Junior Kiana Christensen has just finished a tremendously successful snowboarding season in both her high school and USASA league competitions. Most recently, Christensen competed in the USASA Snowboarding Nationals on April 1-8 in Copper Mountain, Colorado. She ended up coming home with a gold medal, winning 1st place in Slopestyle, a jumps and rails event, 5th place in Halfpipe, and 7th place in Boardercross. She told us about how she prepared for the event, what her competition was like, and her future plans with snowboarding.

Had you been to nationals before?

• “No, this was my first year competing in USASA which has regional series and the top riders from each series make it to the USASA Nationals. Before this, I just did high school competitions and state.”

How did you prepare for the national competition?

• “I had so many competitions this whole season, like in one weekend I had 6 competitions between both USASA and high school comps, so with all the comps I didn’t have much time for training until just this past month when I got to go to Timberline to practice jumps and rails. I didn’t really get to prepare for halfpipe because I’ve never been in a 22’ Superpipe before, so that was my first time, but it was a lot of fun and I was happy with 5th in pipe for not practicing that much before.”

What was your biggest competition, and how did that go?

• “My biggest competition was Slopestyle which went really well especially with having a concussion from practice the day before and then falling again on my head the day of, which made the concussion way worse. But I didn’t travel to Colorado to not compete so I just competed anyways. I didn’t really know any of the girls who I was competing against because they came from around the country and it was my first time at nationals.”

What do you look forward to for next season?

• “By winning nationals, I’m qualified to compete in Rev Tour which is like the next step after nationals, and all the riders there are really good and some are already pre riders. I’m also going to compete in Open Class for USASA, which is all open to all ages (instead of my 16-17 age group), but there’s much tougher competition there. I’ll probably keep competing in high school , just for fun.”

Now that the season is over, what is next?

• “My season is over as far as competitions, but spring is my favorite season to snowboard because parks are good and it is sunny and comps are all over. Then I’m getting a summer pass so I’ll be able to snowboard up until around October!”

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Be sure to congratulate Kiana on her successful season!