Snowboarding started for Dave as a teenager at Turoa, in the North Island of New Zealand. An instant love for sliding sideways on snow quickly followed with five winter seasons in the United States while studying art and design at Auckland University.
Achieving Level One and Two with AASI before swapping over to the New Zealand system and following the rest of the SBINZ pathway to Level Three with ISIA standard and then Trainers Cert.
With time in and out of the instructing/examiner industry including snowsports retail, terrain park building and snowboard events (like the US Open) Dave also used snowboarding to travel the world with further winters seasons and stints in Japan, Canada, France, Italy, Iceland, Bulgaria and even Scotland.
These days his summers are spent running SBINZ courses/exams at Snowplanet (NZ’s only indoor snow facility) along with plenty of mountain biking and being outdoors around his (now) home area of Queenstown.
Like many of our examiners Dave has an ingrained passion for passing on knowledge and experiences to others through snowboarding. Having grown up in the depths of South Auckland the introduction of snowboarding some what changed the direction of Dave’s life (for the better) and he loves to impart what snowboarding/travel and following your passions can do towards living a fulfilling and active life.
For other work Dave spends time behind the computer getting creative within his own design business and more recently was a big part of the re-design and layout for the new SBINZ and NZSIA manuals.
Dave also runs our SBINZ Social Media platforms and was recently appointed the NZSIA E-Learning/Resources Manager role .
Sponsors: K2 Snowboards and Smith Optics
Support: Alta Queenstown, The Snowboard Workshop
Crew: GRC and SSSP
