Schools In Session: Internet Sneaker Culture Part 2 Nike Park

For Schools In Session: Internet Sneaker Culture Part 1 we took a look back at Shoetrends.com, today we are looking at Nike Park. For those of you not around during internet sneaker cultures infancy Nike Park co-existed with Nike Talk for a short time before quietly exiting the scene. The site was a go to source for a collective of sneaker information which included news and photographs gathered from a bunch of reliable sources that ranged from SLAM to Alternate Sneakers. NP also included a forum that would be considered beta-max by today’s standards. While I don’t recall posting on the forum personally (tought to remember going back 15 years), Nike Park was still a pit stop in a “journey” of what was sneaker culture in the late 90’s into Y2K.

Check out this news NP gathered from Jersey-Joe back in 1999.

This sneaker world shattering info found its way to NP and while unfortunately the Carmine’s and Tech II’s didn’t see a retro release for nearly a decade, everything else would go on to release within the next 2 years.

If you’re wondering why we aren’t visiting Nike Park in 2014 there were some limitations. As fun as it was to look through the latest images of shoes that would drop both in the states and overseas

the site was still lacking. For one, like its name implied, this was strictly a Nike fanboy site. If you were into Etonic, Avia, Reebok, Adidas or any of the countless other brands you would have to kick cans. Secondly, if you were looking for strictly performance info (since a lot of dudes were actually using the shoes to ball in or run in (not just collect)) there wasn’t many shoe reviews or info on sizing, comfort and or quality. Still, even if NP never made it past the early 2000’s it will forever live on in sneaker culture as a pioneering site and one that clearly paved the way for future sneaker related sites.