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Boy Wonder (Cont.)


	Wacth this! Roger cavorting in the family garden (James Smolka)

IT'S A COZY, cavelike space, a cluttered mix of dark and light. A sheep skull gazes from the paneled wall. A toy monkey grips a trapeze. Glinting armies of rocks are deployed on two large shelves. The sun catches a bright square of yarn that Roger crocheted when he was younger. ("I was into that for a while," he explains.) The only clue to Roger's sporting life is the snowboards stacked like cordwood at the foot of his bed. If you ask why he keeps them here and not in the shed or the garage, he will shrug his thin shoulders.

"I dunno," he says. "Maybe I just like having them close."

Roger begins to unstack the snowboards, laying them gently on the bed, where they tilt and slide as if they might suddenly do a trick on their own. When he's finished, there's a bright pile of 22 boards, from the new jet-black K2 Zeppelin (K2 has been Roger's board sponsor since he was seven) to a dinged-up purple board barely half its size. He unearths the Barney-colored plank,

I want to get off my pills someday," Roger says. "I think that if I stay around REGULAR PEOPLE a lot, maybe that will help me."

holding its edges with his fingertips.

"This is really, really old," he says. "See?"

If you ask him how he got started snowboarding, Roger will tell a story. He was five. Dave and Terrie's biological son, Dustin, was 15. Roger liked Dustin a lot, and Dustin liked snowboarding a lot. So ...

"I was on the hill," he says, "and this instructor was trying to tell me something about keeping my arms straight and I just took off and went schkeewww, schkeewww, schkeeewww. Then my mom saw me and was kinda surprised."

What happened next?

"For the first year I followed Dustin and his friends around, and they were really nice to me and let me come and everything. Then a whole bunch of stuff happened."

What kind of stuff?

He hesitates. His knuckles work a quick rhythm on the purple paint.

"You know," he says. "A lot."

Officially, Roger's career began with his fifth-place-overall finish in the United States of America Snowboard Association's seven-and-under division in 1997. Then came three straight years in which Roger won the alpine/freestyle combined titles and began to receive some benefits of his newfound stature: sponsorships, invitations to K2's summer house in Mount Hood, getting sent by RipCurl to the Whistler Camp of Champions, the nonspeaking role as a flame-haired snowboarder in the Keaton movie. ("It was fun, sort of, but mostly boring," Roger remembers.) Then the last two years, in which Roger won the overall alpine and finished third in combined. Meanwhile, the sport exploded. Participation in the USASA nationals went from 600 to 1,200; corporate sponsorship went through the roof; and along came the inevitable rise of formalized coaching programs built to churn out camera-ready superstars.

From their sleepy Placerville outpost, Roger's parents regard the frenzy with stolid bemusement, not noting the economic changes so much as the cultural ones, namely the appearance of what they call "soccer parents"—that well-dressed, energetic breed who badger coaches, suck up to sponsors, and get, as Dave puts it, "a little overinvolved." Roger has snowboarded with several Tahoe-area teams over the past few years, most recently at Heavenly. These teams are made up of kids from Roger's age on up whose parents pay around $1,500 for them to snowboard every weekday from December to March and to race in USASA events on weekends. Other top kids attend elite sports-oriented academies like Vermont's Stratton Mountain School ($26,000 a year in tuition). But the egalitarian South Tahoe scene suits the Carvers, who homeschool Roger during the season and enroll him in the local public school the rest of the year. For nationals, which in past years have taken place in Telluride, Colorado, and Waterville Valley, New Hampshire, they plan a family vacation. Dave and Terrie hear about other snowboarders getting private coaches and it makes them smile, not just because of the expense.

"Truth is," Dave says, "I don't think one person could keep track of him."

"He's a maniac on the hill. He never gets tired and he never wants to quit," says Kyle Frankland, who coached Roger for two years on the Donner Summit Snowboard Team. "He won't eat, he won't drink, he'll just keep making turns."

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