Stephanie Massey was a novelty in the late 1980s and early 1990s during a time when skateboarding pushed a stereotype of being an activity for delinquent boys. Very few “respectable” parents would permit their daughters to pursue skateboarding.
Photo: Stephanie in Poweredge June 1989.
Fortunately, Stephanie’s parents, Dan or “Danny” and Ruth Massey were already skateboarders, and the namesakes of “Dan and Ruth’s Sign In Bowl,” which was heavily featured in the Madrid Skateboards 1989 video Skate Sessions (directed by Charles Lloyd).
The Sign In bowl was located in Anaheim, CA at Knott Ave and Ball Road, and they hosted skate sessions, bands, and parties there from 1987 – 1992. There was an ad for the bowl in the September 1989 issue of Poweredge magazine, just a few months after a photo of Stephanie appeared (June 1989) in the letters section of Poweredge.
Ethan Fox, who would go on to direct the first all girls video SK8HERS in 1992 said that Stephanie was the first female child he met skateboarding while he was working on Skate Sessions and that she was likely around age 8. The Massey family was featured (including the four children with Stephanie and Cindy being the oldest) and Stephanie enjoyed pointing out everyone’s latest injuries.
Stephanie then had her own mini-interview, where she stated that the family was from Washington, now living in California and that she had been skating for two years, loved to skate bowl, and imagined she would become a professional.
There’s a short clip of Stephanie practising her kickturns in Skate Sessions:
In 1990, Brian Bailey took a photo of Stephanie in the Sign-In Bowl with JoAnn Gillespie, the legendary Pattie Hoffman, Rhonda Doyle and Saecha Clarke, so she was definitely getting some pointers from the best!
Stephanie would have her own part in SK8HERS and was the lone child in the group photos that Ethan Fox took at Powell Skate Zone, which appeared in the October 1992 issue of Thrasher.
It’s worth noting that there were other young girls skating in the early 90s like Sally Affleck in Australia, who received some solid coverage and progressed rapidly, and several girls who began a bit earlier in the late 80s like Lisa Whitaker, Jessie Van Roechoudt, Lia Halloran and Renee Tantillo, but Stephanie seemed to have the most progressive start. She was surrounded by skateboarding, and connected with some influential women riders, but I’ve yet to find her online more recently and it makes me wonder what happened to her. Give me a shout, Stephanie!
Womxn Skateboard History 