The Snowboarder's Journal - The Snowboarder's Journal 20.2
STAR ALIGNED: Shifting Culture with Zeb Powell
Words: Ben Shanks Kindlon 2022-11-01 08:52:10
“Zeb had driven down from Burlington, VT, to shoot with me in my studio in Massachusetts. I thought this abandoned airfield nearby would be a great spot to capture a few lifestyle shots. Zeb had just been given a gold grill and a leather vest by his friend A$AP Ferg. We spent a few hours exploring this old control tower. I set up a simple one-head strobe off to Zeb’s left and used a can of haze to accentuate the atmosphere around him. The color was amazing, but I wanted to convert the scene to black and white to take the focus away from the colorful graffiti and direct it back on Zeb, where it belongs.” Photo: Gary Land
Someone asked me to put Zeb into context and I was like, ‘You know when Luke Skywalker went to see Yoda for the first time, and he didn’t complete his training, but he could still do some fucked up shit? That’s Zeb. He doesn’t even know how to use a lightsaber yet. Stand by.’”
—Selema Masekela, October 2021
Every generation of snowboarders sees its handful of elites sliding the scales of progression to a place previously thought impossible. We often grow familiar with these prodigies as they spin and flip their way to podiums across the globe—a well-traveled blueprint from competitions to filming flexibility and financial freedom. These select riders earn their spots through consistency, their keep by adding degrees to the prior year’s gold-worthy tricks. In the grand scheme of things, these superlative snowboarders are scarce. But rarer still are those who can hang with the best and inspire colossal change in our culture. In that special sense, Zeb Powell is one of a gifted few.
Through an approach that’s equally electric and eccentric, the rising phenom from North Carolina is bringing aspects of freestyle riding to new heights while simultaneously redefining the inferred responsibilities of a snowboarder with such stature. Zeb hasn’t made his name known through robotically repeating slopestyle runs, placing at the Olympics, or dropping high-end video parts. Rather, in spectacular Gen Z fashion, the 22-year-old has garnered the same if not even greater levels of attention than those taking more traditional routes. From repeatedly breaking the Internet with astonishing clips, never-been-done tricks and a first-place Knuckle Huck finish at his first-ever Winter X Games, to onstage cameos alongside rapper A$AP Ferg and appearing in the New York Times, Forbes and other popular publications, Zeb is quickly blossoming into a mainstream moniker on par with the Flying Tomato and the Bird Man, with acclaim coming from lifelong shreds, weekend warriors and casual spectators alike.
As the only Black snowboarder currently performing at this level—in addition to being the only rider regardless of skin color capable of performing some of the tricks he pulls off—Zeb’s presence is garnering widespread and newfound interest, viewership and participation in snowboarding. Notably, a lot of the regard comes from people of color who felt out of place in snowboarding prior to seeing the example set by this fledgling shred Jedi.
Despite his rather immediate jump to eminence, Zeb does his best to stay humble. That’s because he always keeps in mind that the ride only goes so long as it goes—he knows his time with this good fortune could be gone any minute and he hasn’t many seconds to spare.
“I’m not gonna talk about it, I’m gonna do it.”—Zeb
The first time I ever saw Zeb, he was 14 years old and stood about waist-high on his competition at the 2014 Red Bull All Snow at Mt. Snow, VT. There were a lot of local hitters at the event: Kevin Raksnis, Jeremy Ellenberg, the Yawgoons’ Brian Skorupski and—who my money would’ve been on—Shaun Murphy. But young Zeb made me glad I’m not a betting man. As the sun began to set on the Green Mountains and we gathered for awards, that acrobatic adolescent who spent the entire afternoon finding gaps and transitions across the icy course was called to receive his first-place prize in the Men’s Open category. And that afternoon, if you paid close attention, something in the surrounding atmosphere was faintly telling anyone who would listen: The Force is strong with this one.
Eight years later, I’m in Oregon following Zeb as he parts a small sea of High Cascade Snowboard camp-ers seeking selfies, high-fives and autographs from their favorite pro at the Burton team week in early July. Zeb accommodates the lot of ’em, handing out stickers, getting down for photos and dapping up every outreached hand that comes his way. He does so with an air of balanced humility, demonstrating a more mature demeanor than one might expect from someone his age, with his fame. He’s grown to be larger than life yet remains down to earth. While it’s clear Zeb relishes spreading stoke to his doting fans, the hype of it all doesn’t look to be inflating his head to the point of ungrounding him. For that, he credits his father.
“My dad taught me to be really humble,” Zeb says as we talk about life, family and higher power at a picnic table nearby the camp’s skatepark. “He’d sprinkle it in after every accomplishment, big or small.”
Zeb grew up the youngest of five with two sisters, Scout and Jessie, and two brothers, Dillon and Tyler. Their mom, Valerie, stayed at home raising the kids through Zeb’s early teens, then utilized her caretaking skills by working with the school district as a teacher’s assistant and substitute teacher. Their dad, Carl, ran a chip-meal business with his brother and father. Almost every Sunday of Zeb’s childhood, the Powells went to church.
“I’m religious, generally,” Zeb says. “Not insanely by the book… but a general belief. Something to be thankful to.”
Though not overtly clerical himself, God comes up a lot in our discussion. He says signs of a higher power have influenced his life in more ways than one.
It was the church that initially brought Zeb and his family together, when a fellow member asked Valerie if they’d be interested in adopting one of six babies that needed a home, despite the Powells already having four other kids in tow. Zeb has never met his biological parents and is quick to bring our discussion back to the family that raised him, saying he’s “blessed” to have been linked with such a loving, supportive household from his infancy. Bonus points—for Zeb and the entire world of snowboarding—that they brought Zeb to the mountains. “They also sent me off to a [snowboarding] school, and it might have gone different if I wasn’t the youngest child,” Zeb says. “But all the stars aligned.”
During his childhood in Waynesville, NC, Zeb played team sports and excelled at baseball—a sport in which his father had high hopes for him—but Zeb always preferred flying through the air at his home hill, Cataloochee Ski Area, and all its 200 vertical feet. Although Carl enjoyed seeing Zeb run the diamond, he and Valerie supported Zeb’s sideways-standing dreams with both their hearts and wallets. “There wasn’t much money to work with, but they put it all into us,” Zeb says. By his early teens, he was flying to Colorado for day sessions at the Woodward Copper snowboard camp. The Powells made those ends meet by having Zeb stay with his aunt in one of her friend’s condos close by. As fate would have it, the legendary Chad Otterstrom became Zeb’s coach and by the end of the week, staff at Woodward were pushing Valerie to send Zeb to a snowboard academy. “We landed on Stratton Mountain School [VT] because Chad was working there,” Zeb says. “I was 12 or 13 when it was pitched to me. I was tripping over leaving my friends, we were already so close, and still are to this day. I always just thought of snowboarding as fun, never really thought of it like a career.
“For me, there’s more to it than a video part or a medal.”—Zeb
“But… on a heavy note, the crazy part goes back to a God thing. After the tour [of Stratton Mountain School], it was almost like my parents didn’t want to send me, but one day my dad was driving and says he heard a voice that was like, ‘Don’t fuck this up.’ He says it was a voice from God. He pulled over on the side of the road and called my mom like, ‘We gotta send him to this school.’ That sticks out to me.”
Zeb displays curiosity, open-mindedness and introspection during conversations about existentialism, but when it comes to his superb skill on a snowboard his tone shifts to one that is very matter of fact. Taken out of context, if you read quotes by Zeb about his riding, they may paint the picture of a cocky kid. But when it comes to his boarding, he is simply spitting facts. “At the end of the day, there’s a difference between confidence and cockiness,” Zeb rightfully points out. “I’m insanely confident in my riding, but I usually just keep that shit to me and do what I do. I’m not gonna talk about it, I’m gonna do it.”
Truth be told, he is that talented and, clearly, he knows it. It would be near impossible for him not to, considering the number of never-been-done tricks he’s ingeniously improvised, or the times he’s shown up try-hards at events he was just calmly cruising. And, despite his regularly exhibited humility, Zeb lives it up when appropriate. If you see him on the hill with a megaphone in hand, flipping off everything, jazzing everyone up, or in the streets going absolutely buck wild, that’s really him, too—he’s human after all, and therefore balanced. But he’s also increasingly recognizing his role in snowboarding—in society at large—as something bigger than pop culture, fun clips and athletic accolades. As branches sway and birds chirp melodically through the trees around us, Zeb ponders how his power fits into it all.
“My parents think that God gave me a gift,” he says. “Truly, it is crazy how I move on a snowboard. I could physically excel at any sport I want, I’m muscular without working out. This is just naturally me. The way I see it: Everything about the way I ride… it is kind of a gift. But there’s no reason to think that I’m the best, or that I’m higher up because of it. There’s always something to be better at, to grow in. And this could be taken away from me at any moment. I’m just so lucky to be able to do all this, which inspires me to do more. It keeps me grateful.
“When I was growing up in North Carolina, my dad would say how cool it would be for me to make it and then be able to give back, like going to inner cities and giving kids there an opportunity. And now that’s happening.”
Following Zeb’s exciting Knuckle Huck win (y’all remember the coffin slide to backflip method?), his phone was blowing up with messages from people telling him how inspired they are by his success in snowboarding. “People were coming up to me saying, ‘Man, I didn’t even know Black people can snowboard.’ I was like, ‘Damn, [dad’s] right. So I made it a point to start voicing that I wanted to do that stuff,” he says. “Just making it a known fact that Black people, and all people of color, can snowboard. Because from the outside looking in, it just seems like a white person’s sport.”
Zeb’s first chance to have direct involvement with pushing for greater diversity in the mountains came via the Red Bull Slide in Tour, during which he and a handful of riders demo’d parks along the East Coast, including a session with the nonprofit Hoods to Woods Foundation. “Then I got onto Burton last year and we did that shoot with A$AP Ferg,” Zeb says. “We took him snowboarding, and we ended up jiving with him and his crew so well that we kept inviting him to events, meeting up with him, and then X Games came along. That’s where he gave me the gold grills. I got to go up onstage with him. He made a hard post on his Instagram and claimed it Culture Shifters. We ran with that.”
“Zeb has the potential to redefine the way the world looks at this thing.” —Selema Masekela
Along with Zeb and other pro Burton riders, the epochal action-sports announcer, Selema Masekala, was there riding with A$AP Ferg and his crew during the first Culture Shifters gathering at Aspen Snowmass. During our interview for Selema’s feature in Issue 19.4, the conversation shifted to Zeb. Selema says the young gun seemed sort of starstruck upon introduction to him and A$AP Ferg. But Selema points out that the feelings were more than mutual. “He came over like, ‘Hey, I’m Zeb,’ and it was like, ‘Yeah… we know you. We watch you. That’s why we’re here—we heard you were going to be here.’ Zeb was so blown away. At a certain point he could hardly speak because Ferg was like, ‘Bro, we fuck with you.’ I saw his face, walked over to him and was like, ‘Do you get it now?’
“Zeb has the potential to redefine the way the world looks at this thing. He’s the first person in a long time—since I think Shaun [White]—who has the potential to make people who don’t know anything about snowboarding care about snowboarding and, in turn, draw them into the bigger picture. If you can see it, you can be it. Kids who never wanted to snowboard before see Zeb and you don’t even have to be a snowboarder to be like, ‘What the fuck?’ It’s like Michael Jordan, like Kobe [Bryant], like, ‘I don’t play that sport but, oh, that is how it is supposed to be done.’ And that’s what’s happening to Black and brown kids around the world, just by watching Zeb do his thing.”
In Summer 2020, we saw a large, long-overdue (and still much-needed) wave of social justice pushing for increased diversity in all aspects of society, snowboarding included. As the young Black wunderkind coming into his prime about this time, marketing teams across the industry undeniably saw Zeb as a hot commodity. Some must wonder if Zeb felt, or currently feels, the pressure that comes with such high expectations. Yet he flows through this aspect of the game with poise, too. He’s utilizing his power to better the lives of others, to shift perspectives, to extend boundaries both on snowboards and in the mindsets within the culture. Where exactly Zeb’s superpower comes from may never be determined. Fortunately, in the meantime he’s using the Force for good.
“For me, there’s more to it than a video part or a medal,” Zeb says. “It’s more than being the best or rolling with the best. It’s being able to do that and get back to the basics of chilling with people who aren’t the best and looking at everyone equal. That’s a no-brainer. And, honestly, I don’t feel like a lot of pros give off energy like that. The people who give off the energy that gets me hyped are the fans and the kids who aren’t the best but are just stoked to be riding.
“I am learning that I feed off energy, and instead of rolling with the pros and getting to hit big jumps, I’d rather just be with some snowboard kids getting stoked. Doing more events to get more Black people involved, it feels right. It’s everything I’m about. You know the law of attraction? This is something I want to do, so one way or another, it’s gonna happen. I have so many helping hands, too. So, no, I don’t really feel pressure, it’s more excitement to make it happen.”
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