Sendy Indi
Ten-year-old Indi Hale-Stewart spins his snowboard off a 40-foot jump. He’s a dot in the expansive sky. The only reason he can’t do the 50-foot jump yet is that at 45 pounds, he’s simply too light.
Indi started out as a skier. When he first tried snowboarding at the age of four, he just wanted to be better than his sisters. When he pledged himself to snowboarding at the age of seven, he told himself he’d never touch skis again (except maybe on gaper day).
And he definitely looks the part of a snowboarder. His short nails sport chipped black nail polish, which he wore to school on a dare for five bucks. His thick, honey colored hair is swept under a snap back, but every once in a while, he takes it off to run his fingers through the aqua stripe in the middle. He’s got high cheekbones and a slightly upturned nose with a line of freckles marching up to his piercing blue eyes. Like many ten-year old riders, his goal is to be a professional snowboarder one day. But in Indi’s case, he’s already well on his way there.
Since last year, Indi has accrued 13 sponsors and placed sixth out of 47 at the USA Snowboard and Freeski Association Junior National Rail Jam competition in Copper. This year, his goal is to be among the top three on the podium at Rail Jam Nationals.
But he doesn’t just have lofty aspirations — last year, his dad, Jay Stewart, said Indi’s goal was simply to learn one new trick per day.
Living right next door to Winter Park where school only meets four days a week, Indi certainly had the time for it. Rails and backside 180s and 360s (where you rotate starting with your back facing down the slope) were the most challenging tricks for him to learn last year, so of course, he says, they became his favorites. Challenge is a constant theme on Indi’s journey, and from what I’ve seen, grit is a constant of his character.
For example, semifinals for nationals last season began at 8am and didn’t end until 10pm that night — it was 12 hours of feet being packed into snowboard boots, in varying states of cold and sweat. The way a rail jam works, each contestant gets a 20-minute time limit in which they can do however many runs they can pack in. But it’s just that, runs — you do your one rail, get to the bottom, unstrap, and literally run back up the hill so you can do it again. After that, you get 20 minutes of down time; but sit down too long, and your legs will begin to cramp up. Indi got in about 11 or 12 runs.
“At one point I was un-strapping and they were like, ‘Ok, last runs, if you don’t get in line within 30 seconds, you’re done,’” Indi said. “I was only halfway there, and I was so tired I kept falling up the hill, but I made it.”
Only about half the line did. And only about half of the kids, Indi says, were taking the spirit of the rail jam seriously. In the course, there were two boxes, a donkey rail, and a down rail in the middle, “which everybody was destroying themselves on,” said Indi. That’s because you can’t see the rail at all until you’ve left the jump and you’re in the air, and then it’s a six-foot gap till you (hopefully) land the rail. So instead of chancing a blind landing, some kids had started gapping over the rail and doing backflips instead.
“That was just so sketchy, like, it’s called a rail jam, not a hit the jump over the rail jam,” Indi said. “I didn’t wanna be like those kids and break the point of the competition just ’cause they didn’t have any other tricks.”
So Indi started doing things he hadn’t done before. Half the tricks that he was trying he says he’d never landed before, but he was landing them this time. Most of those who were hitting the blind rail were doing 50–50s on it, which means they were landing it with their boards parallel to the rail. It’s harder to go down perpendicular, because it’s easier to catch an edge. But Indi went for it anyway.
“I hit the jump and I see the crowd almost in slow motion,” Indi said. “Then I look at the rail and I’m like, “Ok, that’s gnarly,” and that was my last thought and I went Ksshh onto the rail.”
When Indi’s dad saw him hit a boardslide, “I was like, ‘What are you talking about, dude,’” Jay said. “It was the coolest thing ever, just to watch how well he was doing and how much fun he was having.”
Although he slipped out a little bit, the judges scored Indi well. And then, in complete darkness now, the Rail Jam results started coming out. The judges started at the bottom, calling out the contestant’s numbers, and by the top three, Indi’s number hadn’t been called.
“I was sweating, I was like, ‘I can’t be in top 3,’” Indi said. “And then at second place they called the first few of my number and I was screaming so loud I didn’t even get time to hear my name.”
Jay had the biggest eyes when he recalled hearing Indi’s number called, as if he was kind of awed at what his own flesh and blood had just accomplished. “I couldn’t put it to words,” he said.
*****
Back in his dad’s shop, Winter Park’s branch of Powder Tools, Indi dispassionately goes over the list of all the possible accidents you can have while snowboarding, and their colloquial names: there’s air chair, where you land straight on your back with your snowboard over your head, and there’s tacos and burritos, where you’re folded over a rail either on your ribs or on your back. Indi’s no stranger to these accidents — some of his worst falls have been air chairs and off rails. But he says he knows what to do for them: check his fingers with his best friend or go inside and cover their eyes to see if their pupils change.
But Indi (knock on a snowboard) has never had a super scary injury. The one that Jay was most worried about happened the previous summer, when he fell, hard, on his back at the skate park.
“That’s when I had like, you know, the whoops moment,” Jay said. “But then I was like, ‘Well, can you feel your arms, can you feel this,’ and was like, ‘Ok, well, if it hurts then you’re not paralyzed.’”
Jay may not have a traditional approach when it comes to this sort of thing, but then, he never wanted to be a traditional parent, screaming at his kid to make a goal from the sidelines of a Little League soccer match. He says that the cool thing about snowboarding is that you can still be involved and supportive as a parent, as long as you realize it’s not your life.
“Jay is a great example of a model parent,” said Mike Brandon, Indi’s coach for the past two or three years. “He has a fantastic grasp of being there without hovering; he supports Indi and gives helpful suggestions but also backs off if Indi’s feeling overwhelmed or stressed.”
It was Jay and his contacts in the snow sports industry who helped Indi get sponsored about a year ago. And although Jay says that sponsoring young kids is the new thing, Brandon says that “It’s still not very common, it really isn’t. Most kids don’t get sponsored until they’re in their teens.”
However, Brandon says that Indi has a unique style, one that’s mature and skateboard influenced. “A lot of kids his age lack the fluidity that comes from skating, but he’s very playful in the way that he rides,” Brandon said.
*****
Indi doesn’t see what he’s doing as extreme. And Jay doesn’t either, another reason he’s not a typical parent. With snowboarding, they say, you do it so often and get so zoned in, that what seems crazy and risky to the outside world is just a series of calculated, practiced risks for them. So they don’t call it extreme sports, they call it a lifestyle. And it’s a lifestyle that seems to have at least as many benefits as it does risks; snowboarding, Indi says, has helped him grow, overcome stage fright and step up to challenges. It’s given him experiences with fear and choice that a lot of people don’t even get by the time they’re 30.
Jay also says he’s seen Indi develop a natural drive to improve through snowboarding, and as he masters each new trick, a self-confidence that flourishes even outside of the sport. Indi hasn’t seen his biological mom since he was five, and although he used to blame himself, thinking he did something to make her leave, Jay says snowboarding has helped him deal with those daily thoughts.
“Since snowboarding is something you can do by yourself, it’s insane how much confidence it can give you,” Jay said.
Indi doesn’t know where his self-motivation stems from — he just knows that he wants to be a pro when he grows up, and says that he’s put in too much hard work, too many hard falls, too many tears and sweat and blood to quit. So he forges ahead, waiting for the day when he’ll weigh enough to hit the DT (Dark Territory) jumps.
“Right now, I’m so light I’d have to have a snow mobile pulling me with no speed checks to hit 4–1 or 4–2,” Indi said, talking about the 50 and 75-foot jumps at his home mountain, Winter Park. “I might pee my pants halfway through, but then I can try bigger tricks that I couldn’t do on any other jump.”
Jay knows it’s dangerous. But he also seems to see in his son the same kind of drive to push himself, the same kind of curiosity to see how far he can go, that he sees in himself.
“Where do you draw the limit on setting limits?” Jay asks. “Like obviously he’s not big enough yet to hit a 75-foot jump, and even if he could, yeah, I would probably say no right now, but, what’s a limit?”
For Indi, there aren’t many.
