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Where Will The Next Generation Of Integrating some in-house coaches' education for high school seniors, PG's, college skiers, and USST athletes not only helps them to understand their own skiing better, but helps them to mentor the younger skiers in the program, providing critical peer leadership and coaching. This opportunity also provides the older athletes with job training skills, allowing them to earn money during breaks in their racing schedules, summers, when reconditioning from an injury, while trying to make selection to varsity status in college, or to national development teams and above. When I think of the number of talented ski racers over the years who have essentially given up the sport in college after years of training just because they couldn't make the varsity travel team their first year, I'm struck by the enormous waste of talent. These athletes are natural coaches already seasoned in training methods, technical and tactical skills, and the psychology of ski racing. Someone should be helping them to help themselves by providing guidance to recognize what they are capable of, and how their knowledge and love of skiing can impact the younger impressionable skiers in the programs. The small number of athletes who have done some coaching after racing frequently start working with FIS track athletes; the very track they just gave up. As a consequence they quickly become bored, overworked, cold and disillusioned with the profession. In addition, many of the most talented skiers are seldom required to complete a coaches' education program to help them professionally prepare for the work, and are assumed to understand all that's required of them as a ski coach since they raced for so many years. What's worse is many of these unfortunate young coaches do not understand that they need a formal education to augment their practical experience. For those who have studied an unrelated major in college they may work several years without understanding some of the most basic fundamental building blocks of physical development in sports. One alternative is to guide ex-racers into the ranks of coaching early on where we need them the most, to work with the most visual learners we have in the sport; the J4's and 5's. In this way they will be skiing rather than standing on the side of a race course. They will have the chance to demonstrate their technical ability to the young juniors, molding a new generation of skiers who get to ski with real live heroes as their coach instead of someone's mom or dad. We desperately need these retiring ski racers to contribute to the sport now while they're still hot, before they step away from the sport, which in some cases may be until they start having children of their own. This is not to say that the moms and dads in ski clubs across the country aren't needed or helpful. They provide an essential element of maturity, experience, and motivation to the clubs. However, young athletes need a balance of skiing models in order to learn and develop to their fullest potential. At the present, many ski clubs are overloaded with well intentioned parents who have passed their prime athletic skiing years. If these parents have not kept up to date seeking current coaches' education from the USSA structure, they are often operating on 20-year-old theories and techniques popular when they raced. Most big ski clubs and schools now realize that their best and most successful ski racers are developed in their own junior programs. It's time for those same programs to make the next step and look beyond race results to measure the programs' success. The number and quality of ski coaches produced by the club should also be a statistic to be celebrated. The process of coaches' education should be started in-house. This would provide mature older athletes the first steps toward occupational training in the sport that cost them so much in time and money. They will learn some critical things about their own skiing that will improve their racing results. If every college ski coach built in a coaches' education component to their program the impact for junior development would be staggering. At least three Division I college ski racing programs in the East are lead by coaches that have been involved with delivering USSA coaches' education, and could effectively offer coaches' education to their athletes in house before graduation. In fact, thanks to the efforts of Jeff Pier, head coach of St Lawrence University, a coaches' education clinic will be offered to college racers this November or December 2002 during a preseason training camp. Most coaches agree that they learned so much about their own skiing after becoming a coach that they wished they were again racing to be able to correct all the little things they didn't understand during their careers. Hermann Maier taught us all a lesson in the value of ski teaching as a fundamental basis to prepare for ski racing while working in his family's ski school in Austria, as he was battling his way through the selection process to the national team there. There's so much more to life in athletics then race results. Ski clubs might even find ways to offer incentives to college graduates by sponsoring x number of graduate credits in addition to their salary, in return for x number of years of coaching service with the club (an idea developed by Jeff Byrne, senior vice president of ORDA in Lake Placid). Clubs and schools should also be helping to sponsor at least part of a ski coaches' formal education and/or certification to encourage professionalism in the sport through our national governing body, USSA. The solutions to increasing the involvement of our talented college/senior racers into the ranks of coaching may be too obvious to see. Improving our current coaching shortages involves changing long-standing traditions; something many experienced coaches find hard to do. But in reality what do we have to lose? At the most it's a question of fewer race starts or training days. Most of us agree that we do too much of that already. So, why not make sure most of our athletes have the opportunity to have a part-time coaching job at some point before they stop racing USSA or FIS, and in the process we'll produce a few career coaches that will fill our boots when we're too old to buckle them? In the final event, if we are to provide the highest possible quality ski coaching for our young skiers that rivals a European model, then it's time that we all buy into the process. The full-time head coaches and program directors are either part of the problem or part of the solution. None of us is as good as all of us. Ron Bonnevie is the head of alpine coaches' education at the U. of Maine at Farmington's Ski Industries Program and a coaches' education coordinator for USSA. Ron is an internationally certified coach with USSA, a level II PSIA certified instructor, a FIS technical delegate, and holds a masters' degree in physical education. |
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Copyright © 2002 University of Maine at Farmington
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