Alas, Time to Talk Sponsorship Again...

Once again, I have decided that it is time to write a little bit on the subject of sponsorships in the fingerboarding industry.

When someone is seeking a sponsorship, one should understand what it actually entails.
Don't expect a company to send you free stuff just because you want it. Quite frankly, I see this sort of attitude all the time.
I feel that people tend to not realize that a sponsorship at the most basic level is a relationship between a company and a person who seeks to represent that company.

So what should you look for in a sponsor? Actually, before that lets ask another question. What should the sponsor expect of you as a rider?
Are you willing to represent the company's products? Are you willing to behave in a mature fashion? Are you going to take the freebies and sell them on ebay?
Now for the sponsor. Is the sponsor legitimate? Do they place a lot of effort into their products, or are they just sticks of fecal matter with wheels?
How does the sponsor treat customers and other riders? Does the sponsor do a lot for the scene?

I, personally, am very picky when it comes to having sponsors. I want to be on a team that is willing to represent me as much as I am willing to represent them.
If you are sponsored by a company, then you really should use their products. I mean, it's understandable to film with your brand new BW for a mini video once in a while.
But for the majority of the time you should use your sponsored deck. If you aren't using it, then you are wasting your sponsorship and the sponsor is wasting their time on you!

Also, I always hear from people complain about not having a legit sponsor.
I really appreciate the way my sponsors (Flatface and Arctic) have treated me, but at the end of the day, even if I wasn't sponsored by them I would still fingerboard for the love of fingerboarding.
People place so much importance into getting a sponsor that they forget why they fingerboard.


Anyways I got a great tip for the noobs on how to get sponsored.

"In the early 90s, the psychologist K Anders Ericsson and two colleagues set up shop at Berlin's elite Academy of Music. With the help of the academy's professors, they divided the school's violinists into three groups. The first group were the stars, the students with the potential to become world-class soloists. The second were those judged to be merely "good". The third were students who were unlikely ever to play professionally, and intended to be music teachers in the school system. All the violinists were then asked the same question. Over the course of your career, ever since you first picked up the violin, how many hours have you practised?

Everyone, from all three groups, started playing at roughly the same time - around the age of five. In those first few years, everyone practised roughly the same amount - about two or three hours a week. But around the age of eight real differences started to emerge. The students who would end up as the best in their class began to practise more than everyone else: six hours a week by age nine, eight by age 12, 16 a week by age 14, and up and up, until by the age of 20 they were practising well over 30 hours a week. By the age of 20, the elite performers had all totalled 10,000 hours of practice over the course of their lives. The merely good students had totalled, by contrast, 8,000 hours, and the future music teachers just over 4,000 hours." (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/nov/15/malcolm-gladwell-outliers-extract)

Start putting in those hours! I, personally, have fingerboarded almost every single day since I started fingerboarding in 1999. Assuming I fingerboarded an hour a day for those 9 years, I would have put in 3285 hours into fingerboarding.
Quite sad if you think about it. . .