Therapy Boards

Therapy Boards

Building a brand on expression and community

Story by Holly Duchmann . Photos by Kimberly Meadowlark

Hammond-native Brent Coker’s appreciation for skateboarding goes beyond executing daring tricks at the skate park—he sees the sport as a form of self-expression.

“When you’re just focused on pulling the coolest trick, you lose sight of what skateboarding is about,” Coker said. “Skateboarding is so simple, but when you make it complex with tricks, you take that simplicity away from it and forget how fun it is, forget the expression at the foundation of the sport.”

With his shoulder-length wavy mane and layers of necklaces, the twenty-eight-year-old challenges the “traditional” persona of a business owner. But Coker’s entering his seventh year at the head of the skateboard brand, Therapy Skateboards, this year—and recently released his thirty-fifth board design. The business, founded out of Coker’s garage, has grown to offer branded apparel as well as boards and has been featured in skate shops across Louisiana—including Humidity New Orleans, Tomahawk Skateshop in Monroe, and Rukus in Lafayette and Baton Rouge.

Coker first started skating after receiving a board for his tenth birthday. Not long afterward, the devastation of Hurricane Katrina forced his family to move from their home on the West Bank to Hammond, where he began skating at Dreamland Skate Park with Timmy Villars and Ally Budde. At Dreamland, the friends quickly formed a community around the sport, which carried them through young adulthood. In his early twenties, Coker started working remotely as a promoter and skater with grassroots skateboard company, Vayawa. This experience, and the encouragement of his father, sparked the idea to launch his own brand in Hammond.

“We had no idea what we were doing starting out,” Coker remembered, nursing a beer at Gnarly Barley Brewing, which has hosted a few of Therapy’s board releases. “We weren’t business-minded people—we knew we had an idea and knew we had to keep pushing.” Two months after he started Therapy Boards, the August 2016 flood killed his longtime skating friend, Budde. Her death, Coker explained, further motivated him to follow his dream, since she no longer could.

Brent Coker, the founder of Therapy Boards.

Kimberly Meadowlark

Therapy Skateboards’ growth aligns with America’s shifting perceptions of skateboarding as a legitimate sport. Birthed in California in the sixties by surfers, modern skateboarding was molded through the eighties and nineties through the introduction of vertical skate ramps at parks and the influence of renowned skater Tony Hawk, who helped shatter the sport’s bad reputation as the realm of lazy delinquents who trespassed and destroyed public property. After decades of being siloed as an “alternative” sport, skateboarding debuted at the Summer Olympics in Tokyo in 2021.

Therapy Skateboards’ launch in 2016 featured two boards with the “Flower of Life,” a geometric design representing the cycle of life.

Today, Coker is working towards bringing in more local artists for Therapy’s designs, but over the past six years over thirty of the boards released by the brand have been his own. In the beginning, Coker mainly promoted the products on Instagram, and achieved reasonable success. The company’s first major milestone came four years later, in 2020, when the brand launched its “Dat Sauce” board design—a play on Louisiana Hot Sauce—which landed a spot in Humidity Skate Shop in the French Quarter, New Orleans’s oldest locally-owned skate shop.

“Being able to release boards in shops we grew up going to as kids, and seeing the community come out and support, it feels good,” Coker said.

The company held its first release party in Lafayette’s Rukus the following year with a release of a pair of boards featuring a Louisiana swamp, based off a painting by Coker’s cousin, artist Kellie Breaux.

Today, Therapy has sold over one thousand boards to customers in more than twenty states. Most recently, Therapy released four boards designed by Coker as a part of its art-inspired “Connected Decks” series. The “Connect the Dots” deck features a four-hundred-thirty-dot puzzle design of the brand’s logo and comes with a mini permanent marker, while the “MyCelium” deck shows a neon representation of a mushroom’s connected root system. Also part of the series is the “REMEMBER” deck featuring a geometric design and the words “Remember homies” and “Remember Therapy,” released to honor past-and-present skating friends. The final board in the series has “Create. Love. Inspire. Repeat.” over a watercolor background.

To commemorate the release, the company hosted a party and art show at Gnarly Barley Brewing in September, featuring art pieces, boards, photographs, and books that have inspired the team in the past and present.

Of the dozens of board designs created at Therapy over the years, Coker’s favorite is a second-edition print of a Zapp’s Potato Chips-inspired Voodoo design, which he released in late October. The original board was designed by Sativa Skates, another Louisiana-founded skateboard company, a decade ago. Coker reconnected with the owner Barrett DiGiulian at a 2021 fundraising event in Ruston for a community skatepark, and they brainstormed a collaboration.

Top row, left to right: Brandon “Beezo” Jefferson, Craig Sterling, Timothy Villars. Bottom, left to right: Ryan “Yeda” Hughes, Brenden Latino, Brent Coker, Brett Ballenger.

Kimberly Meadowlark

“I’ve had the original Voodoo board since I was eighteen years old,” Coker said. “I was gifted it from someone who won it, and it’s been on display on my living room wall ever since. I wanted Therapy to remake the board for its tenyear anniversary.”

For its second edition, the design was updated to reflect the new Zapp’s Voodoo chips bag, and Therapy celebrated the release both in West Monroe at Tomahawk Skateshop—owned by Digiulian—and in Hammond at Gnarly Barley Brewing.

“Sativa is the company that was pushing when I was a kid, before Therapy was even an idea,” Coker said. “To be able to collaborate with them and re-release this board, it’s a very surreal moment.”

Looking forward, Coker wants the company to do more collaborations with other brands and he hopes to eventually open a brick-and-mortar skate shop of his own in Hammond.

“A skate shop provides culture to the community who may not know it,” Coker said. The sport has had a tremendous impact on him personally, he explained—which is part of what inspired his brand’s name. “Normally, you start therapy when you’re going through a problem, and then it gets fixed,” he said. “To me, in skateboarding, [when we’re] starting trying a new trick, and we get frustrated and we get aggravated, and we’ll try it for three hours. Then, you land the trick and all the time put in was worth it. In the future, that thing that was holding us back might be the thing pushing us forward.

Everything makes sense with time as long as we keep pushing through it.”

therapyskateboards.com