Roman Shreves has been skiing for about 12 years, but he didn’t start seriously working on his acrobatic skiing skills until last year.
So when he placed ninth on April 10 in the halfpipe competition at the United States of America Snowboard and Freeski Association junior national championships at Copper Mountain, Colo., it was a new experience all the way around for the Sweet Home High School junior.
It also changed his plans for the coming year.
That’s because Shreves’ top-10 finish in the Freeski Youth (15-16) division qualified him for the USASA Futures Tour next year.
“It’s a group of competitors with a higher skill level,” said Wally Shreves, Roman’s dad.
Roman, 16, qualified for nationals with a second-place finish in four events at the regional competition March 8-9 at Mt. Hood Meadows, where the only halfpipe in the Northwest is located.
He’d competed in slopestyle, featuring tricks off rails and jumps, two weeks earlier at Mt. Bachelor, “but the weather was terrible,” Wally said.
This was Roman’s first year competing in the halfpipe, a freestyle skiing discipline in which competitors perform tricks on a U-shaped course of hard-packed snow. Skiers propel themselves off the sides of the course to perform aerial maneuvers.
Roman has spent most of his years on the slopes skiing at Hoodoo, the Shreves’ home resort, but he’s also put in time at Bachelor and Timberline. .
He has lived in Sweet Home all his life, after his parents moved here after Wally retired from the U.S. Army in 2001. He’s the younger of two boys; older brother Joey is a ski instructor at Hoodo and attends Oregon State University.
The family literally arrived in Sweet Home on Sept. 11, yes, that Sept. 11.
“I was watching it happen on a little black and white TV as I was packing the truck,” Wally said.
Wally, who grew up in Iowa, started skiing in 1987 while he was in the Army. When he retired from the Army, “I got three job offers and one was from ATI and that’s the one I picked.”
He and his Adrianne, also an Army retiree, drove around Sweet Home and they liked it, particularly that Hoodoo was an hour up the road.
Roman, who started skiing when he was 4, said he began working on his freestyle skills a year ago.
“I’ve always been interested in it since I was just a little kid, but I never really had the courage to try tricks until last year,” he said. “It takes a lot to go that fast and fly that high.”
Most halfpipes are 18 to 20 feet in height, but Copper Mountain’s is one of three superpipes in the United States, the Shreveses said.
“The superpipe is 22 feet,” Roman said. At nearly 550 feet long, 70 feet wide and with an 18-degree pitch, the Copper Mountain pipe’s size and design make it an Olympic qualifying standard.
“It’s a huge difference when you stand up there and look down,” Roman said. “You go up this 22-foot wall and jump up another 10 feet into the air and then you spin and flip.”
“He did some of the bigger jumps out there in the park,” Wally said. “It’s interesting, watching someone jump the height of a three-story building.”
Roman said he could also have competed in the open class at Copper Mountain, “Which is everyone, but one thing at a time.”
He said he had competed previously against two of the 20 contestants in the junior nationals halfpipe, Miles Galler and Cameron Alfred. Galler finished 11th and Alfred 19th.
Roman finished with 56.33 points. Winner Dax Hilleke finished with 94.33.
— Photos and video courtesy of Wally Shreves
Wally noted that the top six finishers in the prelims went on to a final round, which gave them more opportunities to increase their scores, which they all did.
Roman said his tricks included a Misty Flip, a trick in which the skier performs a front flip with a spin, essentially an inverted backside 540-degree rotation; an Under Flip (back flip), and a back flare, which is a back flip in which the skier rotates 180 degrees horizontally, essentially flipping over his head – a backflip, but with a sideways twist.
“I felt pretty good. I felt kind of robbed by the judges,” Roman said of his performance at nationals. “On my second run I did three more tricks and only got one more point on my score, which is out of 100 points.”
As he works to get ready for the futures tour, Roman said he’s going to work on bigger tricks – 1260s (three full 360-degree rotations), 1600s (four full rotations) and “getting more flips into it, trying to get maybe a triple flip with a 1600.”
So far, he hasn’t had a coach, though at Copper Mountain, his cousin Jeremy Witters, who is a park instructor who focuses on the halfpipe at Sierra Tahoe in South Lake Tahoe, was able to give him some help.
“I’m not a coach. I’m just the financial guidance person,” Wally chuckled.
Now they are looking for training opportunities and experience beyond what Roman’s gotten at Hoodoo, which is limited.
“Our terrain consists of very, very small features that are hard to progress on,” he said.
Immediately after returning from nationals, the Shreveses went to Bachelor to ski for several days and Roman has applied for a job at Mt. Hood’s Timberline, which would allow him to use the training center there as well, which is where the U.S. National Team trains.
Wally said they plan to visit Italy over Christmas “so he can see the Dolomites (mountains), so he can see what the world competition looks like.”
Roman said his current goal is to qualify for the X Games.
“The next step after X Games is the Olympics.”