Changing The World, One Step at a Time

The team I coach, The Deviantes, training hard at Aspen Mountain.

Recently in Levi, Finland, representatives of national snow sports instructors’ associations from around the world gathered for Interski 2023, the quadrennial congress of our profession. Among the most widely anticipated and best received presentations at Interski was the keynote address by the USA’s Ann Schorling. A member of the Professional Ski Instructors of America National Alpine Team, Ms. Schorling’s address was “Increasing Gender Equity in Snowsports Instruction”. The theme for this year’s Interski was ‘the guest experience’, and a major theme of the keynote address was gender inclusivity as an essential component of the guest experience. Here’s a link to this outstanding presentation: Gender Equity in Snowsports Instruction - Keynote Address at Interski 2023 - YouTube.

It should be no surprise to learn that the lack of gender equality and inclusivity generally in the snow sports industry is real and vexing. It also should be no surprise that organizational cultures throughout the industry often resist and even work against change, despite our leaders’ best efforts. The question for us, for boots on the snow professionals, is what each of us can do to facilitate change, to make our sports more welcoming and inclusive to all? I do not possess some grand plan or revolutionary view to make inclusion efforts easier and more successful. I can speak, however, to what I do, what actions I take.

I’ve been thinking about this a great deal this spring, wondering whether I am doing enough. Anecdotally, it’s brought to mind a old line that a friend and I used to make when we were working together to get her ready for her instructor certification exams. When asked what we were working on so intensely, our response was that we were training for world domination. Her name is Heidi, and thinking of that time together really brings a smile to my face. And I do think we achieved it (especially if you ask us).

I’d hired Heidi as an instructor for the staff at Treble Cone in Wanaka, New Zealand outside the usual early-season process for bringing new staff on board. She was spending significant time and money on the expensive and elaborate instructor training courses that operate at the resorts down there, and her part-time teaching for us served to blunt the large financial burden of her courses. We’d gotten to know each other well on a professional level and I had been impressed by her work. Heidi was having difficulties achieving the highest level of instructor certification despite what I thought were her obvious and prodigious talents as a skier and coach.

On slower days and on our occasional days off, this young pro and I would quietly head out on the hill and work through pieces of the teaching and skiing puzzles, just the two of us. Doing so did call attention to us and, in that particularly small fish-bowl of a place, people frequently asked what we were doing: why, world domination of course. Towards the end of that season, Heidi aced her exams and subsequently went on to achieve great heights in our profession. To this day, she is one of my favorite ski pros on the planet. We became close friends and she is a part of that amazing community of people I miss since I’ve been away from New Zealand.

I cannot and will not take credit for Heidi’s success. I can claim to have had the ability to listen to and understand who she is as an athlete and a person in a way that allowed us to find a path forward for her, on her own terms. Thinking about our time together lately has highlighted the distinctions between my idealized big picture view of the ski industry and the reality of it on the ground, and Ann Schorling’s presentation put that distinction into sharp relief.

Heidi and I did not construct a strategy for her success on the basis of her gender. We concocted and executed our strategy for her out of mutual respect  and clear communitcation based on who she is, what she needed, how to best enable her success on her own terms as the person she is. Gender had nothing to do with it other than generating a result that provided all of us with an industry leader who earned her success on the merits after a lot of hard work, and whose presence and example can and does inspire young women (and their male counterparts) to pursue their own ambitions through conscientious hard work.

The point is not that my work with Heidi is a lesson for gender-based focus. It is that it is a lesson in person-based focus. At the core of the American Teaching System for snow sports is a student-centered teaching model. The intent therefore is to meet all our guests and the pros who we train to teach them as they are – gender, race, ethnicity, religion, age, life experience, how they feel that day when we meet them, what their economic status may be ... each as they are. When we do this well, learning to ski or snowboard and improving at our sports in the hands of an exceptional professional instructor can be a remarkably empowering experience, for adults and for kids.

Unfortunately, our work to achieve real and meaningful buy-in to our student-centered method in our profession remains a work in progress. Critically, I believe that achieving real inclusiveness in snow sports can be a direct outgrowth of that keystone belief of the American Teaching System. We just need to keep our eyes on the horizon while working with each guest, every day, to enable them to achieve success on their terms. When our instructing staffs can honestly turn the lens on themselves and know with confidence they are making progress towards that end, we all win. When that does happen, our profession and our professional organizations will have made a great deal of progress towards re-affirming my own belief in the power of sport. Until that time, though we can take pride in the changes we've made there is yet a lot of work to be done.