Former national team coach Dave Wood says there needs to be a shift in thinking for Canada to create more ski racers and keep them interested in moving up the competitive ladder, and that has to start at the club level.
In a sport whose funding at the provincial and national level is based on national team results in international competitions, Wood believes it's never too early to get kids racing.
"Too many people drawn into the sport have this aversion to competition," said Wood. "But in fact, skiing is no different from soccer and hockey. In soccer and hockey they have goalposts and in skiing we have a clock. There's no pressure on kids and I think kids in Jackrabbits should try ski racing.
"Why not? They're probably going to try other sports. We need, in our high-performance team, to do a really good job because if kids do try it, you want them to stay with it and not leave because it wasn't much fun."
Now coach of the Black Jack Cross Country Club in Rossland, Wood was in Prince George in January to coach his team at the B.C. Cup races at Otway Nordic Centre.
Like other ski clubs in Canada, the Caledonia Nordic Ski Club starts its beginner skiers with the Jackrabbit program. Caledonia also promotes "fun" races, such as its Chocolate race series at Otway, which offers chocolate bars to all participants.
But Wood says the youngest skiers should have more opportunities to take part in more structured races like the B.C. Cup series.
"Too often in skiing, and in other sports, fun is used to describe a poor performance," Wood said. "So if you're not very fast, because you never prepared properly, you're just racing for 'fun.' But to me, that's not fun.
"Fun is the pursuit of trying to be a faster skier. How do you measure fun? To me, the ones with the biggest smiles are the ones on the podium."
Caledonia's racing programs (cross-country and biathlon) currently involve about 40 athletes, all working with volunteer coaches. John Hagen and Leisbet Beaudry are teaching the ski racers, while Pierre Beaudry and Gillian Warner are the biathlon coaches.
The problem with having volunteers as coaches is the club has no paid employee to manage the programs, leaving the coaches responsible for making travel arrangements, fund-raising, and the administrative duties involved in entering athletes in races. Burnout is inevitable.
Now more than 1,500 members strong, Caledonia is the province's largest cross-country ski club and Wood thinks it should have a full-time paid employee to not only coach the kids but instruct the coaches.
"It's really hard for volunteers to have time enough to do everything, so I think they need to get a full-time coach here and a commitment from the club that they want to see a racing program up and running," said Wood.
"The town's big enough, it won't take long to get a reasonably good team. It just takes someone who is motivated and who is good at motivating the kids."
Hiring a coach is on the list of things to consider in Caledonia's strategic initiatives but the board has not yet decided if or when that will happen. Most of the long-range talks have focused around planning for the 2015 Canada Winter Games.
"It's an important question and we will get to it in due course," said Jim Burbee, Caledonia director of competitions. "It's a significant cost to bring another employee on and the board has to decide the value of that as opposed to the cost of that.
"We're in a time of significant change with the Games coming, too, and we want to make sure we make really calculated, sound decisions and aren't rushed into it hastily. But I'm pretty optimistic.
"We have a huge membership, we're the largest club in the province and the opportunity is there to offer more programs to more people."
There are wait lists for Caledonia's Bunnyrabbit, Jackrabbit and Track Attack skill development programs and Burbee, a former Caledonia coach, would like to see more athletes make the next step to the Junior Racers program. That way, they'd be more inclined to stay involved in racing as they become young adults.
"When we had the training centre here with Dave Wood and Peter Saar and Alain Parent coaching [in the '80s and '90s], a lot of teenage elite skiers went through, and if you look around the province, those kids who were in that program are running the ski programs today," Burbee said.
"You've got Eric de Nys coaching the national team, Chris Manhard running the national team training centre at Callaghan Valley, Graham MacLean as the wax technician at the training centre, Paul Freeze coaching in Kimberley. It's an investment. Those are the people who will come back and deliver the sport to the next generation."
A paid full-time coach, he said, would make that possible, with similar spin-off effects.
"In the end we'll all be recreational skiers, but the ones that hang in (racing) longer will tend to be the ones who carry the program," Burbee said. "Coaches are generally the parent of an athlete and what happens is the athlete moves on and you lose the coach. We have a great group of coaches, but their kids are going to grow up. You need the stability of somebody who's there all the time to bring on the new coaches and bring them up to the calibre of the ones you just lost."
Hagen says the Caledonia club's presence at provincial or national events pales in comparison to that of clubs from small cities like Burns Lake or Smithers, which have paid coaches and dedicated support staff.
"It's out of proportion what other smaller clubs are investing in their racing programs," said the 44-year-old Hagen. "At a B.C. Cup race, I'm using mostly my own gear and a rickety tent, whereas many of the other clubs have a paid coach and are well-supported.
"I know we're in a rebuilding phase, but at those competitions it really stands out how the Prince George program is on a long-term lapse, relative to the ski program I remember when I was younger."
Hagen says if the club decides it wants to hire a coach, that person should be somebody who will easily gain the trust of parents, who has the ability to work well with other coaches and who recognizes the value of making the racing experience enjoyable for skiers of all abilities.
"The Jackrabbits program in Prince George is one of the largest in the province but one of the big issues is there's not a good connection between a very popular Jackrabbits program and the Junior Racers.
"One's not feeding the other, where it is in other clubs. Why that's not happening would be a very good area for a paid coach to focus on. That age, before kids hit puberty, is an ideal time for them to really perfect their skiing technique."
