In 2023, Sydney Howard of Bolton was competing at the U.S. national snowboarding championship at Copper Mountain resort, in Frisco, Colo. During one of her slopestyle runs — an event in which riders grind rails, soar off jumps and perform gravity-defying tricks — Howard over-rotated on a backflip, landed hard and dislocated her hip. She was 12.
By April of this year, Howard was back at nationals. This time, she won the girls’ overall snowboarding championship, topping the podium in two of the five required events: slalom and giant slalom. The 14-year-old had the fastest race times in her age group and the one above it. Had she been racing against the boys, she would have placed second — right behind her teammate and friend Pax Draugelis, 14, of Morrisville, who claimed the 2025 boys’ overall national championship.
“I’m always trying to beat her time,” Draugelis teased Howard with a playful grin.
You can be forgiven if you’ve never heard of either of these national champions. Each year, Copper Mountain hosts more than 2,000 athletes at the United States of America Snowboard and Freeski Association’s national championship, the world’s largest ski and snowboard competition. Vermont’s young snowboarders, who also include Marlee Anderson and Brooks Witham, regularly outperform competitors from the Rocky Mountains and West Coast, despite having fewer training facilities, smaller mountains and less snow.
Yet these young athletes get virtually no local recognition, press coverage or financial support in a state that is home to world-class ski resorts and a robust winter sports equipment and apparel industry. Two years ago, when the Vermont Legislature passed a resolution recognizing their accomplishments as national champions, it botched their names and results.
Vermont’s young snowboarders regularly outperform competitors from the Rocky Mountains and West Coast.
Howard, Draugelis and most of their teammates at Green Mountain Academy in Stowe, where they train, are too young to have qualified for the upcoming 2026 Winter Olympics in Italy; snowboarding athletes must be 15 by the start of the Olympic year. This limits their public exposure and sponsorship opportunities. And while many of them dream of going to the 2030 Winter Olympics, these kids are invested in the sport not just because they love to compete. They all described Vermont’s snowboard culture, even at the elite level, as one that emphasizes camaraderie, mutual encouragement and, yes, having fun.
“When I think of snowboard racing, I think of hugging,” said Anderson, 17, a snowboarder from Underhill who is not yet Olympic bound but placed second in slalom and third in girls’ giant slalom at this year’s nationals. “When there’s a little girl [from Vermont] and it’s her first race, she gets swarmed by the older girls trying to help her. It’s really cool to see.”
“These kids are so dedicated,” added Rick Witham, their snowboarding coach at Green Mountain Academy. His son, Brooks, 14, is also a nationally ranked snowboarder. After 30 years coaching the sport, Witham has noticed a marked change in the culture in Vermont. “It’s more about friendship and the love of riding versus ‘Let’s go train on gates for seven hours.’”
That approach is not what Vermont’s athletes necessarily encounter when they compete out of state.
“There are people whose parents force them into it,” Howard said. “They’re not fun to be around.”
The USASA divides the country into 32 “regional series,” including northern Vermont and southern Vermont. To get invited to nationals, an athlete must be the regional winner in their age class, gender and discipline, such as slopestyle, halfpipe, giant slalom and so on. To do so, athletes must train and compete as much as possible.
From December through April, Howard, Draugelis, Anderson and Brooks spend four or five days a week snowboarding. All but Draugelis attend Mount Mansfield Union High School — he attends Peoples Academy in Morrisville — and squeeze in schoolwork in their downtime. Their coach remembers Anderson trying to memorize poetry for school during a gondola ride.
Those who compete in halfpipe and boardercross — the latter pits four snowboard racers against each other on a course that features ramps, banks and jumps — have to travel to Stratton Mountain in southern Vermont or Gore Mountain in New York to train because northern Vermont has neither. That means waking up at 4 a.m., driving two to three hours and staying overnight in hotels.
Draugelis actually started as an Alpine ski racer at 5, then asked to switch to snowboarding a few years later after watching the Olympics. When his parents resisted, Draugelis borrowed a board from a friend and taught himself to ride on the bunny slope. A few years later, he was going to nationals and claiming podium spots.
When the pandemic hit, the Draugelis family, who are from Philadelphia, moved to Vermont for the winter. The family has since bought a house in Morrisville, where they live half the year so that Pax can train at Green Mountain Academy, which attracts other young athletes from around New England.
In the offseason, the young snowboarders do other sports, including gymnastics, which hones their air awareness when doing flips and rotations. Howard has a personal trainer; Draugelis, a nutritionist. Winter and spring breaks are generally spent conditioning or in competition.
“I miss birthdays, school events [and] just hanging out with my friends in general,” Draugelis said. “But I just love it. It’s my favorite thing ever.”
For a time, Howard’s mother, Kim Ead, considered moving to Colorado, because the training programs there are cheaper and better integrated into the public schools.
“But the coaches here are better,” she said, “and our kids are beating their kids.”
Vermont snowboarders have another advantage over their West Coast and Rocky Mountain competition: erratic winter weather.
“An athlete that trains on the East Coast is going to have to train in some of the worst snow conditions,” said Jason Trask, founder and president of Green Mountain Academy. Because western snowboarders mostly ride on fresh powder, they get far less experience on slush and ice. “It really hardens our athletes and makes them much more well rounded for the variable conditions you see during competitions.”
Because competitive snowboarding isn’t cheap, part of the mission of Green Mountain Academy, a nonprofit founded in 2014, is to expand access and diversity in winter sports, Trask explained. Last year, GMA trained 175 student athletes ages 7 and up and awarded more than $40,000 in scholarships to local teens who wouldn’t otherwise get to ski or snowboard competitively.
However, beyond scholarships to GMA and prize winnings at nationals of up to $1,000, exceptional young snowboarders have few avenues for raising money, as they don’t have time for part-time or summer jobs. A few years ago, Ead tried organizing a fundraiser for the GMA team and reached out to as many local companies as possible. She got virtually no response.
As for sponsorships, most come with strings attached.
“If you don’t have a social media presence, then there’s no chance you’re getting a sponsor,” Draugelis said. And because sponsorships typically require athletes to be actively posting, even in the offseason, “That’s out of the question for me.”
“I just don’t want him to have that pressure … to be working on his ‘brand,’” said Shana Draugelis, Pax’s mother. “He puts so much pressure on himself on a daily basis as it is. I feel like my job is to keep him a kid as long as I can.”
“They’re 14 years old, and they’re supposed to be hawking gear?” Ead added.
Regardless of whether any of these teens eventually competes for Olympic gold, all of them said their lives have been enriched by lessons they’ve learned through the sport, such as losing gracefully.
“My goal is to be the best snowboarder I can possibly be,” Howard said. “If that takes me to the Olympics, then that’s amazing. And if it doesn’t, that’s fine.”
When asked what was their most memorable experience in competition, none mentioned standing on the podium with their medal.
For Draugelis, his most memorable moment comes at the start of every race, when all the competitors fist-bump, wish each other luck and say, “Don’t get hurt.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Powder Prodigies | Meet Vermont’s nationally ranked teen snowboarders angling for a spot in the Winter Olympics — in 2030”
This article appears in The Winter Preview Issue 2025.
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