HORSESHOE BEND, Idaho-
Kevin Veon leaps from a rock into the Payette River and lets its swift current tug him downstream. With both hands, the 31-year-old president of Banshee Riverboards grips one of his company’s thin fiberglass boards beneath the surface.
A small hook on the board’s underside is attached to a bungee cord, which, in turn, is tied to a shoreline boulder.
Once the bungee stretches to 200 feet, Veon flattens the board, allowing it to rise.
Suddenly, he’s speeding forward at 30 mph. Standing like a surfer for 8 or 9 seconds, he sends a wall of spray toward the riverbank.
In two years since helping found the company as a student at Boise State, Veon has met dozens of investors, won best new product at a German trade fair and learned to appreciate his wife’s credit card.
“She’s probably the only reason there’s a Banshee Riverboards today,” he said
Veon, who graduated this year with a master’s degree in business administration, is counting on newly acquired business acumen to keep Banshee from wiping out.
“If something is cool, it’s going to grow,” said Veon, who hopes to eventually sell Banshee to a large company. “What I’m trying to do now is make sure we’re there at the end.”
The idea behind riverboarding isn’t so new.
For decades, kids have built homemade plywood contraptions in their garages, attaching ropes to bridge supports to ride the currents. That’s how Robert Geier, Banshee’s resident inventor, got started as a youngster.
“There was a canal two blocks from the end of my street,” said the 39-year-old Geier, whose day job is wading through tax records at the Idaho State Tax Commission.
Three years ago, Geier’s interest was rekindled when he saw kids at a local Boise bridge with ropes and plywood boards of their own.
“Kids were screaming,” he said. “I said to myself, ‘I’m going to have to start building those again.'”
He first stop for advice was Boise State’s Small Business Development Center. There, Kent Neupert, a business professor, turned Geier’s idea into a class project. Veon, one of Neupert’s students, developed a business plan for Banshee.
After winning a BSU business competition, Veon told Geier he wanted to incorporate.
Neupert signed on as an investor.
“The attractive part of it was, it was a traditional Idaho pastime–take a piece of rope, attach it to a tree, float the Boise River,” said Neupert. “You can basically surf without a boat. You don’t need $3 a gallon for gasoline to have a great time.”
Veon has patented the board and bungee combination. Using 30 dealers mostly in the West, Banshee has sold about 300 boards so far, he said, including 200 this year. Its least-expensive version, a wooden board and bungee, costs $300. The fiberglass version, called the “Evolution,” runs $650.
The biggest drawback isn’t price but that so few have heard about riverboarding.
Chris Grier, owner of Gear Peddler in Bend, Ore., discontinued the boards after selling just one last year.
“We couldn’t get out there on the river and show people,” he said.
Paul Barker, who owns Extreme Outdoor Supply near Salt Lake City, has sold five boards through his Web site.
“When I tell people about it, they say, ‘That’s crazy. So, you basically just slingshot up the river?’ My wife was really worried about it,” said Barker, who has a board himself. “You’ve got to get somebody famous on these boards. There’s got to be a buzz.”
Veon and Geier said much of their new business comes from people floating past on the Payette or Boise rivers while they work to improve the boards.
On a recent afternoon, Geier eased down the bank of the Boise River and tied a bungee cord to a tree, preparing for a riverboarding session. A man on a nearby footpath came to the river’s edge.
“He said, ‘So, you’re the next Jake Burton,'” said Geier, a reference to the man regarded as the father of snowboarding. “I thought about it a second, and said, ‘I hope so.'”
Copyright 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
