Skaters Enjoy Grand Opening of Cookeville Skate Park

Cookeville city officials celebrated the opening of the Park View Public Skate Park Thursday.

Local skater Jacob Turrington said he felt excited to have a place to practice.

“It’s pretty dope, I’ve been waiting on this for a long time. I mean, we have had indoor parks and stuff but it never had much business so they all kind of went under eventually,” Turrington said. “So it’s nice to know that this is permanent and concrete and it’s going to be here.”

The City of Cookeville celebrated the grand opening of the skate park Thursday. (Photo: Tess Simpson)

The park is the first fully-concrete skate park in the region and the only skate park designed by Seattle-based Grindline in Tennessee.

Grindline CEO Micah Shapiro said he feels proud of the park.

“I am really happy with it, we had a great group of guys out here doing the construction,” Shapiro said. “They finished it below budget, below schedule so the finished work looks great. I am really happy with it.”

Shapiro said the initial design process proved difficult.

‘This being an old swimming pool, that was definitely a challenge to try to incorporate all of this into that. But yeah, it is really combining kind of what you know about the site and kind of what the community’s desires are,” Shapiro said. “And then you are also thinking about what they are skating now, so you kind of give them something they may be skating in the future that way they have stuff to grow into and challenge.”

Turrington said he will skate at the park all the time, as long as work allows.

“I hope this is just the start of hopefully a lot of other stuff,” Terrington said. “I mean I heard about the water park and everything else coming, Cookeville may just grow even more.”

Cookeville used nearly $400,000 in grant funding from the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation to construct the park.