Are East Coast Snowboarders Better? Statistically, yes.
A Tale of Two Coasts
Most of snowboarding's Meccas are on the west coast. It’s clear why. The west boasts bigger mountains, more reliable snow, and sprawling resort infrastructure. West coast riders have it good.
East coast riders, frustrated by icy terrain and smaller mountains, often end up on a pilgrimage to the Western holy land of snowboarding once they graduate high school.
I was one of those riders.
From my first carve of a west-coast piste, I’d heard my calling. On that same trip my closest friend and longest riding buddy was lured by the same siren song. Blues skies, deep snow, and long runs. I had already been snowboarding for several years - but this seemed like a new sport.
On that trip I also recognized the complacency of west coast riders. Ten centimetres of snow wasn’t enough to get most locals onto the mountain before 10am, and most called it quits after lunch. We had the mountain to ourselves for the week, seemingly because the locals thought it was too cold. It was not cold.
When the week was over we reluctantly returned home to the east coast, but the seed had been planted. We didn’t know much at that age, but we knew we’d be back. Our seeds would be watered on the east coast, but we kept a keen eye on transplanting west as the soonest opportunity. We’d show those west coasters what commitment looks like.
There has always been an east coast/west coast snowboarder rivalry. Sometimes subtle, sometimes obvious. During snowboarding’s early years there was a stark style contrast. The east coast attitude was serious and disciplined. The west coast attitude was freestyle-oriented and laid back.
In the 80's east-coaster Jake Burton and west-coaster Todd Sims competed for competition and snowboard industry dominance. It was an intense rivalry that benefited progression and snowboard equipment tech.
But there's no contest, right? West coast resorts are better, west coast terrain is better, west coast snow is better, and east coasters flock to the west en masse to snowboard. So, what is this article about?
It’s not about the terrain, it's about the snowboarders themselves and how the terrain shapes them.
My theory is that most of the best snowboarders in the world come from their respective east coasts (aka smaller mountains).
Turns out I was right. And I have the data to prove it.
Are Snowboarders from the East Coast Better?
In short, yes.
Snowboarders who grew up riding east coast mountains have dominated the competitive podiums.
Danny Kass and Todd Richards dominated Slopestyle and Halfpipe contests during snowboarding's adolescent years. Kass is from Pompton Plains, New Jersey. Richards is from Paxton, Massachusetts. Mark McMorris comes from the sprawling plains of Regina, and Max Parrot is from a small farm town outside of Montreal, Quebec.
And those are just a few. Let's dig into the statistics.
We’ll be looking at data from across the 76 medalists of mens’ X Games from 1997 to 2022. For each rider*, I:
Found the hometown of their formative years.
Plotted peak elevation of the area they grew up riding.
If uncertain, I used the tallest ski resort within a two-hour drive of their hometown.
Used meters for vertical measurements (sorry, Americans).
The Beast Coast Bar Chart
Snowboarders who grew up riding resorts under 1500m (4921 ft) won twice the X Games medals as their big-resort counterparts. But you might be saying: “1500m is still a pretty big hill.” Point taken. So let's drill down to elevation brackets:
500m Chart
As you can see, breaking out the data into 500m elevation increments only strengthens my argument. Consider the fact that Shaun White is almost wholly responsible for the medals between 2501 and 3000m.
The statistics make a pretty clear-cut case that East Coast transplants tend to dominate the competitive snowboarding landscape. Why is this? The East Coast sucks. Take it from me, an east coaster. So what makes our snowboarders so awesome?
*I wasn't able to find much information on Ryan Williams, who placed 2nd in Big Air in 1998, so he wasn't included in this analysis. I assume he did a 180 or something.
Explaining the East Coast Pre-Eminence
West Coast resorts are smothered by their own luxurious conditions.
Shorter runs = shorter chairlift rides. That means an east coast snowboarder arrives at the top of their park more times per hour than a west coast snowboarder. When practicing a trick through repetition, the tighter the loop between attempts, the quicker the learning takes place. A thirty minute chairlift ride may allow for more vertical feet ridden per day, but not more hits on a specific park feature. Plus, the more established east coast resorts tended to have detachable quads, which meant a park run about every seven minutes.
That wasn’t true of my home hill, which had a painfully slow lift. But snowboarders are innovators. Rather than fall subject to ancient lift infrastructure, we found a workaround: walking. Walking works great when you don’t have to climb an enormous mountain.
Park was the only thing worth hitting on the East Coast. So why would I do a top-to-bottom run and wait in the lift line if all I wanted to do was hit a flat box?
On my home hill, a line formed. We'd try our trick on the box, unstrap, and hike to the back of the drop-in line. One boot in front of the other, we’d slog up the hill. We'd gasp and clap, hoot and holler, and play friendly games of one upmanship with our fellow park rats.
I started off spinning onto the rail. Then I practised spinning off of the rail. Once I learned to backside 360 onto a rail, it was natural to add the 180 out I’d be practising last week. Once I had my rail game dialled, maybe I'd be able to carry enough speed to the one terrible jump at the bottom of the hill and link it all together. Sure enough, I did.
This isn’t to say that friendly competition doesn’t exist on the west coast. But why hike a feature all day when the ride to and from the park has amazing side hits or trees with hidden snow pockets in them? If you scrubbed your landing on a rail at the top of the park, no worries. You still had tons of vertical to gain enough speed to hit the jump three pack further down the park run. Better yet, by the mid-2000s, many west coast mountains had dozens of box and rail features in a single run. Why hike when there are twelve more rails on the run?
But does this explain the difference in medal count for east coast and west coast snowboarders? Not on its own. Let's zoom in a little.
What Does the Land of Poutine Have in Common with Brazilian Soccer?
Of the 51 medals held by East Coast snowboarders who hail from under 500m in elevation, 25% of them are held by two men: Max Parrot, and Sebastian Toutant (aka Seb Toots). Both were born within 30 minutes of Montréal, Canada. Both grew up riding resorts with less than 500m in vertical (Bromont and Sauveur). Montréal is legendary for its street rail scene, which offers access to features well after the ski resorts have closed for the night, if you're willing to put in a little work. Louif Paradis, Laurent-Nicolas Paquin, Jeremy Cloutier, Yan Dofin, and the late Dillon Ojo also hail from the Montréal area.
So what does this have to do with Brazilian soccer players?
Brazilian soccer stars are often in the sport’s "G.O.A.T." conversation, just like East Coast snowboarders. In The Talent Code, Daniel Coyle proposes this is because of futsal.
Futsal is a game similar to soccer, but it’s played in a more confined area with a smaller, heavier ball. Futsal involves 600 per cent more ball handling time and precision than soccer, according to Coyle. As a result, when a futsal player steps onto a soccer field, they find themselves with better ball-handling ability than their competitors and much more time and space to make decisions.
In The Talent Code, Coyle identifies several "talent hotbeds" and the commonalities between them. He distils it down to a few factors:
Struggle is mandatory.
A difficult environment is a feature, not a bug. If you're growing up using world-class facilities, it can have a demotivating factor. As experimental psychologist Dr. Barth says, “If we’re in a nice, easy, pleasant environment, we naturally shut off effort. Why work? But if people get the signal that it’s rough, they get motivated now. A nice, well-kept tennis academy gives them the luxury future right now – of course they’d be demotivated. They can’t help it.”
Passion must be ignited.
The grit to put in the deliberate practice required to improve must be motivated by an internal desire and/or inherent fun in the activity that keeps the student returning to learn.
Effective practice requires repetition and chunking.
Chunking is breaking an action - like a basketball free-throw - into its smallest possible iterations. Then you attack those iterations (aka “chunks”) with repetition and stacking. Practise free-throw part 1, then free-throw part 1 and 2, then free-throw part 1, 2 and 3. If you make a mistake, you must reverse and repeat that chunk of the action before moving on.
With that in mind, let's take a closer look at my flat box practice during my youth on the East Coast.
Struggle is Mandatory
Growing up on the east coast meant jump lips and landings were ice blocks, rails were rusty, and boxes were a mess of protruding screws. No wonder I had a eureka moment the first time I carved into a west coast groomer. The snow just... kept going. Imagine all the new things I could do on my snowboard if I wasn't struggling to maintain an edge down an icy pitch.
My formative years of the sport involved faithful trips to the hill every Saturday and Sunday - snow, rain, or shine. We had to make chicken salad from chickenshit. We didn't let our elevation or location get in the way of trying to improve our snowboarding.
Passion Must be Ignited
Everyone I rode with had a different reason for being there, but "fortune and fame" wasn’t it. East or west coast, the work one needs to devote to improving at snowboarding requires an underlying passion that will fuel that commitment. Whatever made us fall in love with snowboarding, east coasters rarely cite the amazing terrain, landscape, weather or snow conditions.
For me, it was the hoots and hollers of the crowd when I finally landed the trick I'd been working on all day. In the absence of amazing terrain, the relentless and unconditional pursuit of snowboarding became the goal itself. I braved the -30 degree celsius temperatures with edges I religiously kept sharp. Overcoming the odds made snowboarding interesting.
Effective Practice Requires Repetition and Chunking
Some of this is inherent in the sport. It doesn't make much sense to move onto a 360 if you haven't learned to 180. If your spins onto rails become natural enough, spins off are the next logical step.
Still, the real East Coast advantage is in the repetition, and deliberate adjustments to fix mistakes. Landing too heavy on the toes? Stay more upright in your rotation. Can't lock into the rail after your spin? Try changing where you look with your eyes. As you hike up to the back of the line, you’re ruminating on the possible fixes. You’re watching how others approach similar tricks.
If you’re lapping full length runs, it's easy to forget the cause of the washout on the third of fourteen features in the park. Mentally, you've already moved on, and will just throw more mud against the wall next run to see what sticks. It’s a less effective approach to improving on a specific trick or feature.
The East Coast Ceiling
The evidence is compelling. Snowboarders who grow up riding on the east coast have disproportionately stood atop contest podiums.
But many of the factors for why the East Coast is so conducive to learning parks are the same reason every East Coast snowboarder will hit a skill ceiling. Even if they go from their Podunk local resort to one of the premiere East Coast resorts like Mont Tremblant or Stowe, there's still an upper limit. An East Coast snowboarder will never develop the endurance or core competencies needed to be a complete rider if they never step up in elevation and terrain.
This is where I take a hammer and put a crack in my own theory. A pilgrimage west is an essential aspect of reaching the upper echelons of contest riding. It becomes tough to make a pure “east coast produces the best riders” argument when faced with this reality.
On a personal level, the time I spent living out west was the window of time my snowboarding improved the most and the quickest - but access to more vertical was only part of the reason.
What are the missing pieces of the secret sauce that a West Coast mountain adds? Steepness? Deep powder? Backcountry avalanche danger? Thirty-minute runs? World class park set-ups? I think it’s something deeper.
“I’m going to do this for the rest of my life”
In 1997, Gary McPherson began a long-term study that tracked the musical development of 156 randomly-selected children. He followed them from their first instrument to high school graduation.
Mcpherson tracked the students’ progress via interviews, biometric tests, questionnaires and practice videos. Soon, a bell curve appeared. Some kids struggled to play hot cross buns while others appeared to be musical naturals.
But what explained that difference? Surprisingly, it wasn’t practice volume.
At the beginning of the study, McPherson asked the students for how long they intended to play their instrument. As children do, most shrugged. But after a few more prods, they gave specific answers. The responses ranged from a couple of months to their whole lives. It was this answer that best predicted the child’s place on the bell curve of musical ability.
With the same amount of practice, those who were committed to their instrument for the long term outperformed those who were committed for a short term by 400 per cent.
Students with long term commitments - who only practised 20 minutes a week - still progressed faster than students with short term commitments who practised 90 minutes a week. Lastly, when long term commitments were combined with lots of practice, it produced outliers in musical ability.
What does this have to do with snowboarding? It’s the same reason that East Coast snowboarders excel after a brief West Coast mountain adjustment period.
Good mountains are far from the East Coast. West Coast mountain towns are expensive to live in and offer few high-earning jobs. But that doesn’t matter. We still throw our gear in the rusty Subaru and drive west toward salvation. We’re more committed.
The World Freeride Tour: The Fly in the Ointment of the East Coast Theory
If you’re a West Coast born snowboarder, I’m sure you’re throwing up in your mouth by now. ‘The audacity of this ice coaster to lecture me about coastal superiority while admitting he needs our mountains to achieve it. Fuck off.’
To be clear, I’m not suggesting west coast snowboarders aren’t committed to the sport, don’t face adverse conditions and terrain, and don’t hike features. I’m not even saying that, on average, an east coast snowboarder is better than a west coast snowboarder.
A few important points overall:
Of course great snowboarders can come from the west coast, and often do. In my personal experience, life-long west coast snowboarders who are dedicated to the sport have an admirable confidence in their riding, especially in bigger terrain.
Of course terrible snowboarders can come from the east coast, and often do. Growing up riding awful terrain in awful weather doesn't guarantee you'll reach X Games podium status. In fact, it probably deters a lot of great athletes from the sport who could have been potential talents.
For this to be true, snowboarders must have relocated to a "West Coast Resort" sometime between ages 15 - 20. We'll talk about this more in depth in the "East Coast Ceiling" section, but the east coast can only take you so far. While there is, in theory, no "ceiling" to snowboarding progression - there are many skills you simply can't practice if you don't have the necessary terrain or conditions.
But the data is clear: We dominate the freestyle contests.
I proudly presented this East Coast Theory to my riding crew. They quickly pointed out the glaring exception to my theory: The World Freeride Tour. The west coast riders excel here, and they do it for the same reasons the east coast riders excel in the Mens’ X Games (they were shaped by their environment).
Why lap the park if you grow up on a mountain that’s actually worth riding?
Why hike at all unless it is to access other amazing terrain (ie, not a rail)?
Why snowboard at every opportunity (even in terrible weather) when you can be selective?
If you grew up in a west coast mountain environment you’re going to be a more powerful all-mountain rider. Even on the East Coast, on some particularly great powder day, I’ll be riding up the chair marvelling at how no one has hit the difficult but powdery line underneath the chairlift.
Then, from through the trees, a rider will burst whose precision and intuitive use of the terrain is a rare sight on the East Coast.
They’ll slash and snap a powerful ollie off a rock launch or cliff, land confidently, throw a little turn, and carry on as though nothing happened.
“This guy is from the West Coast,” we’ll say to each other on the chair.
The Best Coast
The East Coast Theory - and what I’ll now call the West Coast Theory - represent an underlying coastal rivalry that still exists.
I set out to prove that east coasters were better snowboarders. I confirmed my bias, and it was quickly thrown back in my face. I was defining “better snowboarder” through a very specific lens. The East in me still has something to prove, clearly.
But I’m an adult now. My snowboard bum days are behind me. While I still devote my life to snowboarding, I’m not nursing dreams of the X Games or World Freeride Tour. As a result, entering the picture are considerations like the cost of living, proximity to family, and career opportunities. They shift the balance of what it means to be dedicated to snowboarding.
Being dedicated to snowboarding means making the same commitments those seven year olds did when they picked up their Clarinette: I’m going to do this for the rest of my life.
Every winter I fly to the West Coast to spend a couple of weeks with old riding friends who have, in time, slowly scattered themselves across the country and world. One guy is a botanist, another is an insurance broker, the other is a professional snowboard coach and Level 4 CASI instructor - but we’re all snowboarders.
No matter if they are from the east coast, west coast, Montana or Saskatchewan - the riders I connect to and still snowboard with every winter have one thing in common: they’re going to snowboard for the rest of their life.
We just… always happen to book our trips on the West Coast.