Skate Night!

by Summer Stevens

It’s 7 p.m. on a Friday night at the Ark Church and student pastors Joel and Bethany Overton are opening the doors of the gym to let in a flood of excited elementary, middle and high school students.

Music is playing, the room is filling up and the smell of freshly popped popcorn mixes with the ever-present but somehow nostalgic smell of sweaty feet.

“Welcome to Skate Night!” Bethany says over the megaphone.

The kids that come in first have been lined up outside for over an hour to make sure they get in first and are able to get skates in their size. Several volunteers are in the side room swapping street shoes for classic roller skates, while some kids bring their own skates.

They pay their $5 entrance fee, lace up and head to the gym.

From the speakers comes the latest Christian rap and pop, with a few oldies thrown in there. There are chairs set up along the perimeter of the gym. It’s a full-sized basketball court – not technically a roller-skating rink, but large enough to hold hundreds of skating kids plus parents who choose to stay and watch.

Bethany does the welcome at about a quarter past 7 and celebrates the children who have birthdays. After a few songs, she announces the speed skating competition for elementary students. Later on in the evening they’ll do a dance off to songs like Whip/Nae Nae and the Cha Cha Slide, followed by the high school speed skating competition and a raffle to wrap up the night.

Skate Night is about so much more than just skating. For the last 35 years –minus the years when the original skate building burned down and the COVID19 closure – the Ark Church has been opening their doors to kids and families to offer a safe, wholesome environ- ment led by volunteers who really care.

Started in 1987 by Ark Church founding pastor David Daniels, Skate Night was planned simply to give kids something fun to do, especially in the winter months. In the early years, Skate Night was offered every single Friday night without fail until the tragic electrical fire in 2012 that caused the total destruction of the skate building.

“It was a huge loss,” said Joel. A loss not only to the church, but to the community, the families that enjoyed the weekend recreation, and the county who used the building frequently.

In 2015 the new facility was built, opening up once again for Outer Banks kids to gather together on wheels. 2023 has seen record numbers of people coming to Skate Night. They have 125 pairs of skates to pass out, and about another hundred or so kids bring their own. Some kids don’t even skate. They just want to be there.

“We don’t have 300 kids that come out because of skating. We have 300 kids that come out because there’s something different that happens here. It’s a place where they can come, their families can come, they know it’s safe, they know it’s fun, but they also know there’s people here that may not even know them but they care about them,” Joel said.

Some kids wait until their size opens up, floating between the gym and the foyer talking with friends and picking out something at the snack bar.

Volunteers Mr. Junior and Miss Cathy Edwards faithfully serve the mostly at-cost nachos, candy, slushies, sodas, popcorn and, according to Joel, the “Outer Banks Famous Skate Night hot dogs.”

Volunteers are present to get to know students, listen to them if they want to talk, and just be a friend.

“We have rules and regulations, yes, but we try to present that in the kindest way we can. But I think a big thing is, kids really enjoy joking around with the people they’ve gotten to know. And part of our main focus is to build a relationship,” Bethany said.

“The Outer Banks does a really good job of keeping the ‘family-friendly-nothing-bad-happens-on-the-Outer-Banks-everybody’s-perfect’ type of stigma across it so that visitors don’t see anything different when they’re here. But at 9:30 p.m. when there’s a group of kids that are still here that don’t know where their parents are, don’t know how they’re getting home, we’re able to just sit and talk with them and see where they’re coming from,” Joel said.

“It’s not about just skating. It’s about just being able to show the love of Jesus to people,” he added.