Pretty Good for a Girl : The Autobiography of a Snowboarding Pioneer

When Tina Basich grabbed her rented snowboard and headed to the mountains in Lake Tahoe, snowboarding wasn't even considered a sport ... yet. It was the beginning, and could have easily gone the way of many other sports and become dominated by male-driven competition.But not with Tina on the scene ...Comments like "You're pretty good ... for a girl" only pushed her harder to be the best and to prove she was more than just a token player on the slopes. Representing for women everywhere, she became a snowboarding all-star, started her own signature board and clothing lines for women, founded Boarding for Breast Cancer, and followed her heart, which led her on the adventure of a lifetime.This is her story.

Pretty Good for a Girl
The Autobiography of a Snowboarding Pioneer

Chapter One

Faeryland

I grew up wanting to be like Nadia. I had leotards likehers for my gymnastic classes and learned how to play "Nadia's Theme" onthe piano. She was young, brave, and talented. She just rocked it andthere was no one like her. I loved gymnastics, too, but unlike Nadia, Ialways struggled with the pressures to perform. My gymnastics coacheswanted to start training me for the Olympics when I was eight years oldbecause they "saw talent," but I couldn ’t handle the pressure. I'd get sonervous, I'd pee in my leotard before my floor routine and run off to thebathroom, refusing to come out until my mom came and picked me upfrom class. What made me quit wasn't the pressure -- it was because mycoach ducttaped up my hair. I'd forgotten to put it in a bun as instructed, but as my mom said later when she was gently trying to rip the tape offmy head, "There is simply no need for this." It's ironic that I ended up aprofessional athlete at all.

Until I was thirteen years old, I lived in a world full of love, magic, and that Christmastime feeling. I was a girl with no preconception of whoI was supposed to be or become. I was a tomboy by nature, but unawareof the term. My youth was Little House on the Prairie meets My So-Called Life except that even Laura Ingalls didn't spend six months living in ateepee like I did. Although, at the time, I didn't know this was abnormal. We didn't have a TV when we were growing up because my parents sentmy brother Michael and I to an alternative school, which did not encourage TVs in the home so that more time could be spent developing creative talents. Thankfully, I was a creative type, or else I'm sure my earlyyears might not have been so pleasant.

We lived in northern California in the suburbs of Sacramento in a little town called Fair Oaks. My parents were high school sweethearts andthey married not long after graduation. My mom went to college while mydad took up the trade of house painting. With dreams of a little house ona hill with a white picket fence, they sold their prizedpossessions -- a Jeep and acamera -- andmanaged tosave enoughmoney for adown paymenton a two-bedroomfixer upper.

In 1969, two years later, I was born. I was two weeks premature andweighed only four pounds, nine ounces, so I had to stay in the hospitalfor two weeks in an incubator. I was so tiny that my mom would give mea bath with a cotton ball and my grandpa would sing "Tiny Bubbles" everytime he saw me. My hair, which was bright red, didn't grow in until I was two years old, so my mom Scotch-taped a pink bow to the top of my headso people would know I was a girl.

The first major project on our house was to convert the garage intoa bedroom to get ready for my brother, Michael, who arrived three and a half years later. With Michael, our family was complete. We had a dognamed Duke, a cat named Princess, a pony named Candy, and five Angorarabbits that we'd card for fur, then spin into yarn on our spinning wheel, and use for knitting scarves and hats. This was normal to us, althoughthe local paper did a story once and ran a photo with the caption, "What's Wrong with These Children? Hint: Do You See a TV AnywhereNearby?"

Michael and I lived an imaginative childhood that I only learned latermost people cannot believe. We would build go-carts and tree forts all daylong and had about ten different tree forts in our yard, with one inalmost every tree. We had rope swings and zip lines connecting them likea maze. Michael would always test them, then I'd go down. We'd sit in the plum tree and eat plums and talk about where we were going to hide ournext treasure. We'd hide out behind the weeping willow and stare at adark hole under our deck because a gnome lived in there.

If it rained, it wouldn't stop us from building something new, andwe'd go in to make forts from the living room furniture and the '70sdrapes. We'd ride to the 7-Eleven on Candy, tie her up to the ice machine, and buy Popsicles. Or, we'd ride over to Rico's Pizza to play Donkey Kongand my favorite song on the jukebox, "I Love Rock'n'Roll" by Joan Jett.

My parents didn't let an experience pass us by. They enrolled us inoutdoor clubs like Blue Birds and 4-H Club, put us in music lessons, localparades, and ballet classes, took us to summer camp, soccer, softball, gymnastics ... we had all sorts of sports and art projects going on all the time. My mom was an artist, and from the beginning she was my biggestinspiration for my own art. She always had a paint brush in my hand andwe would paint together all of the time. I was always painting and coloring. I didn't even know that painting and doing art projects was out ofthe ordinary until I first went to public school in ninth grade. My newfriends thought I was weird when I told them that I sewed my ownclothes. Cool, but weird. I thought everyone knew how to sew, or at leastpaint.

Up until then, we went to a private school called Waldorf. It was analternative school based around the arts, music, and creative thinking ...

Pretty Good for a Girl
The Autobiography of a Snowboarding Pioneer. Copyright © by Tina Basich. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

---

Excerpted from Pretty Good for a Girl: The Autobiography of a Snowboarding Pioneer by Tina Basich, Kathleen Gasperini
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.