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Volcom has offered $20,000 for the first kickflip on a surfboard “above and off the lip.” Santa Cruz’s Zoltan Torkos has submitted several videos in the competition (one of his best is pictured below). Here are the rules, according to Volcom:

Volcom is giving away $20,000 to the first person that can land a “proper” kickflip while surfing! By proper we mean an “above and off the lip” kickflip where first you bottom turn, launch an air, use your front foot to flip the board, and then land on it and ride out cleanly. No chop hops, backwash, fingerflips, grabs or laybacks. Just a proper kickflip. We’re going to be strict on these following guidelines. The rules are all listed here, so get out there and put this trick in the history books. Good luck!

Rules:
1. Your entry must be on video from the start of the trick through the ride out. No photos allowed.
2. This contest is open to everyone. The contest begins today and will run until there’s a winner.
3. The kickflip must be a proper air that begins from a bottom turn, is launched “above and off the lip” and travels above the wave. No backwash, No chop hops, or anything in the flats, from the wave face, or below the lip of the wave.
4. All waves must be self caught – You must paddle into the wave. This means NO tow-ats, step-offs, jetskis, boats, dinghys, winches, canoes, oars, helicopters, dolphins or assistance of any kind.
5. No grabs of any kind. Not before, not after, not during.
6. You must completely “ride out” of the kickflip. That means if you land on the back of the wave and fail to continue surfing the wave – it’s not a make!
7. No heelflips. Or else we’d have called it the Heelflip-Off.
8. No shoes. Who surfs in shoes anyway? Regular “made for surfing” booties are acceptable.
9. You must be riding a real surfboard with at least one fin. No boogie boards, softboards, wakeboards, wakeskates, skimboards, kiteboards, trays etc.

Here’s the video explanation of the contest rules. (Volcom already paid Torklos $10,000 in its first edition of the challenge).

Here’s Zoltan Torkos of Santa Cruz in one of his submitted kickflips:

Zoltan deserves a vote. What do you think?

It’s a big sports Sunday in the Bay Area, and approaching kickoff we ask this question of Sentinel readers:

All things being equal, who’s the better starting quarterback for the 49ers for the rest of the season:

At the Sentinel, we’re doing more with video almost every day.
Two of our ongoing projects are up and running and gaining momentum. Assistant Sports Editor Jim Seimas and reporter Andrew Matheson have been previewing and reviewing each weekend’s football games.
I have to say, I’m not the biggest fan of video of reporters in a room talking about actual action. But Seimas and Matheson, with help from designer/photographer/video editor Tony Solis have taken this to an art form. Best production values ever for the genre! Have a look:

We’ve also added artist Kirby Scudder as a regular columnist to the Sentinel’s weekly Guide. Along with his column, he also produces a video profile every week of a Santa Cruz artist. We want to help Kirby with his mission of spreading the word about the arts community in Santa Cruz, one of the best in the country. Have a look at the playlist.

One other video note: Photographer Kevin Johnson (with reporter J.M. Brown) has done some really nice work on putting together four videos that help sort through what’s happening with the desalination project in Santa Cruz. We launch that project tomorrow.

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When 15,000-plus runners came to Santa Cruz on Sunday for the 40th annual Wharf to Wharf race, we were ready to meet them. We received more than 40,000 page views on the Sentinel website.

We put to use the following services:

• Twitter – asking any and all to use #wharftowharf hashtag, we added that to the page for continuous updates. Our reporters and photographers also used the tag. Through twitter, we posted photos and video (using the twitvid service) as well as other updates. We were also able to send directly to the Sentinel home page by using another tag, #scsnews. We’ve used an advanced search widget to display tweets from our staff using that tag and always ask reporters to break news on twitter.
• Storify – we gathered photos, video, tweets from our staff, runners and spectators throughout the day, and embedded the collection in the top of our home page. Our collection has received more than 4,000 views. (See below).
• Flickr – We posted staff and contributed photos to the Sentinel Flickr account, where our set has received more than 6,500 views. We took the easily-embedded slideshow and dropped it into coverage and its own article page. We also shared links to the slideshow on Facebook
• Google maps – We updated a map we built long ago to include Panoramio photos from various points along the beautiful race route, shot by Sentinel digital intern Eric Brown.
• Brightcove and YouTube – We shot video along the route. I got to the race early with a smart phone and a Handycam. I tweeted, collected video, sent photos from my phone (DroidX, which went from fully charged to dead in two miles) and then eventually ran most of last four miles of the race (with my daughter in a stroller) while collecting sights and sounds on the Handycam. We posted the video to our site through Brightcove, embedded the video in an article page and have Brightcove set to automatically post to our YouTube channel.
• Instagram (we’re @scsentinel) – we posted just five photos to Instagram, a couple from the race, and a couple of the best from photographer Shmuel Thaler.  We also liked every photo we found for Wharf to Wharf and followed anyone who ran and posted about the race. Our photos received more than 200 likes, we picked up more than 50 followers.
• Digital producer Christina Gullickson orchestrated the show, handling all of the content flowing her way, and she worked to open the doors to user-contributed photos and promoted all our content on the social channels above.
• Sports reporter Andrew Matheson also immediately had final results and compiled his own video, so we had the first stories about the race that were updated in the afternoon
• Two other easy moves added nearly 5,000 views – we posted an early “Wharf to Wharf Information” page and we embedded the results page within our site.

Congrats to all the runners! We probably overdid, but the Sentinel loves the Wharf to Wharf!

Vote for the Santa Cruz County readers choice boys high school athlete of the year:

Vote in girls poll

Posted from Los Altos, California, United States.

Vote for the Santa Cruz County readers choice girls high school athlete of the year:

Vote in boys poll

We started a partnership yesterday with Santa Cruz Waves. This comes after bumping into great photo after great photo from Tyler Fox’s website on Facebook and Twitter, and then some exchanges about possibilities, and a couple face-to-face meetings. The idea is that we help Santa Cruz Waves promote a uniquely Santa Cruz site, we share some of their work with our audience (more than 5 million visitors in 2011), and help them grow.

The goal of this partnership is to become the world-wide authority on all things surf in Santa Cruz – led by Santa Cruz Waves, supported by us.

It’s exactly the kind of partnership we’re going to pursue in a variety of areas. Photo and content sharing is a start, business and revenue possibilities are part of the discussion. We plan to collaborate in coverage of big events and on breaking news at the beach. We’ll also regularly run Santa Cruz Waves photos in the print edition.

The reason this makes so much sense to us is Tyler Fox. Read his profile. But also, check out the photos and his site.

Interested in similar types of content sharing and exploring the possibilities? Send me a note and/or join the Santa Cruz Community Media Lab.

On a daily basis, it seems like every member of the news staff is developing new digital skills and tools for reporting, storytelling and sharing.

Copy Desk Chief Brian Pifer opened a twitter account, and is digging into HTML and CSS text books. He’s been styling up stories and pages. His photo posted to twitter of Chris Rene downtown has been one of the most popular among our staffers in the new year.

Pifer, who is always at ease with new tools, programs, software and hardware, also designs pages, manages his staff, is asked to do a million things, and occasionally squeezes in extra time to write about the video game industry and its local connections.

He’s also got a rapidly evolving golf game – demonstrated here at Media Day for the AT&T Pro-Am:

Link of the Day: Digital producer Christina Gullickson gathered up a Storified account of the chatter among Niners fans yesterday. Highly entertaining reading as Niners fans got warmed up, ate, fretted, celebrated, but then suffered a loss just short of the Super Bowl. The good people of Storify posted the account at the top of their home page Sunday night.

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Recently, we got a rare new piece of gear, but with all the things we’re trying to get done, we haven’t put it to a lot of use.

The gear: A GoPro camera with a variety of straps and snap-on devices that will allow it to go far and wide. We sent it snowboarding in Tahoe on its first trip, which was a learning experience. We’re still trying to get some of the adhesive off of sports editor Julie Jag’s snowboard.

We don’t have a lot of video to show for that trip. Cops reporter and surfer Stephen Baxter has been our next volunteer, and along with his friend Emlyn Stokes captured about 45 seconds of usable footage from their surf trip on New Year’s Day, 2012.

We’re going to keep taking the camera out, until we break it, sink it, lose it, or actually get some cool shots. Here’s our first effort. We’re learning, and we’ll keep adding to this playlist on YouTube. Want to take this camera to a skate park, zip line trip, around the world, or on a motorcycle ride or parachute jump? Let us know. We’re up for it, if you are willing to sign the right waivers.