Ollie up to frontside wallride in Michigan during Mary’s breakout 2014-2015 season. Photo: Ben Birk “I WAS BASICALLY just the adult in the room,” father Mike Rand said over the phone from Narraganset, RI. “Most people have to dis-cover what they want to be. She’s just doing it. Always has.” With ev-erything that can go wrong while trying to turn a kid into a functioning member of society, it’s a glowing parental endorsement. Mary didn’t have a traumatic childhood. She doesn’t have any family drama, big adversity to speak of or harrowing near-death experiences. She was 9 years old the first time Mike and mother Pam let her go snowboarding by herself. “It was never a social thing for her,” Mike said. “She begged us to go on her own.” About an hour into the day, her folks got a call from Mary saying she was on the side of Flying Fox at Loon Mountain, NH, with a broken elbow. “The adult who stopped to help said she was probably right. We felt like the worst parents ever.” Mary was the last in her family to switch from skiing to snow-boarding. At age 6, she told her dad, “I know I’m on skis, but there’s a snowboarder inside me.” She did everything for her herself, starting about age 7. “We’re so proud, but had so little to do with it. It was all her,” Mike said. “I can take a little credit for teaching her how to carve, but that’s it.” Mary is grateful that her dad, whom she calls the quintessential soul boarder, laid down a serious foundation. “You see [a lack of fundamen-tals] in some of the bigger riders, like, wow, you can do that trick, but you have trouble getting down the hill? It’s crazy,” she said. The Cascadian spires of her new home resort are a far cry from the fences she used to ollie at the 310-vertical-foot Yawgoo Valley Ski Area and Water Park in Exeter, RI. Home to the use-what-you-got Yawgoons crew, which consisted of Mary and big bro Marcus, along with Dylan Gamache, Brian Skorupski, and full-time dentist/filmer Brendan Gouin, Yawgoo was where Mary first caught the bug for logging shots. She decided she wanted to be a pro snowboarder sometime mid-high school, joined Loon’s recreational team and earned flow sponsor-ships from Volcom and Rome. She qualified for four USASA Nation-als but could never afford to go. “She never cried about it. It just was what it was,” her dad said. When Volcom invited Mary to compete at the 2009 Peanut Butter & Rail Jam finals at Mammoth, CA, her parents weren’t feeling the travel costs. So, she created a Powerpoint deck to sway them. She would use money she had saved from waitressing and coordinate and book all the travel logistics. They said yes. They also sent Marcus along to look out for her. Mary finished third and brought home an oversized cardboard check for $1,250. Her folks were psyched. “It made us realize, holy crap, we should be supporting her more in these ambitions,” Mike said. “I was just stoked to get free gear,” Mary said. “Every step felt like the biggest win, each moment in time the biggest deal ever.” Mike and Mary’s mom, Pam, told Mary she should be riding all the time. Snowboard academies weren’t in the budget, but the family had a little cabin on 4.5 acres of land near Loon called Mumsy Acres, named after Pam’s late mom. Mike shelved his construction business to go live there with Mary for her senior year of high school. He would teach snowboarding so she could ride every day. Mary worked with the principal of the Lincoln-Woodstock K-12 school to put classes and curriculum together, then she rolled into AP calculus in snowboard gear after riding all day. “There were only 35 kids in the grade. I stuck out like a sore thumb,” she said. Marcus went to Camp of Champions in Whistler one summer and came back with flow from Sims and Spy, and Mary soon caught the camp bug too. She graduated high school, coached at Windell’s in 2011, filmed with the Too Hard crew, went to Camp of Champions, and then onto High Cascade, where she filmed with Jetpack. She put down a full part alongside Jess Kimura in 2014, which earned her TransWorld ’s Rookie of the Year. She followed it up with a segment in street-centric underground favorite Rendered Useless in 2015, which led to the Reader’s Choice award, alongside nominations for Rider of the Year and Video Part of the Year. 050 THE SNOWBOARDER’S JOURNAL
The Snowboarder's Journal frequency 16.1: Page 50
