Heartland Hero: Tia Pearl

“I always tell everyone that skateboarding was my first love and my forever love,” says Tia Pearl, one of the world’s top wheelchair motocross (WCMX) and adaptive skateboarders. After a botched hernia surgery left her with severe nerve damage in one of her legs, Tia was unable to walk unassisted and used a wheelchair for several years before gaining enough strength to transition to crutches. An avid skateboarder her whole life, she refused to give up her dream. She first took up WCMX, then adaptive skateboarding, and excelled at both. Tia earned top places in the WCMX Worlds competition and has taken first place multiple times at Dew Tour, an extreme sports circuit renowned for its elite competitors, solidifying her status as a trailblazing athlete.

In Mandy Shunnarah‘s new book, Midwest Shreds: Skating Through America’s Heartland, readers are treated to the only comprehensive history of skatepark culture focusing on the American Midwest. Through compelling interviews and stories, including Tia’s remarkable journey, the book captures the essence of a vibrant and often overlooked skateboarding scene. Here, Mandy interviews Tia and offers a glimpse into the world of this remarkable athlete and the vibrant community that shaped her.

Tia Pearl is one of the world’s top wheelchair motocross and adaptive skateboarders

Lauridsen Skatepark is simply magnificent, at a whopping eighty-eight thousand square feet of freshly poured, butter-smooth concrete stretching along the Des Moines River. Though many past Dew Tours have been in California, it’s no wonder that Dew Tour 2021 and 2022 were held in the middle of Iowa.

Dew Tour is an action-sports competition sponsored by Mountain Dew that happens twice a year. Going strong since 2005, the summer competition is for skateboarding, and the winter competition is for snowboarding. The competition is an aspirational one—if you make it to Dew Tour, you’re one of the best—but the stakes were even higher at Dew Tour Des Moines in 2021. With skateboarding slated to make its Olympic debut, the competition was deemed a qualifying event, and it was the only skateboard qualifier in North America. Skaters weren’t just competing for the Dew Tour title; they were competing for the chance to represent their countries on the international stage as well.

Aspirational

It wasn’t just the Olympic qualifiers who made that year’s event unique; it was also the first year adaptive skating was included in the competition. “Adaptive skating” is an umbrella term for the various kinds of skating disabled people do, and it includes everything from WCMX—wheelchair motocross or chairskating—to skateboarding with crutches, prosthetics, white canes, and more. Though adaptive skateboarding and WCMX are typically separate competitions, they were combined at Dew Tour.

Tia Pearl’s journey to Dew Tour was a long one. She came to the event from Galena, Illinois, which is in “the far northwest corner of the state, as close to Iowa and Wisconsin as you can get and still be in Illinois.” Tia grew up in the skate scene, first rollerblading on adjustable K2s with a grind plate, then riding BMX like her dad did, and then trying skateboarding. There’s a reason she says skateboarding is her true love.

“I met skateboarders at the skate park in my K2s, and I always got a reward if I brought home good grades on my report card. Beanie Babies set the bar for what rewards cost when I was a kid,” said Tia, a child of the nineties. “I thought if I got all these As, then instead of Beanie Babies, I could afford a Walmart board. I got a Mongoose board but wanted a real board from a skate shop.”

“The night before Valentine’s Day, my mom was like, ‘We can go to that skate shop in Orland Park,’” Tia said, referencing a Chicago suburb about half an hour from where she grew up. “I got to pick out everything—the deck, the grip tape, the trucks—and build a full complete. We rolled out of there at like 8:30 p.m., and my mom let me skate till 10:00 p.m., which was late for an eleven-year-old.”

Midwest Shreds: Skating Through America's Heartland captures the essence of a vibrant and often overlooked skateboarding scene

At the time, she slept on a mattress on the floor and remembers putting the skateboard beside her bed and staring at it all night. In the morning, she rode her new board to school—on Valentine’s Day. Tia continued skateboarding through high school. Even as her friends dropped off and gave it up one by one when they got cars, she remained dedicated. She took her skateboard to college and started skating around campus. When she dropped out in the first semester, she didn’t have the heart to tell her parents at first.

“I’d wake up every morning at the crack of dawn and leave at the same time as I did before. I’d get home and say, ‘Yeah, school was good!’ when my parents asked,” Tia said, laughing at her younger self. “I played that for like three months until I was brave enough to tell them I dropped out in October and don’t have any grades to show. They were like, ‘Where’d you go all that time?’ and I told them I was just skating around the college.”

Nothing was going to stop Tia from skateboarding—not cheap Walmart boards, not friends ditching the sport, not college, and certainly not nerve damage. In September 2011, at age 22, Tia had surgery to repair a hernia. After she was supposed to be healed from the procedure, she noticed her leg going numb.

“They kept saying, ‘It’ll go away, just let it heal,’ but it wasn’t going away. I was like, ‘I can’t move my toes anymore . . . now I can’t move my ankle,” Tia said.

Eventually, her entire leg was constantly in pain, “like someone is rubbing sandpaper on an open wound.” It was a dark time for Tia. She wasn’t able to skate like she did before, and she and her wife had moved to a new town so their son could go to a better school, but the new apartment they found was on the second floor. With Tia’s chronic pain, she had trouble leaving the apartment. She’d tried skateboarding, but her injured leg was her planting foot; she could push, but balancing on the board was impossible.

In the Spring of 2014, Tia discovered WCMX and wanted to try it.

dedicated

In 2019, Tia saw a .gif on Facebook of an adaptive skateboarder using crutches to skate and knew she had to try it!

In the Spring of 2014, Tia discovered WCMX and wanted to try it. But it’s hard to chairskate in just any old wheelchair—WCMX chairs are designed to withstand drops on ramps and are built with tons of suspension, unlike regular wheelchairs. They’re expensive and often custom-made, which was out of reach for her at the time. But Tia is nothing if not resourceful. By then, she and her family had moved to Galena, Illinois, which has a sizable skate park despite being a small town. She managed to get ahold of two hospital chairs and made a Frankenstein-esque hybrid. By August 2015, she was ready.

“I told myself, ‘I’m going to drop in on the quarter-pipe,’ and I did it. I dropped in on the three-foot, then the four-foot. I was like, ‘This is it! I got this!’ So I turned into this maniac in a hospital chair at the skate park doing things people would never do because there’s no suspension. It’s the worst thing to be in,” Tia said. Through a GoFundMe, she raised enough money to get a rigid wheelchair, which was a step up from a hospital chair and would allow her to grind rails, though it still lacked suspension. She took that wheelchair to skate parks throughout the region, including Olliewood in Dubuque, Iowa, and filmed her skate runs, posting them on Instagram and tagging wheelchair companies. She wanted them to see her, and it worked.

The commentators at Dew Tour nicknamed Tia “The Technician” because she’s such a technical skater

Tia was offered a $5,000 WCMX chair from SeanCo Custom Wheelchairs with a sizable sponsorship discount, and she was able to work out the rest via a payment plan. The chair arrived on October 1, 2016, and the first thing she did was pop wheelies and spin donuts, laughing when she fell over. The center of gravity is a lot different than it is with a typical wheelchair.

“I trained for six months and placed fourth in the WCMX Worlds competition, which was really sick!” Tia said.

As her WCMX pro career took off—getting sponsorships, invitations to more competitions, free stuff, magazine interviews, and a floor pass to the X Games to coach WCMX, where she met Ryan Sheckler (“This is crazy, I used to watch Life of Ryan on MTV,” she thought at the time)—she never stopped thinking about skateboarding.

In 2019, not long after the X Games, Tia saw a .gif on Facebook of an adaptive skateboarder using crutches to skate and knew she had to try it. “I pulled a pop shove-it right away,” she said. “I felt like maybe I wasn’t meant to walk everywhere but I was definitely meant to ride a skateboard.” After a competition in February 2020, where she competed in both adaptive skateboarding and WCMX, she began phasing out of chairskating, in part because she noticed that most of the skate parks around her weren’t as accessible to chairskaters.

“It was like I hit a wall with it. If you ride WCMX, you need flow bowls that start shallow and slowly go down. But here it’s like you can go down a ramp, then up a ramp, and that’s it. You can’t get enough speed to do things like what Aaron Wheelz Fotheringham [the inventor of WCMX] is doing, where he’s throwing one-eighties out of a bowl because we don’t have ramps like that. Ours is just a bowl, not a flow bowl,” Tia explained, feeling defeated that she couldn’t progress at WCMX the way she wanted to. “I was doing the biggest ramps in Galena, but it was doing the biggest roll-in then just rolling away. There’s nowhere to go.” (Discovering she could skateboard on crutches made many more obstacles at skate parks accessible to her.)

Tia at Dew Tour. Tia took first place in both 2021 and 2022.

Once Tia got her invitation to Dew Tour, she trained five days a week while managing her chronic pain and keeping up with her work around the farm where she lives with her family. She’d get her chores done in the morning, go to the skate park, then come back and work in the barn.

For Tia, who remembers watching the inaugural Dew Tour on TV in 2005, competing was a bucket-list dream come true. And her hard work paid off: she took first place in both 2021 and 2022. The commentators called her “The Technician” because she’s such a technical skater, knowing exactly where her feet need to be placed to bend the board to her will. She executes every trick with the grace of a devoted longtime skateboarder.

While talking to Tia, I can’t help thinking about that gritty, DIY ethos that’s endemic to skaters. It comes down to doing the best with what you’ve got, so what could be grittier and more DIY than skateboarding with a disability? When the world tells these skaters they can’t do things, they prove they can—and better than most abled people.

But in talking to Tia, I can’t help wondering how things might be different if skate parks were more accessible and competitions more supportive. Who’s to say how things might have turned out if Tia had had flow bowls to chairskate?

The past is unchangeable, but the future holds much promise. Since Dew Tour 2021 was an Olympic-qualifying event, perhaps one day, when WCMX and adaptive skateboarding are added to the Paralympics, a future Dew Tour might be a Paralympic-qualifying event.

“I always tell everyone that skateboarding was my first love and my forever love,” Tia said. “If there’s anything I held onto for my entire life, it’s this. This is what I was put on this earth to do. I tell myself, keep riding your skateboard, Tia, and you’ll go places.