Professional skateboarder Sean Sheffey and his coworkers were skating outside the warehouse where they worked when Daren Collins walked up to the group.
“Hey, can I get a crack at that?” Collins asked.
The group of employees laughed at his request. After all, Collins, an executive who often visited the warehouse for work, was dressed in business attire.
But they obliged.
Collins rode up to the top of the warehouse’s driveway and busted out a handstand, an old-school trick few skaters could do anymore.
His trick impressed the employees and sparked a friendship with Sheffey.
Years later, that friendship would change the trajectory of Sheffey’s life as he embarked on a journey of faith.
Becoming a skateboard pioneer
While growing up in Maryland, Sheffey was introduced to skateboarding — his future profession — by some older kids who gave him a couple of skateboarding magazines.
“I was really interested in the culture, like the styles, the look and the art of the skateboard,” he said.
Sheffey saw a similarity to the BMX riding he was already familiar with, and he also enjoyed how easy it was to meet up with friends and skate.
“I kind of took a liking to that, the way you could create your own jumping and maneuvering around and riding and kind of piece the tricks and maneuverability around together,” he said.
It didn’t take long for his career to take off. After moving to California, Sheffey earned his big break in Life Skateboard’s film “A Soldier’s Story” at just 17 years old.
At the time, Sheffey had only been skating for four years. In the film, he became the first to backside ollie and fakie ollie and half cab a picnic table as well as to back tail a full-size table, according to TransWorld Skateboarding.
While that might sound like a foreign language to a non-skateboarder, Sheffey’s tricks were revolutionary.
When Thrasher Magazine revisited the film in 2011, skater Mike Maldonaldo called it “one of the rawest skateboard parts out ever. This is true East Coast skateboarding.”
In 2015, Paul Zitzer for Skatepark Tampa called it “gold,” writing that Sheffey’s “power and style are timeless.”
The Skateboarders Journal said “Sean Sheffey unknowingly becomes a pioneer of the game” after his part in the film.
Sheffey continued skating after “A Soldier’s Story” and went on to appear in the skating films “Reason for Living,” “Hokus Pokus” and “Virtual Reality” and later skated for Plan B and Girl Skateboards.
Meeting the missionaries
In 2023, Sheffey was resting at the skate park in Encinitas, California, when two missionaries from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints approached him and asked if they could pray with him.
“I was missing a lot of my prayers and Bible study for some years then. It was just absent in my life by choice, and I thought at that point I had room to welcome God and religion back in my life,” Sheffey said.
So he accepted the missionaries’ invitation.
Afterwards, the missionaries asked Sheffey if they could meet him at the skatepark the next week to read some scriptures together.
A week passed and Sheffey made sure he was at the skatepark to meet with the missionaries again.
“It was super cool to see his life had kind of prepared him for the gospel and led him to a place where he was just real sincere and loving and caring for everyone around him,” Jeff Williams, one of the missionaries who taught Sean, said.
That preparation was years in the making.
Sheffey described coming from a religious background. He attended Christian and Christian Baptist churches with his family growing up.
“(We) always had God in the house,” he said.
Even when he was starting his skating career, he carried a Bible with him — something he hadn’t heard of many other skaters doing.
Sheffey says he previously struggled with alcohol and drugs and even served time in both jail and prison.
But those experiences helped Sheffey get clean — he says he’s almost 17 years sober — and reconnect with God through Bible study groups and daily prayer circles offered in the correctional facilities.
“Even in jail there was hope, and there was prayers,” he said. “That was just things that the inmates would do to show their care and their love for God.”
“He’d been trying to turn his life around, for sure, before he met us,” Connor Bushman, Williams’ companion who also taught Sheffey, said. “He was kind of already in the mindset of like, I want to do more with my life.”
For Sheffey, “the tradition of the Lord Jesus Christ, his teachings and the responsibility of upholding the teachings and the fact that there was a church continuing on the New Testament” appealed to him, he said.
The missionaries continued to teach Sheffey — at the skatepark, a place where he was comfortable — and invited him to church.
Divine connections and an unlikely reunion
When Sheffey showed up to church for the first time, he saw a familiar face: Jordy Collins, the son of Sheffey’s old friend, Daren Collins, and a professional surfer.
Sheffey and Daren Collins had lost touch for nearly five years after Sheffey left his warehouse job. Jordy Collins had become friends with Sheffey, too, and often skated at the skatepark the same time as Sheffey.
The younger Collins had just moved into the ward Sheffey was visiting, and his first Sunday there happened to be Sheffey’s first as well. Then a few Sundays later, Jordy Collins and his wife spoke in church, and Daren Collins attended.
Sheffey was there that day and was able to reconnect with his old friend.
“God orchestrated this incredible way for Daren to come to the church building on a random Sunday for his son to speak, and then Sean to also be there to kind of spark this friendship,” Williams said.
Daren Collins believes people are put in each other’s lives for a reason and not by coincidence, and that includes him and Sheffey. After reconnecting with Sheffey at church that Sunday, he joined in his discussions with the missionaries.
“There are no coincidences in the work of the Lord, and so, every time something like this happens, I always just kind of shake my head in awe and amazement,” Daren Collins said.
As Sheffey’s conversion journey progressed, the discussions were moved from the skatepark to the church meetinghouse. During that first discussion at the church, the missionaries and Daren Collins showed Sheffey the baptismal font.
There, in front of the font, they discussed baptism.
This wasn’t their first time discussing baptism, and they had already been teaching Sheffey for roughly six months but he had been hesitant to set a baptism date.
“It had been long enough where we were like, OK, it kind of has to happen now, or it’s just going to be the same thing,” Bushman said.
Sheffey took the idea of baptism very seriously. He knew that decision meant he would have to make some changes in his life, and he wanted to ensure he would be able to live up to those “honorably or truthfully” once baptized.
In front of the font, Sheffey told Williams and Bushman he wanted to be baptized. But he wanted to wait for his birthday, which was nearly a year away.
“Me and my companion didn’t really know what to do,” Williams said.
Then, Collins bore his testimony about the importance of baptism and making covenants with God.
Bushman called it “the most powerful testimony I’ve ever heard.”
After hearing it, Sheffey was ready to get baptized the next week. He and the missionaries compromised to schedule it three weeks later.
Sheffey was baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ in January 2024.
“I could tell it was going to be a real cleansing and a real spiritual uplifting — it’s just getting that much closer to God,” he said.
Sheffey had invited everyone he knew to his big day, and many of them came, including professional skateboarders Rick Howard and Mike Carroll, according to Bushman.
A changed man
The blessings that came from Sheffey’s conversion were immediate.
One of his friends who attended his baptism went up to the missionaries afterwards and asked if there was an extra jumpsuit, so he could be baptized that day, too.
“He told us that he had never felt better in his life than watching Sean get baptized and feeling the spirit that was there,” Bushman said.
Sheffey’s example also helped his nephew, who Sheffey baptized after he too was approached by missionaries.
Another blessing came a year later when Sheffey was named a 2025 inductee to the Skateboarding Hall of Fame. He credits God for the honor.
“That was very holy, and I really owe that to God,” Sheffey said. “I have been waiting to do that for like five or six, maybe seven years, and it hadn’t happened.”
He believes his joining the church showed God that he was “taking the right, responsible steps in life to receive that blessing,” he said.
Ten to fifteen members of Sheffey’s ward family traveled from Encinitas to Simi Valley, California, to attend his induction ceremony.
In Collins’ eyes, Sheffey demonstrates what it means to become a new creature in Jesus Christ.
Early in his conversion, Sheffey struggled coming to church regularly as it conflicted with his ability to surf on Sunday mornings. Now, he attends and blesses the sacrament every week.
“I see Sean, and I think back about Christ on the beach talking to his apostles and asking them to leave their nets, and straightway they left their nets. That’s basically what the Lord asked of Sean, to leave your nets, and he did,” Collins said.
Bushman added, “He lived everything we taught him, and he didn’t just agree with it but he put it into practice.”
Joining the church and rekindling his relationship with God has changed Sheffey’s life.
“I think it’s allowed me to have more faith and believe in others and trust and care more,” he said. “It’s given me that extra love and spiritual emotions I need to get through and have that power to get through day by day. It’s like a new hope.”
His relationship with God means so much to him that now he hopes his faith can be a defining aspect of his life and legacy.
“I think by the time I pass, I would like to have it clear that I wanted to be here responsibly, and I was a religious and God-loving man and wanted the same for my children and grandchildren.”