Submitted by AOA U12 Athletic Consultant Bennett Carter…What an amazing KICK START to our winter at Mt St Louis Moonstone (MSLM) last weekend! Thank you to everyone who supported this inaugural event designed to benefit all AOA members by bringing coaches, instructors, kids, parents and officials together at the start of the season for learning and fun and to get back on snow.
We had an amazing turnout – 80 coaches and 150 athletes from across three AOA divisions! We also had the run of the fully open Mt St Louis Moonstone (MSLM) resort! Thank you to all our supporters including Sporting Life, Cam Powell, and Bill Ford, AOA alumni who skied with and inspired kids and coaches, suppliers who came to support kids and coaches, Mitch McDermid and Glacier for the vision to host this event, and lastly to Mt. St. Louis for their hospitality and world-class on-hill experience.
The KICK START idea came to light when we decided to change up the fall AOA coaching conference and move it on-snow. One of the key goals was to provide practical training to the kids from experienced Level 4 CSIA who are also alpine racing coaches. In doing so kids received ski improvement from instructors who have a strong understanding of fundamentals and basic skills. The collaboration and alignment between AOA and the CSIA was very important to bring teachers together on the same hill with the goal of showing both coaches and kids how the same basic skills are used to create a turn.
The coach module that we ran on Thursday delivered pedagogy to help show all participants how and why to teach, and how and why slow, expert skiing relates directly to high performance. In the short term, we wanted to provide additional ideas to help coaches make the most of every day on snow, especially in December when hill space is rare, and secondly to show skill-testing environments that can be set and used throughout the season to assess competency.
Did you know that time developing skills is more beneficial for kids than spending time racing? It is so important to keep kids exposed to competition so that they are familiar with a competitive environment, but the foundation of being a good skier and ski racer comes from sound fundamentals and basic skills. Kids who can learn expert skills at a slow speed can then apply these same skills when they start to go fast. The truth is that ski racing is a progression so if you don’t learn it when you are in U8/U10/ you then start to go fast and might just discover it is too late to change your fundamental technique to remain competitive.
AOA will continue to focus on skills with a spring KICK START event planned for April 3-4, 2020 at the Craigleith Ski Club. Stay tuned in February for registration on the AOA website. If you want to learn more about Skills for your ski club programs click here>