PSIA Fall Training

Every year in the Fall the Professional Ski Instructors of America host their 'fall training' for Divisional Educators - The people who coach and certify instructors.

As a member of the Alpine and Childrens Education Teams for Rocky Mountain, I was invited to spend five days at A Basin with the best instructors in the Rocky Mountains. It started off with a Keynote presentation from USSA (United States Ski And Snowboard Association) on their 'out of the box' approach to innovative coaching. We were hoping to be on-snow for our second day of training but mother nature was not co-operating and we were forced to be inside for safety reasons. After going over the usual office updates, we studied some footage of Michaela Shifrin in a GS course and compared it to footage our ski instructors skiing high performance turns to come up with strategies to help our instructors be more like Miki! We also the developed ways to introduce this movement pattern to our guests earlier in their career.

The third day was on-snow at A-Basin and we worked in groups to help each other experiment with the strategies that we had discussed the day prior, as well as warming up our clinic leading and personal ski skills for the upcoming season.

Day 4 switched gears with most of the 200 participants leaving just the Kids and Nordic groups. It was great to see XC skiers load the chair at 8am to do some laps before the mountain opened to the public. We received feedback from the kids committee and welcomed our new team members before heading out on the slopes to practice moving through three presentation styles: presenting, teaching and facilitating.

We went back inside on day 5 to work on clinician staffing and editing work books and quizzes.

A big thanks to A Basin for getting the groups on snow given the snow conditions in the US at the moment!

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