Snowboards That Instructors Should Avoid

Preface: Personal Preference Prevails

Put down your pitchforks. Before entering this arena of keyboard warriors, let me preface my opinion below by saying there are technically no rules. Personal preference plays the most significant part in any purchasing decision. People become vehemently defensive in justifying their purchasing decisions.

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I acknowledge at the outset that all modern boards are great for their intended purpose. It’s your money and it’s your season. That said, what you choose to ride can affect your ability to improve your own riding and by extension, that of your students.

Based on my observations over the years, history repeats itself when it comes to board-buying mistakes. We buy into the hype and acquire boards based on clever marketing that do one thing really well, usually to the detriment of everything else.

In an effort to simplify, I’m condensing this passive-aggressive attack into two broad categories; too much and not enough. The hopeful inference is that somewhere in the middle lies the board (or range of boards) that is ‘just right’.

Trigger Warning: Instructors Are Not Professional Snowboarders

‘Snowboard professionals’, then? It is still a bit of a stretch and an obvious wordplay, but sure, we can cling to that. We play an essential and rewarding part in proliferating the sport we love, but collectively, we need to recalibrate our perspective by getting off the pedestal.

In reality, we aren’t pushing the sport in the same way the person whose name is plastered on that pro model is. The truth hurts, but you’re not that guy, pal. Your invite to X Games didn’t get lost in the mail and the Natural Selection Tour isn’t actually going to call you back. We’ll call you back though.

Too Much Board – Bigger Is Not Always Better

Sore joints all the time? Can’t get into a press and butter around? Feel like you suck at switch or your board just hates going slow? [Boards don’t have feelings, that’s a user error]. Suppose you said yes to any of the above. In that case, you might suffer from big-board-itis, a common condition among instructors who choose to use pro-calibre performance snowboards incongruent with their riding level.

If that hurts to read, you can reword it to ‘incongruent with the level of snowboarding they’re teaching’. Better?

As a rule of thumb, boards with names like ‘bullet train’ or ‘mega death’ are probably overkill for instructors. Save yourself the eye-watering price tag on a carbon fibre upgrade; spend it on the boots you’ll be in 8 hours a day. You don’t need a board that uses the verbs ‘destroy’ and ‘obliterate’ in the blurb.

Surprisingly, you don’t all of a sudden activate ‘beast-mode’ and start smashing pillow lines through osmosis when you step into these boards. Au contraire, you’ll feel like the board is riding you. You’ll probably sap the fun out of your day because you can’t mess around at slow speeds while you teach. Further, you might struggle to perform riding tasks on courses requiring refined demonstrations at slower speeds or a shorter radius than your heavy artillery was designed for.

Not Enough Board – Being Under Gunned

Are you struggling to get a grip? Do you feel every single bump on the run? Do you find yourself performing unintentional wheelies? Do your friends describe your snowboard by referencing different types of noodles? Mi Goreng perhaps? You might suffer from an affliction related to riding too soft a board for the job’s demands, read ‘all-mountain riding.’

Far less prevalent and often easier to mask than big-board-itis, this condition is rare but still exists as a remnant of a bygone era where park snowboarders relished soft flexing boards. One of the more significant drawbacks of softer and/or smaller boards is their stability at even moderate speeds. The lack of any dampening effect means you feel every bump on the run, and you can’t plough through chunder like you might on something burlier.

Despite the drawbacks, these boards are generally more fun for teaching lower-level lessons, and I’d consider them the lesser of two evils. They’re also usually more switch-friendly and thus more conducive to a broader spread of teaching scenarios than big, stiff boards.

There’s (Technically) No Right Or Wrong

Generic articles on choosing the right snowboard already saturate search engines. This tongue-in-cheek ‘guide’ employs deductive reasoning distilled from a decade of instructing and training instructors. In the parlance of instructors, there’s an old saying that “there’s no right or wrong, just consequences.” It’s a nod of respect to the folks whose enjoyment of snowboarding isn’t burdened by attention to granular detail.

This blog attempts to echo that sentiment and offer thought-provoking insight rather than a prescription. There is no silver bullet, and the learning journey never ends. With the dubious wisdom in this article, you can narrow your search immensely, but shoving a formula down your throat would be far too cliché for an instruct-o-blogger.

It turns out you’re not doing it all wrong; there are just consequences to riding, or in this case thinking, like a robot. If you’d like to try our new AI-powered Snowboard Selector Technology (SST), you have successfully missed the point.

If you want to hear real experts discussing snowboards, track down your nearest local board shop or check out a reputable YouTube channel like The Tribute Lounge.