Frontside 180 Ollie

By Scott McLachlan

The frontside 180 is probably one of the best moves to learn after the regular ollie. It’s fun easy, and can be mastered without too much trouble. It also teaches you to control your board better, and with both feet.

Description: The skater ollies and rotates through 180 degrees frontside and lands rolling fakie. Both the skater and the board rotate the full 180 degrees.

Firstly, just to clear up the term frontside for anyone who doesn’t quite understand it. When doing tricks like 180s, frontside just means that you can see in front of you the whole way round, i.e. you turn to your left (for regular footers). Frontside when referring to grinds and slides means that you approach the object so it’s in front of you - you can see it the whole way. It’s pretty simple once you get it.

Getting on to the trick itself, you should have you back foot either on the tip of the tail (like a ollie), or with you toe slightly towards the heel side of your deck (like a frontside shove-it). I think that if you set up like a regular ollie you tend to get better pop (higher 180s), whereas with the other method you get a quicker, but lower trick. Just do what you want. You front foot should be just behind the bolts, or in your regular ollie position. I found that it helped hanging the tips of my toes off the toe edge of my deck, but I could just be weird :-).

The key to getting the full rotation (on flat ground anyway) is turning your top half of your body before you pop. Wind up you upper body the opposite way to which you want to spin, then unwind (shoulders first) and pop in almost one movement, then level out with your front foot just like an ollie. Make sure that your weight is evenly distributed on your deck - don’t lean too far back or forward, keep centred. Also make sure that you use that front foot to it’s full, or else you get either a crappy height or shitty rotation (or both!).

Landing is pretty simple, but can be painful if you haven’t centred your weight as I said above. Make sure you get the full rotation, then just slam them feet down like any other trick. You can also land on your nose first (which is now you tail) in a switch manual type position, and pivot the last 10 or so degrees. All you gotta do now is find a nice, big 15 set...