Dawn of the Age of the Spawn of the Snowboarders

By Matt Boxler

Frightening as it may be to many skiers out there, there’s a whole new generation of snowboarders upon us. They don’t have green hair or nose rings, but their dads might. They may not have “dude” or “stoked” in their vocabularies yet, but their moms certainly do. And they don’t know tabletop from big-air unless it involves flinging their cereal bowls at breakfast time.

Yes, give a hearty welcome to the next generation of generation next. These are the young tots who have been reared by a generation of snowboarders who, in all likelihood, have never even clicked foot into skis before. So it seems perfectly natural for these parents to teach junior to stand, then to teach junior to walk, then to teach junior to spin fakie into an alley-oop.

As with many things in life, though, common sense goes a long way. Obviously, if your child hates to be outside in the cold, it doesn’t much matter if he’s on a snowboard, skis or a horse-drawn sleigh with Santa Claus himself in the seat next to him – the experience will not be fun. For other children, it’s impossible to get them to come inside. This is great until you realize they needed to take a bathroom break somewhere along the way.

Is there an ideal age to introduce children to snowboarding? “Every child is different,” said Bruce McDonald, senior vice president and ski/snowboard school director at Wachusett Mountain in Princeton, Mass., a resort that knows a thing or two about youths and youth programs. A typical weekend or weeknight at Wachusett will be flooded with school groups, and snowboarders are among the most common breed. But that still doesn’t mean it’s wise to push your three-year-old out there with a snowboard and expect a miracle.

“We used to start our instructional programs for kids at 3 years of age, now we start at 4,” McDonald said. “If you’ve got the one-on-one scenario, you can do just about anything; it’s generally just playing in the snow. When you get to age 4, children’s muscles start to kick in and they have more social skills. They can tell us when they need to go to the bathroom and when they’re cold.”

Still, for snowboarding, even older is better. Given the weight of snowboard equipment typically found in resort rental shops, children who weigh under 60 pounds simply cannot flex the board, which is necessary for turning. Tots on skis, on the other hand, can have them fixed into a wedge or “pizza” to help control both speed and direction.

“When you talk about young children and snowboarding, age is less important than other factors, like weight and maturity,” McDonald said. “A snowboard needs to flex, unlike a skateboard that has rubber bushings underneath. Snowboards need to bend.”

McDonald praises the young children who go out there with their parents and have a blast on tiny plastic skis strapped onto their winter boots, but the challenge is greater for snowboarders. And once a child does reach the age, weight and maturity levels to make instruction effective, McDonald advises parents to leave it to the experts.

“The parents, boyfriends or husbands don’t have the skills to recognize what is needed,” he said. “The classic thing I see is they get the child out on the hill and they say ‘turn.’ We break it down into segments, approach it little pieces at a time to build their confidence, their kinesthetic memory. We’re getting their muscles to remember what to do before their brain thinks about it.”

And since children of any age are more interested in having fun on the snow than they are at mastering the elements of technical accomplishment, professional instructional programs and qualified instructors have very effectively masked technicality with fun.

“We don’t use technical terms, we tell them things they can understand,” McDonald said. A lot of it looks like it’s just playing on the snow, but it’s allowing the muscles to develop, the senses to develop, and helping them recognize the terrain, etc. And this is just what the doctor ordered in a nation of couch potatoes.

“More and more kids today are sedentary, finding entertainment at home, on television, on their computers,” McDonald said. “Parents are looking to winter as a nice way to exercise. Even though snowboarding has grown in leaps and bounds, many snowboarding parents actually prefer to start their kids on skis.

“For whatever reason,” he said. “It’s certainly easier, and they’ll sure have more fun on the first day. The image that a kid is coming to us now with is snowboarding,” McDonald said. Snowboarding has got the limelight now, even if parents steer kids to skiing first.”

Although there’s not much crossover in technique between skiing and snowboarding, McDonald said kids who start earlier on skis will have a head start on other factors related to the sport such as fear, sliding, understanding how the lifts work, etc.

Most New England resorts are consistent with this structure, limiting the youngest children to one-on-one instruction in order to maximize their on-snow experience. Smuggler’s Notch, the Vermont resort renowned for its children’s programs, offers a learn-to-snowboard camp for 4- and 5-year-olds.

“Smuggler’s has seen increased interest by this age group and we’re responding with a program to specifically cater to this younger set of boarders,” said Barbara Thomke, public relations director.

Smuggler’s “Discovery Dynamos Snowboard Camp” mirrors the close child-to-instructor ratio of its Discover Ski Camp (ages 3-5), focusing individual attention to young children’s needs and learning styles. “With instruction paced to each individual and youth-sized equipment, camp will be a fun and positive experience for these beginning boarders,” Thomke said.

When it comes right down to it, the most important lesson of the sport is best taught by the kids, whose parents can stand significant improvement – and that is the art of having fun.