PR NEWS RELEASE 02/28/2006:

Downhill board sports have been continually growing and evolving in the past five years - and it's not slowing down by any means whatsoever. With spring around the corner, longboarders, skaters, surfers and snowboarders alike are looking to hone their skills and push the envelope of the gravity sports that they have embraced - both for training and simply because it's a whole heck of a lot of fun.

As a result, an increasing number of riders and enthusiasts are looking to replicate a certain feel or sensation experienced on the snow, water - even sand - that a regular skateboard or "longboard", for the most part, cannot deliver.

Enter the "hybrids". Ranging from 2 wheels to 14, hybrid "carvers" are the answer to riders looking for a specific simulation of sliding laterally on a snowboard, carving on a tight edge or charging down a 20-foot set wave in Oahu.

Currently, hybrids are making an impact on the boarding scene at large, and their popularity is growing steadily.

Some popular boards include the "Tierney Board" a two-weeled board that simulates apline snowboarding, the "Freebord", which simulates lateral motion on a snowboard, the "CarveBoard", which is arguably the closest one can come to surfing on land, the "Flowlab", a 14-wheeled snowboard simulator and the "Onshore Board", which simulates aquatic physics on land.

There are several others as well, and more keep "popping up" quite regularly.

Chris Rempel from LongboardDirectory.com and Kurt and Tyler Tierney of Tierney Rides, LLC decided to set up an online discussion forum that caters to the topic of carving hybrids, called "X-boarding.com"

"We really just wanted to create a place where riders that were interested in finding out more about hybrids could hang out, learn from eachother and make friends. We also wanted to make it possible for prospective buyers to make an informed choice, based on others input, about what board would best suit their riding style."

"Sometimes you just have to hear it from 'real people', instead of trying to make a purchase decision based on advertising", says Chris Rempel, hybrid boarding enthusiast and webmaster of LongboardDirectory.com

Kurt Tierney (of "Tierney Rides") had been wanting to set up a support forum for his products for some time, and so when Chris approached him about the idea of sharing costs and effort to get the forum up and running, Kurt cheerfully obliged.

"It should be a good opportunity for riders in general to make friends and learn more about the alternatives to regular skateboarding", says Kurt. "It's also going to be great to help our T-board customers with technical issues and answer questions in our section of the forum".

X-Boarding will also facilitate several contests, wholesale offerings from a variety of hybrid companies to forum members, as well as classifieds and other common fuctions.

Check it out at http://www.x-boarding.com

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