This excerpted feature, written by PSIA-AASI Lead Writer Peter Kray, appears in the Spring 2025 issue of 32 Degrees. You can read the entire article here.

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AASI’s Most Consistently Eclectic Event

AASI Rider Rally hits the snow at Copper Mountain, Colorado, April 21 through April 24, this spring, celebrating 25 years of inspired instruction and a legendary word-of-mouth history that seems to grow with every new event.

Equal parts shred-fest, educational improv, and annual rolling reunion tour for America’s snowboard instructors, Rally is the jam band concert equivalent of PSIA-AASI’s National offerings. According to Eric Sheckleton, who along with former AASI Snowboard Team Coach Randy Price, is one of Rally’s co-founders, “That’s precisely because it’s a free-flowing teaching and learning experience that feeds off the energy of its participants.”

Sheckleton, who is the current president of Interski – the first U.S. instructor to hold that role – said he and Price were members of the 1996-2000 PSIA-AASI Team, the first to include the AASI designation (snowboard instructors were originally included on what was then the Demonstration Team in 1988). Toward the end of their term, they were completing a new teaching manual and video “and didn’t have a great delivery method to bring it to the public.”

AASI – the American Association of Snowboard Instructors – itself wasn’t officially introduced until 1997, and Sheckleton said, “By the time we were developing these great new concepts, snowboarding was still an elective at National Academy and there was no real formal way for snowboard instructors to interact. Along with our coach, Brian Spear, and other team members like Lane Clegg (who would also later coach the snowboard team), we were trying to figure out how to share these resources with other snowboard instructors so they could tell us what they did and didn’t like about it.”

In 1999, the Northern Rocky Mountain Region hosted a divisional snowboard instruction event in Whitefish, Montana, led by Price and Sheckleton, which helped set the stage for the first National Rider Rally at Big Sky, Montana, in 2000.

At Big Sky, Sheckleton said the team arrived with a loose plan of action, beginning with a remote dinner on the mountain in a yurt, which quickly turned into an epic snowball fight. Later, a random meeting with a backcountry ski operator at Big Sky’s Scissorbills Saloon resulted in four days of deeply discounted snowcat riding. After a week of open-ended instruction; wide-ranging discussions; and daily, full participation attendee laps down Big Sky’s Calamity Jane run, Sheckleton knew the stage was set. “We wanted a posse spirit that was less about rigid clinics and more about togetherness and lifting each other up,” he said. “We wanted everyone to feel like they were creating the experience as much as they were participating in it. And from that first event there was an immediate dedicated following with a core group of 10 to 15 people who attended every year. That, along with a PSIA-AASI grant we received to offset the costs, helped get it off its feet.”

Learning, Laughs, and a Little Bit of Lager

Ask former Snowboard Team member Shaun Cattanach what he remembers from the original Rider Rally in 2000, and he’ll say it was a mix of timely, useful information, a lot of hard riding, and for those attendees who came back every year, a budding collection of “Rally Stories,” that became recurring jokes.

“I remember giving a presentation on LTR (AASI Official Supplier Burton Snowboards’ former beginner-friendly “Learn to Ride” program) in the auditorium and having to hand out beers just to keep the audience in control,” Cattanach said. “Also, that Glen Plake was running a ski camp at Big Sky at the same time. Riding firm snow in the trees way faster than we should have been. And on the drive back to Bozeman having to tie a certain snowboarder’s boots to the rear bumper because they stunk so bad we wouldn’t let them in the truck.”

Cattanach would go on to work for Burton full time, where he continued to partner with AASI to help the iconic snowboard brand collaborate with professional instructors to get more people out riding. In 2019, PSIA-AASI honored him with the association’s Distinguished Service Award, which recognizes individuals who made significant contributions to support the success of PSIA-AASI and its members.

As a member of AASI and an employee of Burton, in the coming seasons Cattanach followed Rider Rally as it went on an extended road trip to some of America’s most heralded mountains, perfecting that special mix of great riding, good learning, and at the end of each session, a beer-enhanced breakdown of each day’s events.

Along with the occasional wasabi eating contest, sore muscles and cracked goggles from epic on-mountain sessions, and lots of “Penguin Slides” (when riders dive chest first down the mountain with their boards tucked in the air behind them) as much as anything, Rider Rally’s main mission was to spread the sport’s laid-back sense of belonging while weaving together the country’s community of snowboard instructors from slope to slope. “It’s always been about flexibility,” Sheckleton said. “There’s not really a list of topics. It’s encouraging members to think about new ideas and hearing what everyone has to say and seeing what they want. But it’s really about trying to find new ways to create camaraderie, and that is really what I think makes Rider Rally what Rider Rally is.”