Even at 38, Scott still has plenty of pop. Here he snaps a method in the town of Government Camp, OR, to showcase the release of his latest pro model snowboard with Capita, a collaboration between his longtime board sponsor and Zero Skateboards. The slide marks illustrated on the bottom of the snowboard were copied from the deck that Jamie Thomas skated. December 2022. Photo: Brandon Rego SCOTT WAS BORN in 1984 to Marry Ann Siron, a labor and de-livery nurse, and William Stevens, who headed an outdoor expedition outfit called Experiment with Travel. “My parents ran this business where they would take people to do all these outdoor activities like cross-country skiing and snowshoeing,” Scott says. “My dad would take us ice climbing. I remember setting rappels on 100-foot cliffs as a 10-year-old and people just trusting that I had the right knots tied. We had a 35-foot rock wall in my backyard that my dad constructed, so I used to climb all the time. I was fortunate, my childhood was awesome. Especially in the early ’90s, that kind of stuff was rare.” Scott skied, mostly cross country, and he strapped into a snowboard for the first time in late 1994. “I was an immediate lifer,” he says. Scott began boarding at southwestern Massachusetts’ Mt. Tom Ski Area, which unfortunately shut down in ’98. He started hitting Ski Blandford, another now-defunct operation that topped out around 450 feet. “It’s pretty comparable to the Midwest, but you weren’t really get-ting the reps that you would with a rope tow,” Scott says. Despite its di-minutive size and slower pace, Blandford proved to be a prime place for Scott to cut his edges. Its icy little slopes are where he learned board con-trol—western Mass, particularly nearby Ski Butternut, homed a strong contingent of local snowboarders including Chris Grenier, Chris Beres-ford and others who would help to push Scott’s jumping and rail riding. Back then, he was hucking like everybody else. “If I was to show you footage of my skating or snowboarding in high school, I’m just emulating the guys in the videos,” Scott explains. “I was trying to hit gaps and jump down stuff, hit handrails, do rodeos, 720s. Then I saw Travis Parker’s parts in Robot Food and that was big. I’d never seen anyone fast plant onto a rail. That’s when my lightbulb went off, in 2002. It even changed my skating.” Skateboarding would grow to equal snowboarding for Scott, but his days of serious four-wheel thundering didn’t come until after high school. That was in large part because Scott was a starting shortstop on several baseball teams. His coaches weren’t all that stoked about him rolling his ankles, especially with the prospect of playing college ball po-tentially looming. So he held off on skateboarding. “I played shortstop for a decade at least,” Scott says. “I cared less to hit; I just wanted to turn double plays and dive for balls. I loved playing infield. I remember scouts coming to the last few games, but by then I was tapped out. I had JP Walker on the brain. I wanted to be a pro snowboarder.” Following graduation from high school Scott went to Colorado for a short stint at a college in the Rockies. After breaking his back and want-ing to dial things down, he realized he had a better chance of living out his dream of being a pro if he stuck close to home with his homies and forged a path of creativity. “There were the Pat Moores and Scotty Lagos, JP and Jeremy [ Jones] were still holding it down at that time,” Scott says. “We were just trying to carve out any lane we could get.” It was the early 2000s and video sharing was beginning to run ram-pant on the internet. That started Scott’s serious addiction to watching every single snow and skate video he could find. The internet’s infinite database opened Scott’s mind to more and more possibilities of how to approach the streets and mountain, which helped instigate a blend in retro flair and modern takes in his snowboarding and skateboarding. Along with scouring sites online, he also started investing in a horde of physical copies of snowboarding and skateboarding films. Among his most cherished have always been the Robot Food movies. Just prior to the release of Robot Food’s renowned Afterlame in 2004, Snowboarder Magazine ran a video contest in conjunction with the mov-ie’s production crew. The winner of the contest was to have their part featured in the bonus section of the Afterlame DVD. Scott won. Much to his dismay, his part didn’t make it onto the coveted disc. “I was dev-astated, dude,” he says. “Either Jess Gibson or Pierre Wikberg called me and told me they loaded so much bonus on the DVD they couldn’t fit my part. At the time, DVD was king. And a Robot Food movie? If I had my part in the bonus it would’ve been seen a gigantic number of times. But they uploaded it on their website and that was still a big deal for me. And I still have this Robot Food snowboard with the whole team on it, with a Robot Food logo on the base. I could probably sell it for a lot of money, but I would never.” It wasn’t the big break Scott had hoped for. Instead, that break came when he joined forces with Jesse Burtner and his production company, Think Thank. 046 THE SNOWBOARDER’S JOURNAL
The Snowboarder's Journal The Snowboarder's Journal 20.4: Page 46
