I’d been searching for skate bags that could comfortably hold the Powerslide Next skates I’d just bought. I fitted them with an Endless 3x110mm frame and large wheels. These big-wheel skates have been all the rage among urban inline skaters for many years now. They’re great for long-distance skating on rough roads.

But these wheel frames were longer and taller than the usual 4x80mm hockey frames I’d skated in the past, such as the ones on my True carbon skates. These hard boots were also taller and bulkier than the hybrid carbon-shell boots, such as the Powerslide Tau, that I’d been skating in for the past three years.

These big-wheel skates did not fit any skate bags in my possession. The Inline Warehouse skate bag that had carried many of my past skates, for instance, couldn’t be zipped up when I squeezed a pair of PS Nexts with big wheels into it.

I was genuinely surprised to find no skate bag explicitly marketed as suitable for today’s big-wheel rollerblades, the inline equivalent of a Hummer compared to a sedan. It appears that most of these skate bags were designed for slim ice skates or kids’ rollerblades.

In this treatise, I show four skate bags, their actual measured dimensions, and whether my monster pair of rollerblades fits inside them.

I also weighed them halfway through writing this. I kept trying to describe their perceived build quality; whether they felt hefty or flimsy, and so on. I finally brought out the scale to eliminate my subjective bias.

Before I continue, however, I should clarify that by “skate bags” in this essay, I mean compact, triangular-shaped bags. I don’t mean duffel bags, and I don’t mean large skate backpacks. I want the most compact bags possible so I don’t waste trunk space, since I usually carry a bunch of them in my car just in case I need to stop somewhere to skate.

And, by “big wheels” in this essay, I mean a 3x110mm configuration similar to my Endless frame, with a 276mm wheelbase. I am aware that speed skaters roll on 4x110mm or 3x125mm. I don’t think my skate bags will hold those.

Compact skate bags are mainly for ice and kid’s skates

A typical triangular skate bag seems to follow a standard set of dimensions when it comes to the length and height of the bag. Most compact bags measure slightly more than 15″ long and 15″ tall. Some bags are as long as 17″, and others are as tall as 16 ½”; but those small increases in length and height beyond 15″ don’t matter much.

These bags, however, differ wildly in their “actual, usable width”. It’s the narrow usable width of most skate bags that causes problems for my big-wheel hard-boot skates.

Most ice skates, inline hockey skates, and quad skates will fit comfortably in any of the four skate bags shown. All of these have relatively slim cuffs compared to hard boots with a hinged cuff and thick strap buckles. All of these skates also use normal-sized wheels, 80mm or smaller.

The following images illustrate how two True carbon-shell skates with factory wheel frames and 76mm/80mm wheels fit comfortably within a Rollerblade skate bag, with room to spare. These are actually Hi-Lo frames, but throughout the rest of this article, I will refer to them as if they were a typical 4x80mm setup.

If I try to cram a Powerslide Next with 3x110mm wheels into the same bag, the zipper will not close completely. The bulky cuffs, when placed side by side, exceed 11″ in width and contort the 8″-wide bag into a weird, stretched shape. I measured 15″ from the rear wheel to the front wheel. That is one inch short of the bag’s 16″ length. I could stagger the two boots to slightly reduce their total width, and that allowed me to zip the bag up completely. As the image below shows, the skate bag is forced into a weird shape to fit these two skates.

That is a EU size 42-43 Next 2.0 boot with a 275mm wheel frame. Imagine even larger boot sizes. It seems that most compact bags will only accommodate kids’ hard boots comfortably.

Just how bulky are hard boots with big wheels?

To understand how bulky hard boots are, and how much longer and taller big wheels and taller frames make them, I took some measurements. Let’s start with the inline equivalent of ice hockey skates. In fact, this monocoque carbon shell/boot is exactly the same one True makes for their custom ice skates. They simply rivet an inline frame onto the boot instead of a steel blade.

Coming up next, we have Powerslide Tau boots on a Trinity Endless frame with three 110mm wheels in a 3x110mm configuration. The Tau is a hybrid boot with a half-carbon shell, so its boot is almost as slim and compact as the hockey boot. But the cuff and buckle add almost two inches to the width. Big wheels raise the boot height by almost an inch, even with Trinity’s special ability to get the toe box as low as humanly possible to the ground. The total length increases from 12″ to 15″.

When we compare the PS Next hard boot to the Tau, the differences can be attributed to the thick removable liner and the expanded hard shell. Cuff width increases by an inch in this case.

Here is a visual comparison of these three skates. I pushed them against a wall, with their rear wheels touching the wall.

As we have seen, all four compact skate bags can handle the length of big-wheel frames. All of them are far taller than any of my skates. So the limiting factor is width. Here is a recap of the maximum widths of the four skate bags we’ll review next. Note how three out of four don’t have enough width to meet the 11″ requirement for the Powerslide Next.

As we have seen, all compact skate bags can handle even the length of big wheel frames. All of them are far taller than any of my skates. So the limiting factor is the width. Here is a recap of the max widths the four skate bags we’ll review next. Note how three out of four don’t have a width capacity meeting the 11″ requirement for Powerslide Next.

You can actually pack the largest skates into the tiniest bags

This long essay is like many of my other long-winded treatises. I have taken a hundred pictures of boots and skate bags. By organizing these pictures logically, I can simply let the pictures tell their own stories. Any words I write are merely annotations in the storytelling.

As I wrote about the pictures showing boot dimensions and skate bag dimensions, an idea hit me.

Astute readers were probably already screaming in their heads as they read through the preceding sections. I feel sorry that it took me a hundred pictures, manual annotations of dimensions, and finally the long process of weaving a story around these images before I came to my senses.

I rushed outside to make use of the last glimmer of light after sunset to capture this idea in pictures. Here they are.

It worked! I simply nested the two skates at a right angle, so that the widest part of the cuff of one abuts the empty space below the toe box of the other. Now the pair measures only 9 ½″ instead of 11″. They are now just slightly wider than my hockey skates placed side by side with no offset. Wow.

Recall that I could not zip up the Inline Warehouse skate bag when I placed the two skates side by side with the wheels on the ground.

With nesting, the reduced width of 9 ½″ means the two offset boots now fit well in the 7″-wide main compartment of the skate bag. The bag bulges slightly on both sides to accommodate the extra 2 ½″.

Recall that I had to stagger these two boots in the Rollerblade bag in order to zip the bag up.

With nesting, this 8″-wide bag feels like it has room to spare. The bulge needed to accommodate the extra 1 ½″ is imperceptible.

There are downsides to this nesting strategy, however. Our skates were not designed to be stored this way, and some metal parts can rub against and scratch the plastic parts of the other skate. The wheels and frames also come into contact with the other skate’s boot and cuff, smearing dirt and grime across surfaces that would normally stay relatively clean.

There is another, less obvious problem: the dirt doesn’t just end up on the other skate. Instead of being confined mostly to the bottom of the bag, dirt from the wheels and frames gets smeared across the inside surfaces of the bag. Over repeated use, that grime can then transfer back onto the boots, and onto anything else you put in the bag.

Pack large skates into a backpack not designed to fit them

I set out to write about compact skate bags. I did not intend to write about skate backpacks, even though I do have a few. However, the “nesting boots to fit” insight got me thinking about backpacks. So here is a quick detour.

This is how I pack my hockey skates with a Hi-Lo 68mm/80mm setup into my Rollerblade Urban Commuter Backpack. I set the wheels down on the floor, with the grime on them kept away from anything above the boots. The backpack came with wheel covers, which you don’t see here (see later pictures). I pack water bottles and padded crash pants into it as well. When I need to travel with skates, the compact and flimsy bags won’t cut it. This sturdy and ergonomic backpack is the only answer for those situations.

I thought it would be impossible to pack big-wheel skates into this backpack when I started writing this treatise. But I was wrong. With this nesting strategy, I managed to pack my PS Tau 3x110mm into the backpack for a Wednesday Night Skate while writing this essay.

The remaining issue is the grime. It got onto my water bottles, protective gear, padded pants, and pretty much everywhere inside the backpack. I looked around my house and finally found the original wheel covers that came with the backpack.

Inline Warehouse Carrying Bag is great for hockey skates

Now we get back to our regular program: talking about how you can fit big wheels and hard boots into a compact skate bag, with the wheels set down on the floor.

I love the cheap Inline Warehouse (IW) Carrying Bags. They are made for IW and prominently display both the Inline Warehouse name and big letters showing “IW.” They usually retail for $20. But if you buy a pair of skates from IW, you can grab a carrying bag for $10. After all, you’ll be a walking advertisement for IW when you trot around with this skate bag.

These bags are decently made, with medium-thick material. They have plastic peg feet, and there is a large mesh side pocket 1½″ deep for knee pads and wrist guards. There is a zippered mesh pocket in the back that doubles as a ventilation panel for the main compartment.

Once in a while, the bag changes color. I’ve seen bright yellow versions in addition to bright blue and the red one shown above. As of this writing in August 2026, a version with cool light-gray lettering is available. Sometimes these bags run out of stock if you buy your skates at an unlucky time.

I’ve been using them forever for both ice and inline hockey skates. While the 7″ width of the bag is technically too narrow even for a pair of hockey skates, the bag can bulge slightly outward where the quarter panels and toe boxes are. I can also simply stagger the skates front-to-back. There is room to spare.

I’ve also been carrying larger skates in these IW bags, including aggressive skates, Powerslide Reign, and Powerslide Tau skates in a 3x110mm wheel configuration. These skates stretch the boundary of usability. The Taus don’t actually fit widthwise and bulge the bag severely outward. But I made it work.

With the Powerslide Next on 3x110mm, however, I’ve exceeded what was possible, trying to fit an 11″-wide pair of skates into a compartment measuring only 7″ wide. The zipper simply cannot be closed. And there isn’t much room to stagger the skates.

I think Inline Warehouse probably commissioned this skate bag back before big wheels and long wheel frames were a thing. They just never bothered to update the design to catch up with the trends of the last decade. Or there’s another possibility: perhaps these bags were designed for ice skates all along.

The Inline Warehouse-brand Carrying Bag is the narrowest bag out of the four I’ve used. It is only great for hockey skates – they don’t bulge these bags outward. But I still highly recommend this bag for medium-bulk skates. People on Reddit have reported that the mesh is fragile. But I only use it to store socks, insoles, Compeed pads, towels, etc. And I’ve been using some of these bags for almost three years now.

For big wheels on hard boots, nest the skates at right angles like I showed in a previous section.

Or, get a wider skate bag. That is, keep reading.

Rollerblade Carrying Bag: the Mercedes-Benz of skate bags

At 8″ wide, the Rollerblade bag is one inch wider than the main compartment of the IW bag. This bag is longer (16″) than it is tall (15″), the reverse of the IW bag, which is 15″ long and 16″ tall. That extra length makes it better suited to modern, long-wheelbase frames.

This is the most robustly built of the four bags. Its material is substantially thicker and heavier, and the build quality is impeccable. At $30, it better be.

There is a protective bottom insert for added stability, along with plastic peg feet. There is a small mesh pocket in the back and a small zippered side pouch inside the bag. Otherwise, there are no other compartments for storing accessories. When using this bag, I have to find my own accessory bag for larger items such as insoles.

Here are some visual comparisons of the Rollerblade bag against the Inline Warehouse bag from the previous section. I show the biggest skates each can strenuously fit, with the zipper barely able to close completely. Both bags are grotesquely distorted by the bulging skates.

If I put a pair of hockey skates in this bag, there is plenty of room to spare. I can easily pack my knee and elbow pads and wrist guards in there as well.

As mentioned in previous sections, it is possible to fit a pair of PS Next 3x110mm skates in this bag. But I need to stagger the two boots to slightly reduce their total width, which allows me to zip the bag up completely. This is not ideal; I fear that it places undue strain on the seams.

I also showed earlier that the same pair of PS Next skates fits comfortably when nested at right angles. But dirt and grime may be a concern for some people.

This one is like the Mercedes-Benz of compact skate bags. If money is burning a hole in your pocket, this bag is for you.

EALER Sports Skate Bag for big wheels and hard boots

This $14 compact skate bag by EALER Sports feels well-built. I’d peg its build quality as comparable to the IW-brand bag. But it does weigh almost a hundred grams less. I’m not sure how to interpret that. Despite this bag’s compartment being 2″ wider than the IW bag, it doesn’t have IW’s 1½″-deep side pocket, and it is also shorter. It has a flimsier protective bottom insert as well. Perhaps that explains the difference in weight.

This skate bag looks comically small when placed next to the Powerslide Next 3x110mm. But it’s as if the bag were tailor-made specifically for my setup. See the later pictures to confirm how the bag fits like a glove.

There is a large zippered mesh pocket on the back of the bag. There are large rubber peg feet on the bottom. And have I mentioned yet that the usable space really is 9″ wide? Despite being shorter in both length and height than the IW and Rollerblade bags, this bag fits my big-wheel setup simply because it is better suited to hard boots, with their wide cuffs and protruding buckles.

The skate bag arrived comically small, too, neatly folded up. I show the even wider Gooyule bag and the PS Next here for scale. Unlike the Rollerblade bag, with its heftier and stiffer materials, this bag tends to collapse onto itself when I try to stand it up empty.

The zipper opening is just long enough for me to slip each of my two big-wheel skates into the bag. If my rear-wheel-to-front-wheel measurement were any longer than its current 15″, it would not be easy to get the skates in, and the wheels would stretch the bag lengthwise. As one image below shows, the 11″-wide combined cuffs bulge the 9″-wide bag outward by about an inch on each side. It’s not too dramatic.

I can easily zip up the bag with these two skates inside without having to stagger them as I did with the Rollerblade bag. In fact, I can’t stagger them even if I wanted to. At 15″ long, the bag barely accommodates my 15″ rear-wheel-to-front-wheel measurement. My skates can’t wobble or move in any direction inside this bag; they sit snug against the inside walls.

I don’t know if I would use this bag for all my skates. But it seems to be a great value and a perfect fit for my PS Next 3×110 setup. I never fully appreciated that extra-large side mesh pocket on the IW bag until I no longer had it on this EALER bag.

Gooyule Skate Bag: the Ford F-150 of skate bags

A very different type of compact skate bag is catching on in popularity on Amazon. Many “alphabet soup” brands sell them. Some have little in the way of product descriptions or specifications. Others show plenty of product data, but often with self-contradictory information. Prices vary wildly, but they usually fall on the cheaper side compared to traditional compact bags.

I bought a two-pack (blue and red) from a brand called Gooyule for $21, or roughly $10 each. There are three compartments, with the outer ones meant for carrying skates and the middle one for gear and whatever else you need when skating. You would not normally intuit this unusual packing arrangement from the width measurements alone, because each side compartment measures only 3″ wide.

The whole thing weighs only 346g, making it the lightest of all four bags. It’s a whole 100g lighter than the second-lightest bag, the EALER at 446g. But to me, its main canvas material does not feel any thinner or flimsier than the EALER bag. Its weight comes in at just 65% of the heaviest bag, the IW-brand bag at 532g. I am not completely sure where the weight (and presumably cost) savings came from. Possibly it’s because this bag has no plastic bottom insert in the middle compartment and no bottom feet of any sort.

The unintuitive way of storing skates in the side mesh pockets works surprisingly well. Recall that my Powerslide Next skates, with a 3x110mm setup, measure 11″ wide together, or roughly 5½″ each. Each skate is 2½″ wider than its side compartment. But the mesh naturally bulges outward, while the inside wall bulges into the middle compartment. The arrangement works.

In the pictures above, a Gooyule bag, with its 3″-5″-3″ compartmentalization, is shown next to an 8″-wide Rollerblade bag. Carrying the Gooyule bag by its handle feels natural, just like carrying the Rollerblade one, without any part of the bag appearing strained. The weight of the skates rests on their wheels via light bottom inserts in the two side compartments. These then transfer the load to the sturdy canvas material forming the side walls of the 5″-wide middle compartment. I did not imagine that this arrangement would work so well. But it did.

There is plenty of room in the 5″-wide middle compartment. The cuffs and boots bulge slightly into it, but this compartment stays clean of grime. I packed all my gear, including crash pants, into it without drama.

These Gooyule bags came folded up into a bundle even smaller than the EALER. Here is a blue, packed Gooyule bag holding PS Next skates next to the red bundle as it was shipped to me.

Right after unpacking, the Gooyule bag is even harder to stand up than the EALER. It kept collapsing onto itself when empty. But after a day, the plastic tubular frames firmed up and could prop up the bag all by themselves.

The images below illustrate a Gooyule bag with Powerslide Tau 3x110mm skates stuffed into it, with gear in the middle compartment, stretching the bag to its full 11″ width (left), versus the same bag with the middle compartment empty (center). In other bags, mesh windows are there to allow ventilation. In this bag, the entire two sides are vented.

This Gooyule skate bag and its many alphabet-soup-brand equivalents may be the unlikely winner in this lineup of four compact skate bags. It is the most versatile of the bunch. Any combination of boots, frames, wheels, and gear I possess fits. If I’m carrying less, it compresses sideways when stored in my trunk.

If needed, the bag becomes the equivalent of a Ford F-150 pickup truck, with an 11″-wide bag plus 2″ protrusions on each side, giving it a grand total usable width of 15″. That should accommodate even the fattest hard boots in the largest boot sizes on the market. I suspect that longer speed skates will also fit, if you are willing to stretch its 15½″-long enclosure a bit. And lastly, this bag is dirt cheap: $10 apiece.

There are many downsides to this bag, of course. To start, the middle compartment is not ventilated at all, in stark contrast to the side mesh compartments. I can’t leave my knee pads and wrist guards in it after a day of skating without unzipping the compartments to let them vent and dry.

The bag does feel a bit flimsy, even though its main material appears to be of the same quality and build as the EALER. Perhaps it’s the light weight that gives off that impression. But the bag carries just fine in real-world use. As noted, however, it has no peg feet, and the side bottom inserts feel somehow suspiciously thin.

Most importantly, I anticipate that boot buckles and straps will scrape, puncture, and eventually break the side mesh over time and with repeated use. I may be proven wrong, however. Only time will tell.

And lastly, but perhaps firstly, this bag is dirt cheap. I can always leave one of the two-pack unopened as a spare. I can then throw this backup into the middle compartment of the one I actually use. If something should happen to the bag while I am out there, I can just pull out the spare, like one does when a car tire blows.

Hey, have fun skating. And be safe out there.