“A sketchy inrun, a sketchy takeoff angle and weird windlip landing didn’t phase Nils. He was charging at the lip full speed, and how he maintained control and style at this altitude was beyond me. Timfy, Greece.” Photo: Jérôme Tanon NILS TOOK A DIFFERENT PATH . He lived with Griffin Siebert and his family for two years during high school and became friends with filmer Jeremy “Jerm” Thornberg and the Lick The Cat crew, then started filming for their popular webisodes. He used a college fund to stay afloat, but was broke upon graduation. “I thought I was going to have to move back east to live with my family, but a friend lined Hans and I up with a stunt-double gig for this Disney movie, Cloud Nine , that gave me enough money to stay out west, buy a little car and make it through the winter,” he says. Nils continued filming with Lick The Cat and starred in their first full-length video, 2013’s Project LTC . He earned a sponsorship with Salomon that same year, and later joined the ranks of The North Face and Giro. Like his brother, Nils managed to land himself on a couple Snowboarder covers, and produced exceptional backcountry footage for various videos including SFD (2015), Insight (2016), Giro’s Into the White (2017), and Lick The Cat’s Video of the Year (2018). In ad-dition to demonstrating his top-tier abilities on kickers, big mountain lines and beyond, Nils won Transworld Snowboarding ’s 2017 Standout Performance of the Year, for taking home the coveted gold duct tape at the 31st LBS. He placed first in the switch race that year, too. Outside of snowboarding, Nils enrolled in community college be-fore transferring to the University of Utah where he is currently pur-suing a mechanical engineering degree. Although he can seem like a silly, carefree character, he has a meticulous mind that is well-suited to academia. He’s organized, accountable and displays more calculated tendencies than his older brother. As a kid, Hans says their mom nicknamed Nils “Mother Hen” because of his habit of constantly checking on everybody—a trait he sometimes still exhibits, especially with those he’s most comfortable. He’s the type to make itineraries and stick to them, and he admits he can be overbear-ing at times. This was especially true in his relationship with Hans. Nils found himself getting annoyed with Hans’ more relaxed nature, and after succeeding side-by-side together for as long as he could remember, Nils was skeptical of Hans’ decision to forego a college degree. “I am very critical of myself, and since Hans is the closest person to me, I would project that onto him,” Nils says. “We’re very close with each other emotionally, and since we’re brothers I would always expect things from him that I would expect of myself. I never really communicated it, but I was probably being way too critical of who he was, and I think he felt it.” Nils was right. “With me not going to college and Nils going to college, I definitely started to judge myself a lot,” Hans says. “I was double-guessing everything I did, and at one point holding myself to the same standard that Nils would. But after a while I was just like, ‘You know what? We’re two different people.’ “I’ve got my faults and it’s good that I’ve acknowledged them, but I don’t think I need to perceive it that way. There’s a perception in America of having to go to college, but I don’t think it’s absolutely nec-essary. In the end I probably won’t make as much money, but I don’t regret my decisions at all. I was always much more content working hands-on in the dirt.” Through time and maturation, Nils shifted his perspective. He grew to not only accept, but also appreciate Hans’ personal choices and the way he carries himself. “Everyone projects themselves onto other people, and you hold the people closest to you to the highest standard,” Nils says. “But there’s a difference between understanding someone is different from you and in practice actually coexisting with that person that’s different from you. For a while I couldn’t accept that. I wanted Hans to go to school like I was going to school. I didn’t really make the connection that Hans and I are two very different people, and the way that Hans is and how he approaches his life is totally fine. He’s a passionate, caring, driven person, and on top of all that, a professional athlete with an absurd skill set to add wealth to his life outside of snowboarding. I love the shit out of him and I’m super-proud of everything he’s done. “We’re like yin and yang. From the outside looking in, it might seem like we’re super-similar, but our approach to filming, and who we are as people, is super-different. Hans runs a more spontaneous pro-gram and has a naturally, creatively flowing process. I’m super-militant in my approach to most things in life, and I think that can be good, but it also turns into a fault at times. I think there are places where Hans can tighten up his program, but there are also places where I can learn to loosen up a bit.” Hans concurs. “I’ve thought about us in that way since a young age,” he says. “Nils and I are very yin and yang. We’re super-similar, but also polar opposites. Sometimes it’s hard to see eye-to-eye being such different people, but that’s not too huge on the grand scale. From our earliest memories we were always there side-by-side, and then we kind of did our own thing—I was dealing with some stuff in my life, he was dealing with some stuff in his—but that’s just how life goes sometimes. We’re brothers, and as bitter or gray as our communication may be at times, there’s no one in this world that I’m closer to. And in the past few years, I feel like we’ve been growing even closer.” Lately, the Mindnichs have been hitting the sweet spot in their ca-reers and their brotherhood. They’ve come to recognize the beauty in their contrasting natures. They’ve learned to appreciate that not only accepting, but also adapting, certain traits from each other’s styles will improve their lives. It’ll benefit their boarding, too. “Sometimes when I get too in my head, I can start to overthink how fast I’m going into a jump,” Nils says. “And maybe Hans is under-thinking how fast he’s going into that jump. You know what I mean? There’s always a balance there to figure out.” THE MINDNICH PARADOX 045
The Snowboarder's Journal frequency 17.4: Page 47
