In skateboarding there are those who make the streets their best friend and pray they don’t visit the emergency room. Skating hard, going big, and technical, everyday hoping to walk away clean. Returning home after a long day of skating without a scratch is usually a sign of some God given natural born talent. Lacey Baker has those days paired with a genuine love and dedication for skating. At 15 she holds one of the highest honors, 2006 World Cup’s #1 Women’s Street Skater.

Lacey asked for her first skateboard at four years old. She remembers, “I wore a helmet until I felt like I could keep my head off the ground. I learned how to fall, how to roll.” Lacey caught on fast but still is unassuming, “I’d be skating with my friends and do a kickflip, and think it was easy and they couldn’t do it.”

What separates Lacey’s skating from other street skaters is how precise and technical she skates. She goes for difficult tricks and aims for high consistency. Though Lacey admits contests bring on pressure, she says she doesn’t like to look at it that way, “Its basically like going to a skatepark and doing the run.”

Prague is her favorite contest, “I like the whole city, the fact that there is so much graffiti everywhere, and the contest is really fun.” If you check out her skateboard box she’s tagged it with her own graffiti art. Lacey is creative, drawing, spray painting, and playing guitar. At the start of this interview she pulled the tape recorder to her guitar strings and played despite requests from her mom and manager to start the interview. Playing the tape back, she nailed some pretty strong riffs. Lacey’s mom introduced her to bands like Bob Dylan, Jimmy Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, and Janis Joplin. Lacey also credits her mom as her biggest role model. She’s a big supporter of Lacey, her skating career, and her art.

As skate mentors, Lacey’s inspired by Ryan Miller from Utility boardshop who she’s been skating with since she first started, and tech skaters like Marc Johnson. Her next big goal is to focus more on filming, and get a video part. “My friend Brian knows how to edit and he puts our parts together. We both have cameras.” That, and learning new tricks, “I was doing the same tricks for awhile just practicing consistency, but then my friend Michael, he’s been learning so many new tricks that I have to learn new tricks now too. It’s just that time.”

Lacey’s hyped whether she’s learning new tricks, traveling to a contest, or shooting with a photographer. She never tires of progressing, her latest, a half cab nose manual big spin out and a fakie 5-0.“I just love skating; I’ll stay at the skateparks all day long. Chill and skate till I can’t move anymore,” she explains. She gets pumped on ledges and manual pads like the set up at West Covina skatepark. Lacey skates everyday.

Watch for her this year as she heads to North Carolina for the first contest of the year this May and continues traveling for contests over the next six months. Lacey is the now and the future of women’s skateboarding.