Reclaiming nature: Breaking barriers for Black athletes in winter sports
Winter sports are deceptively inaccessible for athletes of color.
At the top of Mountain Creek, a ski resort in New Jersey, teens from New York City who have never snowboarded anxiously await their first trip down the slopes.
Wrapped in warm, but bulky equipment, the teens' infectious energy takes over the learning area as they practice, fall, and get back up in preparation for their inaugural ride -- one that could change their life.
Raquel Hamblin, 19, had a long list of fears before her first time on the hill: she was scared of falling down, not being good enough, not making friends.
Growing up in a West Indian household, she also wasn’t sure that she would mix well with the snow and the cold.
Hoods to Woods, an organization that helps break down barriers so kids from underserved communities can access the outdoors, changed her perspective.
“[My friends] look at me crazy because I snowboard,” she said in an interview with ABC News. She was once a Hoods to Woods participant herself, but now she helps teach the next generation of snowboarders.
She continued, “Snowboarding, it's like top-tier important to me. Because it takes the stress off of me and I get to have fun. And then now I get to teach other kids how to snowboard and have fun, too.”
For the Hoods to Woods kids, the excitement of a new skill is palpable as they duck-walk in their bulky winter clothes onto the lift to the top of the hills. But sports like skiing, snowboarding, ice climbing and more, require more than just the willingness to learn.
The world of outdoor recreation is deceptively inaccessible for athletes of color. Embracing a new sport requires navigating barrier after barrier, including culture, location and transportation, cost, equipment, the learned skills, and more.
These can be expensive sports to invest in without the experience and skill set, Hoods to Woods co-founder Omar Diaz and Brian Paupaw told ABC News. And if the cost of transportation, equipment and lessons aren’t a factor – it could be the lack of a support system or community that hinders new participants.
Paupaw understands the hesitation faced by new snowboarders. He was invited by friends when he was younger, but he didn’t think snowboarding was for a Brooklyn boy like himself.
“At first I was apprehensive. I was like ‘Nah, you know I'm from the projects. This is not the type of stuff that we do,’” said Paupaw. He fell over and over again during his first lesson, but kept getting back up.
“I said, ‘Yo, you got to go back. You got to keep trying this. Like, don't give up, don't miss out on an opportunity.’ And I never looked back ever since.”
Snowsports Industries America found in a 2022-2023 study that winter sports participation is slowly getting more diverse.
Black participants grew from 9.5% of all participants in 2022 to 11.2% in 2023. Hispanic participation also grew from 14.9% to 15.2%.
This is likely driven by a noted surge in younger athletes – more than half of the Black and Hispanic participants are young adults between the ages of 18 and 34.
This new generation of athletes has a slowly growing number of role models of color to see themselves in, like X Games gold medalist Zeb Powell.
Breaking the ice
When Powell first tried snowboarding, he hated it.
His family put him in a snowboarding class by himself on a family trip as a kid, with a teacher who was “mean” and taught him to ride in a stance he wasn’t comfortable with.
He missed a best friend’s birthday party, an invitation to snowboard, because of that disdain for the sport. The moment forced him to confront his mental roadblocks.
Powell would later become the first Black snowboarder to win a gold medal in X Games history in 2020 at the age of 20. He said he had never thought about his skin color while snowboarding or that he had never seen someone who looked like him play the sport before he made history that day.
“I started getting so many responses like: ‘I didn't even know Black people snowboarded or like you're the first Black person I've seen snowboard, like, you're so inspiring and make me want to do this,’” he told ABC News in an interview.
He continued, “Once that happened, I was like – Oh, like, this is a thing. And I need to start working on it.”
So, he helped create Culture Shifters, an annual event in which a diverse collective of athletes, musicians, artists, organizers and activists come together to hold tough conversations to create a more inclusive snowboarding community.
He also partners with Hoods to Woods to raise the next generation of snowboarders.
“It's a crazy energy I've never seen on the mountain,” Powell said. “We are the community. And we can lean on each other to talk about how to grow the sport our way and represent our way.”
In its most recent research, Snowsports Industries America found that younger generations are changing the demographics of winter sports. However, that leaves many older adults with untapped potential for exploring the outdoors.
That brings us to Brown Girl Outdoor World (BGOW), a sporting community for Black, Indigenous and other people of color to explore nature in a supportive environment.
Building community
Demiesha Dennis, based in Toronto, Canada, grew up in Jamaica. For her, the outdoors wasn’t a place, “it was just where we lived, where we existed and how we moved about.”
“You wake up, you're given breakfast, and you're told to head on out and come back in before the sun goes down,” Dennis said. “Climbing trees, getting lost in the bushes, and spending time outside with my grandma, learning about birding really was one of the things that drew me to the outdoors.”
It wasn’t until she lived in Canada and the U.S. that the racial disparities became evident.
“What I thought of as the outdoors wasn't the same picture that I had," said Dennis. "I wanted to build a home for me here. And how do I build a home when I don't know the place? How do I build a home when I don't have a relationship with it?"
To change this, she created what she needed – and what others needed -- to break into the world of outdoor recreational activities. She created BGOW, where adults can explore, learn and see themselves in the outdoors.
"As we grow older, it seems like joy is harder to get with," said Dennis. "We've been told that now: stop playing, start working ... There's so much fear locked up in how we don't approach play as adults, and you gotta start somewhere."
Dennis first learned to snowboard at Culture Shifters alongside Powell and others.
"I got the wind knocked out of me, came back with bruises, and those were some of the most joyful bruises I've had in my life, because I tried something really, really new."
At the heart of these efforts for representation is community building.
"The concept of community is everything," said Diaz. "Sometimes you have outsider syndrome when you come in from the hood, you know, thinking, you know, that you don't belong in certain environments. You know, a Mount Baker showed me that yo, you're part of this community."
ABC News' Nico Rothenberg contributed to this report.
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