Thursday, October 14, 2010

Happy 7th Birthday PKSA!


It's Parkour South Africa's birthday!!

Today, 7 years ago, Neil Craig and I officially registered www.parkour.co.za. I remember speaking to him on the phone from the UK in 2003 and in a very excited voice saying, "We MUST introduce this to South Africa now! It's the most amazing thing ever. You've GOT to try it!"

A few months later, I was back in SA and on the streets of Pretoria handing out 100's of black & white A5 posters to passers-by. Inviting them to attend the first "official" pksa jam at the Union Buildings, and telling them all about Parkour.

The first PKSA website, as shocking as it was, I created with MS Frontpage and edited txt files using a Black background and White text schema. What a dreadful colour choice that was! Then it went through a Grey background and Black text, which was only marginally better. Later on Neil created the latest format of the website in a complex php design and it's stood the test of time. (We've had compliments from the parkour communities all over the world, and remain one of the few websites to have lasted since the initial international boom in 2003. Many of the other sites were created on free websites and died a slow death.)

Skip ahead 7 bumpy years (I went back to the UK for another 4 years and only arrived back in SA in 2008/9 to continue on the PKSA structure), and we now have well over 2000 people on the database and plenty more visiting our website on a monthly basis. Plus we have a regular international audience, with over 50 countries worldwide viewing our site and interacting on our forums.

Monthly training sessions (We call them "Gatherings"), just in Johannesburg alone, can attract well over 50 people at a time. Not to mention Durban, Cape Town and a few of the newer cities to attract followers such as Port Elizabeth, East London, Grahamstown, Stellenbosch, Bloemfontein, Potchefstroom ... to name a few.

I've even had a few emails from people up in the Limpopo province asking for advice on training.

Recently we've seen the neighbouring countries tag along for the ride, with Namibia being the most active and guys in Zimbabwe and Mozambique as well.

So here's to PKSA, and it's new transition about to happen in the next year. May it last for many more years!

Cheers!

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

We’re a group of volunteers and starting a brand new initiative in a community. Your weblog supplied us valuable information to work on. You have done a marvellous work!

Dane Grant said...

Thank you very much for the post. Always good to hear when new initiatives pop up. :-)

Keep in touch and tell me more about it.

Anonymous said...

What a nice post. I really love reading these types or articles. I can?t wait to see what others have to say.

Anonymous said...

Sustain the great content, inserted to my personal internet explorer feed.

Christo said...

Hi Man,

do you know of any parkour that's still active on Cape Town?