Jordan Cooper ’22 has a finely tuned skillset of skiing ice and rails. But the New Hampshire native is more than just a master grinder; he’s working hard to perfect his other skills out here in Colorado during his time off the slopes.
Ben Hall: How was your ski season this year, and how do the parks here compare to back East?
Jordan Cooper: It’s been the best ski season I’ve ever had. I’ve been going mostly to Breckenridge and Keystone … back East, the park I ride on weekends is ranked No. 1 in the world; so coming out here I knew the parks would be incredible, but I wasn’t sure how they’d compare. But they lived up to the expectations. I miss my crew back East. They really push me, but I found a new crew of guys I’ve looked up to for four or five years, and now they’re friends of mine.
BH: Are these guys you just saw on the gram, or how did you link up?
JC: I met a bunch of them at a competition I did in Denver in October, and ended up beating a bunch of the guys who were my idols who I’d seen online … now we meet up all the time and run laps together. I still definitely look up to them.
BH: How’d you get your sponsorships?
JC: I ride for Fat-ypus and Zimmerman’s Skis Boards & More; they’re my two legit sponsors. Roxha Italian Boots has also hooked me up with a couple pairs of boots … we started to post pictures and videos with the logo [for Zimmerman’s] and hype them up to our friends, and eventually they were like, “We’re starting a team.” So me and six of my buddies got on board with them, they hook us up and help us out a lot … they’re back in New Hampshire, so I miss getting to see the family all the time.
BH: Tell me about your love of pottery.
JC: Senior year of high school I was in a class where all we did was think and look at art. The teacher was a pottery teacher and he saw that I was kinda bored sometimes, and he agreed to teach me how to make ceramics … I started to stay after school, and he would always have meetings so he just gave me full access to the pottery studio, and I started spending four or five hours a week in there alone … he started giving me skiing metaphors to help me out, and I started producing a ton of ceramics … Now, he’s one of my best friends from back home; I get dinner with him when I go back home. There’s a lot of flow with ceramics. It feels peaceful in the same way skiing does for me.
BH: Were you involved in the Contoocook Valley Regional High School senior prank last year?
JC: I was not involved with it, but I have a lot of respect for the guy who pulled it off … his dad had a construction company, so he borrowed a crane, brought it in at 5 a.m., and went up to cover up the letters.
BH: Alpacas. Are they actually a passion of yours?
JC: I am an alpaca enthusiast. Alpaca are great. They’re not as cute as they seem —from the outside they look like these beautiful loving animals, but when you have to sheer them and take care of their hygiene they don’t like it; they’re actually pretty vicious … My dad is a professional alpaca sheerer. Our family’s from New Zealand and he was a station manager there for so many years, and my mom missed her family in the states so we moved back here. And as any 15-year-old living on a farm in New Zealand, he learned how to sheer sheep as a kid. So when he came to the states and needed a job, he started sheering sheep. But the money in sheep sheering isn’t as good as the money in alpaca sheering, and it’s more difficult on the body. So he went on YouTube to learn how to do it, and now he spends four months doing it.