Tim Windell has built a growing action sports wonderland where champions train and wannabes have fun.
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Tim Windell at Mount Hood
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By Ben Jacklet
It’s 7 a.m. at the “funnest place on earth,” and buses and vans are loading up with kids raring to shred up some mid-summer snow on Mount Hood. A pair of teenage girls wearing snowboard boots are playing tetherball with one hand while holding lunch bags with the other. A pre-teen on a skateboard zips past the “Super Awesome Game Lounge” and tries out a few tricks in the wavy skate park out back. A tall boy jumps up and deposits a short girl’s snowboard on top of the basketball rim and ambles off. When she returns she looks up and laughs. “How’m I supposed to get that down?”
Tim Windell, the 46-year-old former snowboarding champion who built this action sports wonderland out of a trashed motel he bought out of bankruptcy, takes in the scene with a grin. For the third summer in a row, his $1,949-per-week overnight camp is sold out, and his new year-round academy is drawing inquiries from Saudi Arabia to Iceland. Not only did Windells Camp survive the recession, it flourished. Recent purchases include two $56,000 ski lifts and four huge air bags to provide safe landings for outrageous aerial maneuvers.
Windell is quick to point out that his competitors started buying air bags after word got out that he’d bought some. “We lead the way in the industry,” he says.
It’s a short, gorgeous drive from the Windells base camp on Highway 26 to Timberline Lodge. Windells operates a private snow park with an intimidating variety of jumps, half-pipes and rails in a south-facing gully east of the main ski area. To get there you have to ski: not exactly a sacrifice, since there is arguably no better place in the nation to ski in summer than Mount Hood.
Windell has gained weight since his days as champion, but he still rides with easy grace. His newest interest is snow skating. As a youth he tried moguls and backcountry telemarking, and then embraced snowboarding when critics were dismissing it as child’s play. He remembers being hassled by ski patrollers for no apparent reason. “They just didn’t like the fact that we were shredding the powder better than they were,” he says. “Way better.”
After a smooth warm-up run at eye-watering speed, Windell kicks back on the lift and shares a few details from his boarding career. The reason he was able to win consistently on tour was simple, he says. While his competitors treated boarding as an excuse to get hammered in Japan and party all night in Europe, he was focused on winning. He limited his extracurricular activities and trained hard in the summer to get an edge once the season began.
He applies the same ethic to his business. “You have to continually move forward and keep it fresh versus sitting there and being stagnant,” he says. “Since the conception of Windells we’ve always tried to put at least 15% to 20% back into the business, year after year… It has paid off.”
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| Windells |
| Founder/president: Tim Windell |
| Founded: 1991 |
| Employees: 103 (summer camp season) |
| Annual revenue: $5 million |
| Facebook fans: More than 23,000 |
Over at the park, teenagers are riding rails and catching air and hooting out to celebrate crashes. Each camper rides in a small group with a coach, but it is difficult to tell campers from coaches because they are all shredding together with great freedom.
Windell says one of the central tenets of the camp is to encourage creativity. “We’re open to anything,” says Windell. “We allow kids to rollerblade. We allow kids to scooter. We allow kids to ride whatever it is they want to ride. Why not?”
Dodging our way around boarders, rails and ramps to the bottom of the run, we catch up with Mike Hanley, the president of Windells Academy. Hanley is trying to build up the Windells Academy from 20 students to 40 or 50. Academy students head up to the mountain every day, study for four hours upon returning and follow online curriculum while traveling to compete. Hanley says the goal is to keep top athletes in an accredited school even as their sports careers are taking off, and “to establish a sense of balance.”
That is a tempting proposition for athletes like Nick Goepper, an outrageously agile 17-year-old who says he would spend his life on a trampoline if he could. Goepper grew up skiing a 300-foot hill in Nebraska that gets about 10 inches of snow a year; after three years of Windells camps he’s perfecting his double-cork 1080 and pursuing Olympic dreams.
Goepper wouldn’t be the first athlete to go big-time after attending Windells. Alumni include legends such as Shaun White and Gretchen Bleiler (who recently bought a condo at Government Camp to support her summer training routine on Hood). Such star power makes it easy to recruit the next wave of campers. Repeating that success with a $35,000-per-year academy is the latest maneuver that Windell is eager to master.
