se days, resorts spend thousands of dollars to attract snowboarders to their resorts with claims of the biggest halfpipe or the best board park. But how did this sport explode onto the scene? To answer this question, a brief history is in order. On that snowy Christmas day in 1965, Sherman Poppen had created the first snowboard. His wife named this contraption a Snurfer because it was a cross between surf and snow. Snurfers were typically made of wood, and had a piece of rope attached to the front tip to steer. The Brunswick Corporation liked Poppen's invention and was the first company to mass-produce it. Over a million snurfers were sold, which sparked the imaginations of a few snowboard innovators. Around the same time that Poppen was developing the snurfer, Tom Sims, a skateboarder from New Jersey, had an idea. Because the streets of New Jersey were icy in the winter, he decided to design a skateboard for the ice in his junior high wood shop class. Sims was not able to base his snowboard on Poppen's Snurfer design because he did not know about it yet. His first designs were from skateboards without the metal axles or wheels. Although the first designs were not very successful, Sims came across the right combination of materials, shape, and bindings in 1969. Tom then began to produce his own line of snowboards, which remain one of the most popular boards today. Because Poppen and Sims began their snowboard designs at about the same time, nobody really knows who the true inventor of the snowboard is. Most of the credit goes to Poppen's invention of the Snurfer because it was manufactured first. Poppen and Sims were not the only snowboard innovators though. Jake Burton Carpenter, a surfer from Long Island, New York, had the idea not to skate on the ice, but rather to surf the mountain. Burton took a common Snurfer, and added rubber straps to achieve better control of the board. These bindings allowed riders to control the snurfer much better with their feet than with the steering rope. Burton entered his design in the annual National Snurfer Open Competition. Because Burton's board was so modified, he was in a class all by himself, and easily won first place. The other snurfers saw Burton's design, which led to the birth of Burton snowboards. Jake Burton is considered "Mr. Snowboard" because ""Burton's probably got 40 to 45% marketshare overall"". Not only that, but ""Jake's nearest competitor probably has 10 or 12 percent [of the snowboarding industry]... Jake's stuck with a philosophy and set the stage. Everyone's copying him"" (Neuert). This is why Burton snowboards have become the most popular boards on the slopes today. Snowboarding was "plagued in the early years by the Snurfer's reputation for unpredictability... [and] was outlawed at most ski resorts" (Brimner 7). The insurance companies for these resorts would not write liability policies "because a snowboard wasn't seen as a "directional device" like a pair of skis" (Brimner 7). The insurance companies would not cover the snowboarders, and the ski resorts did not want to be liable if an accident was to occur. As a result snowboarders were not allowed on most of the slopes. In addition, snowboarding was becoming popular among the surfers and skateboarders. Though most of the young surfers a

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Approximate Word count = 2207
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page double spaced)