PALACE'S KYLE WILSON COMPLETES SFA LITE TRAINING

Madlands Is Where Kyle Wilson Learned To Work

Kyle Wilson went pro for Palace Skateboards in 2021 after years working inside Madlands, the brand's temporary indoor skatepark in London. He grew up on South Bank from age fourteen, the concrete undercroft below the Southbank Centre that has produced more of the city's team riders than any shop counter.

Palace itself started in 2009, founded by Lev Tanju, Gareth Skewis and Marshall Taylor out of the same scene. Wilson's deal now runs alongside Nike SB, Thunder Trucks and Shake Junt, and his footage anchors parts like Beta Blockers and Laust in Translation. Madlands was not a retail gimmick either. It put teenagers like Wilson on the payroll and gave them skate time in the same building, years before his name went on a deck.

His Nike SB relationship follows the same logic. The brand recently put nine skateshops in World Cup kits for its FC Pack, treating shop teams like sports franchises instead of marketing footnotes.

That is the resume behind the video Palace posted this week. It is not a part. It is Wilson sitting down with the Ben Raemers Foundation to talk through the Suicide First Aid Lite training he took with them, filmed by Josh Sosa.

Three And A Half Hours Inside SFA Lite

The Ben Raemers Foundation's Suicide First Aid Lite course runs three and a half hours and trains a person to recognize the signs of a suicidal crisis and step in before it escalates. Co founder Susie Crome is now qualified to deliver the course herself, which lets the foundation run it directly inside skate shops and team houses instead of booking outside instructors.

Palace, Isle, Slam City Skates and Lost Art have all put staff or riders through it. Courses like it typically train people to recognize warning signs, ask directly, and connect the person to further help, then leave them equipped to do the same for someone else.

The foundation calls its ongoing video format Checking In. It spends a day skating with a professional, then sits down to talk through the routine and structure they lean on day to day, plus the SFA Lite training itself. Wilson's episode follows that format exactly. The caption is explicit about it: checking in with Kyle Wilson, discussing routine and structure and the SFA training he undertook with the foundation.

Ben Raemers Never Got This Conversation

Ben Raemers rode for Enjoi, Slam City Skates, Independent Trucks and Converse before he died by suicide on May 14, 2019, at 28. He had won King of the Road with Enjoi in 2016 and landed the cover of Thrasher, the kind of resume that made his death land harder in a scene that assumed its best riders had it together.

The foundation carrying his name launched that same year, built to end the stigma that kept Raemers, and skaters like him, from saying anything was wrong. Slam City Skates, the shop that sponsored him early, is also one of the four operations that later took the SFA Lite course, closing a loop the foundation did not plan for but does not shy from either.

Converse, the brand on his feet at the time, is still shaping the same skate world through product rather than crisis. It just teased a second Jack Purcell collaboration with Kenzo, proof the sponsorship money never stopped moving even as the foundation built something slower underneath it.

Skateboarding Has No League Office For This

The NBA and NFL only mandated licensed mental health staff for every team within the last decade, backed by nine figure broadcast deals that fund it. Skateboarding has no equivalent league structure and no commissioner's office writing that requirement into a collective agreement.

The Ben Raemers Foundation built the substitute itself, shop by shop. Suicide First Aid Lite is now inside four major UK skate operations, Palace, Isle, Slam City Skates and Lost Art, a wider footprint across one sport than most single sneaker collaborations reach in the same stretch of time.

A brand training its own riders to recognize a crisis before it happens is the cheaper, harder version of what the NBA and NFL fund with stadium money. On the evidence of Wilson's episode, it is also the version actually reaching the people standing on the board.