Snowboarding was his passion. Making the sport more inclusive became his mission

When Brian Paupaw was 14, a local drug dealer he was loosely familiar with picked him up after school. The dealer knew some of Paupaw's junior high friends and often hung around the school. He offered Paupaw a ride home, but along the way, they made a detour.

The man brought Paupaw to an apartment where Paupaw watched women pack crack cocaine into plastic bags at the living room table while the dealer showed off his firearms. Paupaw says he was being recruited to sell drugs, and while a part of him envied the respect the dealer commanded, along with the money he often flaunted, Paupaw knew what happened to those who got into this line of work. He was raised in a rough part of Brooklyn, N.Y., in the 1980s, and every other day or so, it seemed, someone in the neighborhood was shot or stabbed.

Paupaw, who is Black, didn't want to dive into the drugs or the violence. He says he just wanted to skateboard but remembers