We Instructors Are Different

A young student takes in his first view from the top of Highland Bowl

Imagine a small group of smart, dedicated and hard-working professionals. Imagine that each and every one of them, regardless of seniority, regularly spends a significant amount of time and effort learning, training and working in order to get better at what they do. The most successful among them achieve a modest degree of notoriety within their profession and their industry but most toil in anonymity, and most of them are able to have a life-style that is the envy of even the most successful of people. Not so tough to imagine. Then tweak the picture: remove from this group all profit motive and consider that only the rarest of them actually makes what would be considered a good living. And yet they are happy, passionate people who are unrelenting in their enthusiasm. Yes, that’s us, ski and snowboard instructors, and we definitely are different.

There really aren’t any other professions with similar dynamics. We often look to the golf industry and the role of golf pros as a point of reference, but our workaday lives are vastly different. Tennis pros? Not even close. We’re not coaches, exactly, although those of us who are instructor trainers do a lot of coaching and there are many among us who work as instructors and coach athletes in the competitive disciplines of our sports. What makes us most different from all of those other sports professionals is that we never have a score as an indicator of how successful our students are and, most importantly, we make every turn with our guests. Let’s be clear, when we are skilled and conscientious about our work, we make every single turn with our guests, and that changes everything. There is no way to successfully teach skiing or snowboarding while standing on the sidelines.

Skiing and riding in concert with our guests means that we always are in the spotlight for our athletic performance. Older, accomplished instructors whose ski and snowboard performance isn’t what it used to be nonetheless still need to be able to demonstrate effective movements and ski and board performance. I am certainly very fortunate to know a broad array of pros who continue to be effective and successful instructors well into their seventies and even eighties – they’re a genuine inspiration. Still, it means that we all work to constantly improve and there is far more pressure on our athletic performance than on our peers in other recreational sports. There certainly are an unfortunate number of ski and snowboard pros who are exceptional athletes and who have a decent amount of knowledge but whose actual teaching skills are mediocre and yet who manage to succeed anyway. Actual teaching skills are challenging to train and to assess, and many of the most gifted, teachers can be a little uncomfortable talking dispassionately about what makes them so good at what they do because doing so can feel somehow forced or insincere.

The Professional Ski Instructors of America (PSIA) and the American Association of Snowboard Instructors (AASI) (we’re all one organization, for the uninitiated) recently published a new manual that has as its aim delineating the teaching, communication, and social skills and tactics of great snow sports teachers and codifying them in a way that allows each of us to learn and improve. Creating a manual for such “soft skills” must have been a challenging process and at times, as noted, a little uncomfortable. The authors did a commendable job but, for me, simply posing the question of what makes a great teacher and continually asking ourselves how we are doing as teachers is more valuable than any specific answer or evaluation we may find.

A consistent refrain we hear from instructors who are training for their certification exams (or from our best or most ambitious members pursuing ambitions within PSIA and AASI) is that we all wish that our evaluators could simply hide in the woods unbeknownst to us while we go about our work as instructors. Man, that would be terrific! It always reminds me of something the head of food and beverage at Sugarbush said at a dinner party once (you know who you are, Gerry): when a guest was bragging to us about what a great chef she was and how her friends always love her food, he suggested that if she really wanted an honest opinion she should go out and find perfect strangers, charge them $50 for a meal, and then ask them what they thought. The point is that while certification and position are important benchmarks for instructors, it’s vitally important to never confuse status with merit. The response from, progress made by, and success of our guests is the only truly meaningful indicator of the skills of an instructor (interestingly for me, the same is true of managers and the work of their staffs, but that’s a post for another day). Please don't misunderstand me: I have ambitions within the profession and the industry that are vitally important for me, but they are merely benchmarks on the path of ever-improving ski teaching.

Ultimately, no ski or snowboard pro ever falls in love with our work because their staff trainer, Examiner, or supervisor says something nice to them. We love our work when our guests fall ever more in love with skiing – it validates our choice to pursue this career and reminds us all over again why we just can’t get enough of our sports. When our managers and the people driving our instructor organizations recognize our excellent work it’s the icing on the cake, but just the icing.

I’ve got my feet up and out of boots today on a much needed day off, but tomorrow I may have to make some turns for myself in the spring Colorado sunshine just in case I forget how totally awesome it can be. And if you’re hiding in the woods nearby, you just might catch me grinning like someone without any pressure or a care in the world.