On her wooden desk, senior Lauren Mok flips and twirls her pocket-sized fingerboard to pass the time during a long weekend. She has practiced and perfected one of her favorite moves and continues to challenge herself with more complicated tricks.

Students are known for their diverse interests, from being on school and club sport teams to participating in nationwide Drum Corps. However, Lauren has a particularly interesting hobby: miniature skateboarding, better known as fingerboarding.

She first began fingerboarding toward the end of eighth grade.
“One of my friends was messing around with her hands one day in class, and we were pretending our hands were people,” Lauren said. “I thought it would be really funny if I got one of those little skateboards and tried to do something with it.”

Since then, Lauren has mastered many tricks and started her own YouTube channel called Fbforfun, where she records herself performing stunts, reviewing boards and even unveiling new skate parks.

“I started making videos because it’s huge in the fingerboarding community,” Lauren said. “There are forums and you can share your videos and get feedback. Videos really helped me when I started learning tricks too.”

Lauren’s videos have become popular in the fingerboarding community, and she has been contacted by two companies, No Comply Fingerboards and Redemption Fingerboards.

“I was approached by two companies that wanted me to support them and wanted to sponsor me,” Lauren said. “I make videos and promote their companies and their products, and in return I get their products to review.”

Lauren is also part of a competitive fingerboarding team that initially began online, but has started meeting in person as well. She has attended a few of these meetups, called Rendezvous. Some of them are even worldwide meetups.

“The owner of [No Comply Fingerboards], Todd Cuzzorrt, opened an actual fingerboarding shop in Indiana, and I actually went to the opening of that,” Lauren said. “I met a lot of people there. Two years ago I went to Massachusetts for a meetup where people and teams from all around the world, like Germany, come to compete.”

Although doing tricks and stunts on her boards is her main passion, Lauren also collects fingerboards and has a collection of over 20. She buys most of the ones she has, but has also made some boards and even some parks as well.

“I actually do have a park at my house,” Lauren said. “Well I have two parks. One is a big table that I can put all my ramps on, and another one is this custom ramp from this big fingerboarding company in Germany. I worked all summer two years ago to come up with the money and was finally able to buy it.”

Fingerboarding is more than just a hobby for Lauren. She spends most of her free time either filming new videos or showing her stunts to her friends.

“It took a while to pick up and every time I learn a trick it’s hard,” Lauren said. “But when you get it down and get that muscle memory, it’s very rewarding because people are so amazed at what you can do with it.”