West Islip's Breest rises in snowboarding

Yeah, like lots of youngsters in his age group, Charlie Breest grew up playing extreme sports video games. The difference between him and most, though, is he then pulled off several of those stunts in real life.

Breest, 19, seems to have always been about going from simple to spectacular, and pushing the limits. When he was 4, a plastic skateboard caught his eye and his mother got him one. Before too long, he was landing switch kick flips. At 13, Breest nagged his parents into buying him a dirt bike, then turned the family's backyard into a makeshift course with jump ramps, and went into competitive motocross. His mother's love of skiing, which she passed on to him as a 5-year-old, soon led to snowboarding.

Now he's a state champion.

The West Islip native won the Catskill Mountain Series Boardercross open-class men's championship Feb. 4 in Lake Placid. Boardercross, essentially, is snowboard racing down an inclined course. Breest, who took second in the event last year, edged JC Liljenquist to win.

Before that, Breest won a snowboarding championship at Windham Mountain in January. But the state title, for him, was a culmination of dedication, sacrifice, and years of pushing the envelope.

"This is huge," said Breest, who has been competing with CMS since he was 11. "There's a lot of competition up here, so being No. 1 in the state . . . it's an award with a lot of meaning."

Breest works for an electrical control and programming company, is a business major at Suffolk Community College and hopes to eventually get into law school. There's that, but he also plans to go further with snowboarding. He's competing this weekend at Catamount upstate and said he expects to contend in the USASA National Championships in April.

His mother, Barbara, was a ski patroller at Hunter Mountain and Charlie used to tag along. He got into snowboarding at 7 -- "took two years to get good," he said -- and was competing by 10. (There are YouTube videos of some of his snowboarding tricks.)

From there, it was on to motocross, with that Kawasaki KX100 his parents at first insisted they wouldn't get him. Then boardercross, which he said has "similar strategy" to motocross.

All that risk-taking hasn't come without its penalties. Breest considers himself "fortunate" to have only broken his wrist twice, injured his rotator cuff and been knocked unconscious "a couple times."

Boardercross became an Olympic sport in 2006 and Breest now aspires to reach that level. "As it's playing out now," he said, "it could be a possibility."