Blue Mt PA

I had a great finish to my time at Mount Snow. After 40 something degrees and rain on Monday to single digits on Tuesday and Wednesday, things on Thursday and Friday got back to more regular winter... in the twenties. Snow guns were running pretty hard all week once the weather turned. I cut out just after lunch on Friday to head for Blue Mountain in southern Pennsylvania. I went a couple hours out of my way to stop home to see my family and dogs. They were all good and pretty happy to see me. I pulled into Allentown, PA about 10:00 PM after a pretty easy drive. Saturday and Sunday I would run a PSIA Level 1 Validation in cooperation with PARA (Pennsylvania Alpine Racing Association). Level 1 for PSIA is a certification for teaching beginning skiers. In the race world, athletes are not part of it until they have some skiing skills making PSIA level 1 certification skiing information mostly useless for race coaches. The clinic has been modified to include safety, learning style, teaching style, learning partnership and so forth but with more advanced skiing to make the information more pertinent to race coaching.

I arrived at the mountain just before 8:00 AM, Saturday morning and the place was already pretty jammed. I realized the area opens early (8:00 AM). The Lodge is on top so they use a tape across the access to the mountain with skiers lined up along it instead of the a line at the lift before opening...different from most areas. I found the ski school director and he had me set up in the "boot room", one of the rooms that the ski school staff uses in the main lodge. The course is set up in theory for newer race coaches but in my experience it is usually attended by fairly experienced coaches. This group was no different. Only one of the six in the group was new to coaching; two others were not active coaches.. just interested. The other 3 had been coaching many years. Once we were out hill, I realized only the new coach was new to PSIA, the others were using this for and update. Three were level 3 (certified to teach it all) one was level 2 (certified through parallel) and one was level 1 (certified to teach beginning skiing). This posed a bit of a dilemma but not too bad. The program I ran went from an introduction to organized delivery of information in a way that keeps the athletes safe and engaged (see my earlier description above) to a shared session of different drills and progressions and how we would modify them to make them more appropriate for different aged athletes. It came off pretty well and was pretty fun. It sure helped that the skiing and weather were both pretty good.

Saturday night, I was invited to a Christmas party at one of the coaches houses. Most of the Blue Mountain race coaches were there. They are a good group. Most have skied together for 20 years as Blue Mountain coaches. It is fun to hang out with friends that have a long history...all you have to do is sit back and listen to the stories. It turns out some or our athletes at Labrador have shared coaching and race lane space Copper Mountain in Colorado during Thanksgiving camps with some Blue Mountain coaches. The ski world is pretty small.