Chris Waker finds a snowboarding home in Summit County, named U.S. Ski & Snowboard Coach of the Year

Christopher Waker’s snowboarding journey is a quintessential Summit County winter sports story.

It’s one that, at its heart, includes an engagement at the same chairlift at Breckenridge Ski Resort where he first met his fiancee. It’s one that includes days at the county’s terrain parks coaching some of the country’s — and world’s — best young talent. And it’s one that added its most recent chapter last month when Waker was named U.S. Ski & Snowboard’s Domestic Coach of the Year.

For a guy who has made a lifetime out of teaching and hucking tricky inverted rotations on a snowboard, it was in the lead up to his acceptance speech at the U.S. Ski & Snowboard Congress in Park City, Utah, when Waker experienced some of the strongest nerves of his life.

“During the dinner there was a list and you could kind of see when you are going to go up on stage,” Waker said. “And I knew I was within two people to go. And, all of a sudden, my heart was racing like crazy. It was pretty funny, I’ve never had my heart rate spike by sitting still.”

Waker, originally from Vermont, moved to Summit County 13 years ago for the same reason so many others do: to progress his snowboarding career on the state-of-the-art terrain parks. For a few years, Waker saved up money during the summer while working for his father’s plumbing and heating business in order to build up his budget he’d live off of while training in Summit County.

Leading up to 2010, Waker competed on the Grand Prix and World Cup circuit with an eye on qualifying to compete at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. Though he missed out on qualifying to represent Team USA in Vancouver, Waker stuck with the snowboarding life and community, as he pivoted to coaching the sport he loved. Luckily for Waker, he had a previous connection with Ian Kirk, one of his coaches during his teen years attending Stratton Mountain School in Vermont. Kirk was able to help Waker coach an Australian development team based in Summit County, an experience that not only enabled Waker to get his feet wet in snowboard coaching, but one that also made him realize he could make a career out of it.

The wheels didn’t come in motion for Waker to become a year-round resident of Summit County until a fateful moment on the 5-Chair lift at Breckenridge Ski Resort. While lapping the two-person chair along Breck’s Peak 8 park and pipe terrain, Waker filled into the singles queue for the 5-chair. Moments later, he found himself riding up the lift with an aspiring Swiss snowboarder, Darien Giedd. The two hit it off that day and the following weekend when they again bumped into each other and rode a two-person chair at Keystone Resort during a subsequent competition.

When Kirk founded the Kirk’s Camp snowboard club in 2013 under the philosophy of providing “a support system for radical lifestyles” Waker followed. Based in Summit County — where Waker now lives full time with Giedd — but operating worldwide, the club quickly attracted some of the top young freestyle snowboarding talent, including Nik Baden of Steamboat Springs, Luke Winkelmann of North Carolina and eventual Olympic gold medalist Red Gerard of Silverthorne.

In his time with Kirk’s Camp, Waker has passed on quite a few young riders to the U.S. Rookie Team. Waker’s riders in the camp have also represented the nation in slopestyle at FIS Junior World Championships, such as Will Healy, Eli Mcdermott, Alex Atno and Winkelmann.

Winkelmann is at the top of Waker’s coaching success stories. The young rider relocated to Summit County to train in the winter, a far cry from riding dry slopes and a little hill in North Carolina. But with an adept background on rails, Winkelmann worked with Waker over several winters to improve his jump skills on the slopestyle course, to the point where Winkelmann finished in an impressive fourth place at this year’s Burton U.S. Open at Vail Mountain.

“He’s kind of been the next up-and-comer, which has been amazing,” Waker said. “I’m super happy for him. He got rookie of the year for the U.S. Open. It was a huge feat. I really try and build up a program of athletes who are motivated and who push each other and have fun. I feel like with me personally growing up as a competitive snowboarder, I always excelled when my friends and peers were pushing me. So I really strived to build a program where kids were pushing each other. When most of our athletes learn tricks are those days when everyone is super excited and just pushing each other.”

Waker also emphasized keeping it fun for young riders like Healy and Winkelmann. Waker said the pressure of constantly taking the next step as one of the country’s best young Olympic snowboarding hopefuls can prove daunting and exhausting at times for the riders he coaches. Doing things to prevent the kids’ mental burnout is perhaps the most important part of Waker’s job. That’s why Waker said it’s a point of emphasis for him to cultivate rewarding, fun, full-team moments when out on the mountain by filming the exact moments of successful trick progressions for young riders. And, of course, filming the fun of powder days.

“They do a lot of dangerous tricks,” Waker said, “going upside down twice now — double- and triple-corks — so it’s about providing the right environment and making sure they have the correct fundamentals to make it to that next step. Because if you have other friends, close competitors next to you, telling you ‘you got this,’ when they see their fellow teammates pushing the envelope and pushing their skills to the next level, that’s kind of when they get fired up and really want to throw down too.”

Waker doesn’t shy away from the fact that he’s an emotional person, and he said that’s a main element of his coaching: to maintain excitability while out on the mountain. And, sure, there is excitement when proteges such as Winkelmann win, say, this year’s Rev Tour slopestyle circuit. Despite all of those successes with Kirk’s Camp, though, Waker’s best moment while on the snow in Summit came last spring on the 5-Chair.

“I made the lifties stop the chairlift, and I proposed,” he said. “It was six years since we met on that chair, lapping the park, two singles going up.”

Now engaged to Giedd and rooted here in Summit County, Waker will launch his own snowboard club next season. Dubbed “Tru Snowboarding,” the club will be based in Summit and build off of Kirk’s Camp’s foundation as Kirk signed a three-year deal to coach China’s international team.

For Waker, it’ll be the next chapter in his Summit County snowboarding story. Under a new team name, Waker will continue to coach elite young talent with his same energy and emotion.

“I feel like that kind of emotion feeds them,” Waker said. “They want to excel because they get that rise from me. They get so stoked and, when they land a trick, it’s like I landed a trick. So that’s where I feel like I’m, that’s kind of where I add to them. That’s where my kind of coaching comes in.”

via:: Summit Daily