What Goes Up… Young, Male Snowboarders Are Discovering The Downside Of Flying

Flipping through the ad- and jargon-crammed pages of TransWorld SNOWboarding magazine, the uninitiated might wonder what snowboarding has to do with snow.

Almost every photo features a teenager named Jason, Josh or Jamie flying 20, 40, even 60 feet above Earth, often upside down.

Occasionally photos are run in second-by-second sequence, so readers can see how much hang time the flyboys achieved. But more often, we’re left to speculate what happened when Jessie failed to achieve orbit and returned - abruptly? - to terra firma.

Sharon Bezecny sees - and treats - the consequences on a daily basis at Schweitzer Mountain Resort’s first-aid station. “The most commonly injured person (at ski resorts) is a young male, and most young males snowboard,” says the registered nurse. “Ergo, those are the people who hurt themselves doing young male things. It’s hormones vs. brains, and hormones win.”

During the past 10 years, Bezecny says, the number of snowboard-related injuries at Schweitzer has kept pace with the sport’s dramatic increase in popularity.

“We’re generally busier on days when it’s sunny, the snow is fast and people are having too much fun.”

Most injuries result from snowboarders falling on the snow, she says. “But when they hit something (else), it’s pretty devastating, because usually they hit head-first.

“Another biggie - it’s happened several times here - is when snowboarders fall into a tree well and can’t get out. Without poles, they have nothing to push against, and their feet don’t come out of the bindings, so they can’t get the board below them. It’s a bad scene - they can suffocate.”

Bezecny says most injuries occur in the afternoon, when snowboarders are tired. “Usually I have to eat my lunch by 11, or it doesn’t get eaten.”

Who’s getting hurt? “Beginners fall a lot,” says Bezecny, “but they don’t go fast enough to get in trouble. It’s the intermediates trying to get better who end up here (in the first-aid station).”

Jasper Shealy, a professor of industrial and manufacturing engineering at New York’s Rochester Institute of Technology, evaluated almost 20,000 ski- and snowboard-related injuries reported by the Ski Patrol at two Southern California resorts between 1988 and 1995.

Shealy says the overall injury rates for the two activities are similar, but the distribution of injuries is quite different.

Snowboarders suffer fewer lower-leg and knee injuries than do alpine skiers, but a higher percentage of wrist and ankle injuries. Forty percent of snowboard injuries involve wrists and ankles, and about half of those are fractures.

Ankle injuries decreased about 75 percent as riders traded their sneakers and Sorels for more supportive boots designed specifically for snowboarding.

But in the past year, with the shift toward stiffer, more alpine-style boots, Shealy says, the number of serious knee injuries has increased.

“And as more manufacturers go to the lower, softer boot that kids doing freestyle maneuvers like, my guess is that we’re likely to see the ankle-injury rate go back up, too,” he predicts.

The problem, Shealy says, is that equipment development is “taking place in a vacuum”; manufacturers approach design from a performance point of view without paying enough attention to safety.

Curiously, even some protective gear has little science behind it, Shealy says.

“The wrist guard, for instance, should (be designed to) dissipate the energy rather than just transmitting it someplace else,” Shealy says.

Even so, Shealy recommends snowboarders wear wrist guards and helmets. He also prefers what he calls “stiff soft boots.”

“Get the stiffest soft boot you can find and a three-buckle ‘exoskeleton’ binding,” which he says provides better support than the newer plate-binding and hard-boot system.

At 27 years of age, David Reseska is practically over the hill compared to the typical Inland Northwest snowboarder.

But 12 years after introducing the sport to a resort back East, he hasn’t lost his enthusiasm, which he shared with 500 Schweitzer Ski School snowboard students last season.

(Schweitzer’s lessons reflect the sport’s rebellious attitude: Beginners enroll in “Learn to Shred,” while advanced snowboarders take something called “Shred Mo Betta.”)

“I would prefer to go snowboarding for sure, that’s my thing,” says the redheaded instructor, who also downhills, telemarks and cross-country skis.

Reseska says snowboarding is easy to learn and well-suited for the area’s heavy snow.

Unfortunately, he says, young snowboarders are less interested in learning ski-hill etiquette and proper turning techniques than they are in achieving the weightlessness touted by magazine photo spreads.

“Safety is very unimportant to them,” Reseska says of his typical young male student. “Twenty to 30 percent have never been on a ski slope before.

“They come up here after seeing all those pictures in magazines, and they don’t understand common courtesy - things like right of way and respecting other people on the slope. They think that because they’re snowboarders, they need this attitude.”

Consequently, says Reseska, it’s not unusual for snowboarders getting off a lift to sit down in the middle of the unloading area to put on their bindings, making it difficult for skiers to pass.

To some extent, etiquette and safety go hand in hand, Reseska says. And while he can discuss both during his introductory lessons, “Ultimately we need to get more (experienced) people on boards talking to these kids, trying to earn their respect, explaining how they need to recognize the rights of skiers. … There has to be a happy medium there.”

If he had children of his own, Reseska says, “I’d want them to learn to ski before they learned snowboarding. You can start skiing when you’re 4 years old, but it’s hard to snowboard - to carve good, technical turns - before you’re about 10.”

He’d teach them about control - how to fall properly, “so they don’t end up on the tail of their board, an unguided missile headed straight down the hill.”

And he’d remind them that those spectacularly tempting magazine shots feature expert snowboarders in ideal conditions, “where they could land on their backs or their heads and it wouldn’t matter.”

Because more often than not, it does matter where and how you land.

Just ask nurse Bezecny.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 Photos (1 Color)

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: ACCIDENTS HAPPEN Snowboarders run about the same risk of getting hurt as alpine skies, but tend to suffer more upper-body injuries. Listed here are the types of injuries snow-boarders incur: Concussion Facial cuts Broken nose Neck strain Fractured collarbone Dislocated shoulder Fractured wrist Compressed vertebrae Bruised hip bone Twisted knee Twisted ankle Fractured ankle