move over gen x, generation of outdoor athletes is leaving industry

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R E P O R T
TIL
EB
J
BY
ˆ
a Thursday afternoon in Boulder, Colo., 17-yearold Zack Roth drops two crash pads beneath a
gently overhanging boulder on the shady north
slope of Flagstaff Mountain. The hard-packed ground is crossed with roots, so he
positions the pads carefully, looking at chalked holds on the face above to judge
where he might land. He’s been working this boulder problem, called Hollow’s
Way, for several weeks now. A stout V8 (roughly .12b), it’s a little beyond him,
but the moves are obvious—three consecutive sidepulls followed by an awkward
cross-body dyno for the top. He gets closer with every try.
ON
MOVE OVER GEN X,
A NEW
GENERATION OF
OUTDOOR ATHLETES
IS LEAVING
INDUSTRY PILLARS
ˆ
At 5 feet 4 inches and with a slight build, Zack is hardly the burly rock jock one
expects to find beneath a Flagstaff testpiece like Hollow’s Way. His close-cropped
brown hair, wire-rimmed glasses and pensive manner seem more suited to computers than hard boulders. But he latches onto the starting holds with the practiced
ease of an Olympic gymnast, flagging a foot and reaching easily to the second
sidepull. He steps his feet up and snakes a hand to the third hold, where he perches
momentarily to study the final, scary throw. No go. He pitches off and hits the pads
lightly, then stands up and smiles. “Just a couple more tries and we can check out
another problem,” he said.
For most people, bouldering V8 would take years of work and singular dedication
to the sport. But for Zack, who started climbing on an artificial wall at the X-Games
five years ago, our hour of bouldering is just a pit stop in a full day of activity. After
school he was slacklining with friends—his first time doing that—and when we’re
done he’s going wakeboarding with his family. Zack is extremely talented at almost
all the sports he does. It’s no wonder—his athletic schedule is jaw-dropping. He estimates he spends 20 hours a week bouldering and 35 hours skateboarding (he was a
sponsored skater for several years.) He usually does both each day. “They use different muscles,” he says. “When you get tired skating you go bouldering.” He also sport
climbs at the 5.12 level and makes frequent trips with his dad and friends to Rifle
LY
16 »THE BOOK »SUMMER 2003
BEHIND.
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PHOTO COURTESY SHAZAMM/ESPN
ˆ
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State Park in
w e s t e r n
Colorado. In
summer, he
goes
wakeboarding or
barefoot skiing
two or three days
a week. In winter,
he snowboards every
weekend at nearby
Eldora Resort and makes trips to the
backcountry outside of Vail.
But while Zack—and a generation of
kids like him—is certainly outdoor
active, noticeably absent from his schedule are the staple sports that have for
years been pillars of the outdoor industry. Zack is not a backpacker (“I don’t
know that many people who do it”) or a
mountain biker (“I go maybe six weekends a year.”) He’s only led two traditional climbing routes (“there’s not really
anyone to teach me how”) and is sort of
nonplussed by mountaineering. Zack’s
activity selection reflects a larger trend
among young outdoor athletes.
According to the Boulder-based
Outdoor Industry Association (OIA),
although participation in outdoor sports
among 16- to 24-year-olds is up about 4
percent over 1998 (when OIA first started
tracking the numbers), backpacking participation is down 30 percent
over that same timeframe.
Hiking is down 3 percent. Mountain biking
is down 20 percent.
Climbing on natural
rock is down 17 percent. Canoeing is
down 12 percent.
As well, according
to
the
N a t i o n a l
Sporting
G o o d s
»THE BOOK »SUMMER 2003
Page 17
Association (NSGA), team sports are in
decline among school-age boys. There
seems to be wholesale rearrangement in
the way young people recreate. The
change is, in part, because of increased
competition for time- and mind-share
from academics, computers and video
games. But it’s also because of the
increasing popularity of a loosely defined
new genre of “action sports.”
Think of action sports as everything unearthmuffin. They’re aggressive, fast-paced,
technical, challenge-oriented and
adrenaline-laced. They’re compiled from
different and often incongruent cultures:
from machine-powered sports like motocross, snowmobiling and wakeboarding to
human-powered activities like bouldering,
playboating and snowboarding that fall
within the traditional boundaries of outdoor sport. Their appeal is in their accessibility—visually in the media and practically
in how much time it takes to do them—
and kids are taking to them at the expense
of other leisure activities. “Whenever a
sport gets on TV or has prize money associated with it, grassroots participation goes
up,” NSGA’s Larry Weindruch said.
“You certainly see that around here,”
said 52-year-old Dave Baker of the Tucson,
Ariz.-based, specialty retailer Summit Hut.
“The number of people under 20 hiking
and backpacking isn’t what it used to be.
At the same
time, the
number
of young
people
at the
l o c a l
rock gym
is
up
sharply.”
The story’s the same
at retailers across the
country. Backpacks are sitting on the shelves, while
crash pads fly out the door.
Hiking boots are gathering
dust, while trail runners ring
up sales. “These aren’t your
father’s outdoor sports,” said
Julia Day of the Boulder-based
Leisure Trends group, a market
research company specializing in
leisure, sports and recreation.
“Kids are growing up in a different
world, and they’re pursuing different activities.”
It’s no wonder; in the late ’60s
and early ’70s, books like
Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire
and Sierra Club compendiums of
wild land photography inspired a gen-
eration of earthmuffins to don packs and
boots and escape to the backcountry.
Today, their kids are being told—via a
media blitzkrieg Abbey and David Brower
never could have dreamed of—to grab
skateboards, snowboards and crash pads
and try their hands at kick-flips, rail
grabs and monster dynos.
The diversity of action sports makes it
hard to pin them to traditional lifestyle
categories. Kids are equally enamored of
the weightlessness of a big ollie and the
crisp edge of a sandstone crimper, for
example—they subscribe to the seemingly
disparate lifestyles of skateboarding and
climbing. Yet they don’t really buy into
either. That worries outdoor retailers who
have long relied on lifestyle as a selling
point. How can they predict what young
consumers will be doing next year, or
even next month, if it’s not clear where
their passions lie?
“In the old days,” said 43-year-old Bill
Wilson, owner of the Virginia-based Blue
Ridge Outdoors retail chain, “you adopted a sport and defined yourself by it. Now
kids are in and out of all these activities.
The scope of what they’re doing is so
much broader—it’s hard to catch them in
the act of any one thing.”
The driving force behind the growth of
action sports is ESPN’s X-Games. Since its
inception in 1995, it’s captivated young people like almost nothing else. In 1999 nearly
6 million 12- to 17-year-olds, a whopping 27
percent of the American teenage population, tuned into the event. Viewership
among this young audience has increased
94 percent in the last two years alone.
Thanks to a savvy combination of advertising and marketing, grassroots participation
in action sports has followed suit.
All of Zack’s favorite sports—climbing,
skateboarding, wakeboarding and snowboarding—as well as other action sports
like freeskiing, surfing, BMX and motocross are posting record participation
gains with young people. The number of
skateboarders has more than doubled
since 1995, topping out this year at nearly
10 million. Snowboarding and wakeboarding have seen similar growth.
Similarly, within the outdoor industry
virtually every fast-paced or “extreme”
niche has exploded. According to the OIA,
among 16- to 24-year-olds, artificial wall
climbing is up 8.5 percent over last year
(the first year it tracked it), ice climbing is
up 110 percent over last year, snowshoeing
is up 75 percent over 1998, playboating is
up 77 percent over last year, telemark skiing is up 150 percent over 1998, and trail
running is up 14 percent over 1998.
Faced with an evolving group of “core”
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R E P O R T
sports and a confusing but potentially
lucrative young market, industry businesses are scratching their heads. Are action
sports a gateway to more traditional outdoor sports, or are brown boots and big
packs hiking the road to obsolescence?
To find answers it’s important to look
at the origin of action sports and the
consumers they’ve spawned. Don’t tune
in to ESPN, though—the X-Games
hardly presented the “go for it” attitude
Mountain Dew was looking for.
“I’d heard about BASE jumping and
other sports that sounded totally insane,”
Bruce said, “so I wanted to take that nonmainstream, adventuresome energy and
the new music and tie it together with
this high-octane beverage.”
Bruce and the BBDO crew went to
Hawaii, where they filmed surf star Laird
onated with a young ESPN producer
named Ron Semaio.
Semaio had just been assigned to
ESPN’s programming department and
was tasked with starting ESPN2, a sports
network that would appeal to a younger
generation of athletes. Like Bruce, he’d
seen the dedicated, passionate followings
that surrounded “lifestyle” sports like
surfing, skating, BMX and climbing. They
BUT WHILE ZACK—AND A GENERATION OF KIDS LIKE HIM—IS CERTAINLY
OUTDOOR ACTIVE, NOTICEABLY ABSENT FROM HIS SCHEDULE ARE THE STAPLE
SPORTS THAT HAVE FOR YEARS BEEN PILLARS OF THE OUTDOOR INDUSTRY.
DO THE DEW
In 1992 Pepsico Inc. asked a New York ad
agency called BBDO to convince young
people to try Diet Mountain Dew. The job
fell to a 31-year-old copywriter named
Bill Bruce. “They were pushing the whole
thing about how diet can still taste good,”
Bruce said. “The campaign was very trials
oriented—the idea was to get young people to actually try the product.”
At the time Mountain Dew was the
eighth most popular soft drink in the
country. It was a distinctly southeastern
flavor. Created in the ’40s in Tennessee,
the original bottle featured a hillbilly
shooting a shotgun at a revenuer. The
drink’s first marketing campaign, in 1965,
featured the phrase, “Yahoo Mountain
Dew... It’ll tickle your innards.”
Subsequent campaigns followed the same
theme: “Get That Barefoot Feelin’ Drinkin’
Mountain Dew,” “Hello Sunshine, Hello
Mountain Dew,” “Dew it Country Cool.”
“It was all about people swinging on
ropes,” Bruce said. “It was lush, green,
mountain… Which was fine for those
generations, but for the new group it
wasn’t going to hold up.” In creating the
campaign, Bruce took advantage of a
number of changes in the cultural landscape. With Reagan leaving office the
country seemed ready for weird, new
vibes. The Seattle grunge music scene
was lifting off. “Kids had a kind of ‘what
the f---’ attitude,” Bruce said. “There was
a lot of free-form individuality.” As well,
corporate sports were losing flavor with
the younger generation. Mired in strikes
and salary disputes, popular athletes
18 »THE BOOK »SUMMER 2003
Hamilton boogie-boarding over a 50-foot
waterfall. Then to Arizona, where BASE
jumper Matt McCarter flung himself off
the lip of the Little Colorado River Gorge.
In the commercials, the stunts are followed by unimpressed commentary from
a group of slacker teens: “Done that.” “Did
that.” “Doin’ it tomorrow.” Bruce put the
footage to music from an up-and-coming
Seattle band called the Supersuckers.
The odd combination of malaise and
adrenaline immediately struck a chord.
Mountain Dew skyrocketed in 1993, and
has since led the carbonated soft drink
category in share growth, passing many
rivals to rank in retail sales behind Coke,
Pepsi and Diet Coke. “In the last decade
they’ve been one of this industry’s great
success stories,” John Sicher, publisher of
Beverage Digest magazine, said.
Linked hand-on-throttle with the Dew
were action sports. Diet Dew’s 30-second
spot was essentially the first time it had
received mainstream media play. (MTV
Sports debuted the same year but was
hardly considered mainstream.) Madison
Avenue’s sudden interest in the genre res-
all had their own successful magazines.
They had distinct clothes, music and cultures. Yet they were totally below the
radar. “It reminded Ron of the rock and
roll revolution,” said Josh Krulewitz, who
worked with Semaio at the time. “Parents
and critics were dismissing these things
as fads, but kids loved them.”
To Semaio, the Mountain Dew ads—and
a slew of copycats from other major
brands—were a clear indication that big
money was beginning to embrace alternative sports. In 1993 he and other ESPN
producers developed the idea of the
Extreme Games. Two years later the first
games, in Newport, R.I., showcased an
embarrassing array of weird sports: sky
surfing, bungee jumping, street luge and
extreme kite skiing, to name a few. Some,
like Kite Skiing, were clearly losers.
(“There were, like, two guys who knew how
to do it,” Krulewitz recalled.) But others—
climbing, mountain biking, adventure racing—seemed fresh and accessible to a public dissatisfied with traditional sports. In
effect, the Games opened people’s minds to
alternative recreation. It was suddenly cool
BUTCH ADAMS PHOTOGRAPHY. COURTESY OF
BLACK DIAMOND EQUIPMENT, LTD. © 2001
didn’t create this niche. Instead, drop
$1.29 on an ice-cold Mountain Dew and
drink deep the lemony, limey flavor
that, over the last decade, has redefined
the future of this industry.
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R E P O R T
to do something other than basketball,
baseball or football. And action sports
didn’t require teams or a playing field. You
could do them anytime and anywhere.
Originally conceived as an every-otheryear event, the X-Games was so successful in its first year that “we decided right
there on-site to do them again the following year,” Krulewitz said. The media were
impressed as well, though perhaps more
by the seamless melding of promotional
vehicle and entertainment concept. TV
Guide called the games “like a three-daylong Mountain Dew commercial.”
TALKING THE TALK
While the roster of action sports in the
2003 X-Games doesn’t include a single
outdoor industry sport (they dropped
climbing for the first time this year), a
generation of outdoor athletes raised on
the extreme continues to influence the
direction in which the industry is moving. These days sports and gear are influenced by fashion, culture and lifestyle. A
1998 article on CNN.com proclaimed
that: “‘X,’ whether for extreme sports or
Generation X, has come to symbolize a
romantic image of youth in America
today—edgy individualism, a hint of danger, a cool and casual style.” True or not,
kids and manufacturers alike seem eager
to buy into this image.
20 »THE BOOK »SUMMER 2003
This presents a problem for outdoor
retailers. Traditional outdoor “core”
sports have never really been edgy or
stylish. Witness ’80s-era climbers, or the
throngs of plodding hikers that clog the
Appalachian Trail each spring. But savvy
manufacturers and retailers are beginning to speak the language a discerning
new consumer wants to hear.
“As an industry we can’t afford to perpetuate the image of blisters, poison oak
and mosquito bites,” Paul Gagner, vice
president of sales at Gregory, said. “We
need to reinvent our products to be more
exciting and high tech.”
After developing the internal frame
backpack in the ’70s, Gregory rode the
“back to nature” wave, building a reputation on comfortable, multi-day load
haulers. Its 2004 line, however, focuses
primarily on small, lightweight, high-tech
packs for challenge-oriented endeavors
like adventure racing, and multi-sport
packs designed for shorter trips. “Because
kids, like their parents, are pressed for
time, if they are going to participate in
outdoor activities they need to do it in
short spurts,” Gagner said.
The same line of thought is guiding
innovation at Vasque. “We’re cutting the
number of brown backpacking boots and
going with new materials and new colors
that connect with a technical marketplace,” said General Manager Rick
Appelsies. Both Gagner and Appelsies see
the same changes in the outdoor consumer. “There’s been a shift away from
‘pensive’ and toward ‘challenging,’” added
Appelsies. “Instead of doing seven-day
backpacking trips, people are going trail
running or fast packing.”
Does that mean kids will forever eschew
the backcountry for fast-and-light adventures to the local sport crag, or day trips
on trails close to home? Not necessarily.
“It’s cyclical,” Appelsies said. “But is that
cycle five years out? Ten years out?”
For retailers the issue is doubly perplexing. They’re struggling not only to
understand a changing consumer, but
also to compete with new and powerful
retail channels that already have a connection with young people. The Internet
is omnipresent. Big boxes like Gart
Sports, Sports Authority and Galyan’s,
are increasingly accessible to families
that spend a lot of time at the mall.
These evolutions within the outdoor
industry may have a positive side, though.
With action sports and the gear to do
them so accessible, legions of young consumers have found their way outdoors.
According to the OIA, the number of 16- to
24-year-olds participating in outdoor
sports, at 32 million, is higher than ever.
Like Zack, these kids are very active, participating in more than five different
sports over the course of a year. But
they’re also busy with school, video games,
the Web and the proliferation of nonindustry sports that come part-in-parcel
with the action genre.
The challenge, according to OIA’s Frank
Hugelmeyer, is integrating these new consumers more vertically into outdoor
sports. “Ten or 20 years ago there wasn’t
the same competition for time- and mindshare,” he said. “We have to find a way to
work with these competitive elements to
promote the outdoors.” OIA is in the process of developing an industry-wide outreach effort to do just that.
Other industries, competing for the
same young market, are exploring similar
ideas. Project Kids, a new $3 million marketing effort funded in part by
SnowSports Industries of America (SIA),
will encourage kids and their parents—
especially moms, who make buying decisions and largely influence travel—to buy
in to snowsports through a unique combination of media programming not unlike
the X-Games. The package includes TV
shows on Nickelodeon; an interactive kids
website, www.thesnowlab.com; on-slope
activities; and a national PR campaign
called “Winter Feels Good.”
In some ways, the fast-paced flavor of
action sports, the frenetic drive to create
exciting new outdoor products, and the
increasingly sophisticated efforts to market the outdoors to kids and parents are
reminiscent of that kind of fiery teenage
romance that, unbearably passionate at
first, must eventually mellow into a comfortable relationship or wear itself out.
For kids like Zack, continued interest
in outdoor sports is really just a matter
of exposure. Last year, the coach of his
high school climbing team (only in
Boulder!) moved away just as he was
beginning to teach Zack the fundamentals of traditional climbing. If someone
were willing to teach him, he says, he’d
love to do that more.
Next year, when Zack graduates from
Fairview High, he’ll pack his climbing
shoes, snowboard, and skateboard and
move to France for a year. He’s been there
before, to Robyn Erbesfield’s kids’ climbing camp. But this time he’s going with no
set agenda. He’s psyched on bouldering at
Fontainbleu, and he’s heard there’s a pretty cool French skate scene. But he’s also
thinking a little about the Alps. And it
doesn’t really scare him to think he might
have to put on boots and a bigger pack in
order to see them up close.
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