their clothes and vice versa, rather than just hiring some models... it's not just some pretty faces, it's really great athletes, really amazing riders, and that's what they're promoting: The whole package. They really seem to march to their own drummer in that way. Without Nikita and a few other really great sponsors like Nixon, there's no way I'd be skating full time right now or made it as far as I have, for myself or with The Aliiance.

Fuel.TV: That's picking up too, though, right? It used to be that a couple of teams might have a "token girl" riding for them. Now it seems like most of the girls competing at X Games have pretty good sponsors, and a handful, like Elissa Steamer with Zero, are really being promoted as full-fledged team members.

Knoop: You're right. There are now a handful of girls who have really good situations with their sponsors, but it's still really hard, and the truth is that most of the girls, even the top pros, don't really have that backing from the industry yet. It's getting better, that's for sure, but it's still very difficult to be able to do it full time and be able to really devote everything you have to it, the way many more men are supported to be able to do it.

Burnside: There are a few companies that really get it. I've been with Vans for a long time, and they've really supported me and hooked me up. That's really been my number one sponsor as a skater and when I was snowboarding. It's been awesome to be with them so long. Nixon is another great example: Chad at Nixon is always down for the girls and has helped a lot of girls out. To a lot of the other companies out there, I'd say, "What are you waiting for?" And I'd say the same thing to the Dew Tour, to X Games, to anybody. "What are you waiting for?" This is skateboarding, you know? There's no limit to how far we can push it.