Coaches Education

This year’s Event Organizer and TD Training Seminar was held over the a single day at the Dublin School in southern New Hampshire.  We kicked off the seminar with two group exercises – Jury Procedures With Regard to various sanctions and Events Contingencies, where groups of three or four discussed the options and decision making and shared their conclusions with the larger group. There were some great ideas around the crazy winter weather we encounter in the East! After a short break, the morning discussions resumed with a round table on volunteer recruitment, empowerment and appreciation – it was really great to hear all the ideas on how to recruit and support these critical team members. We rounded off the morning with a presentation from Sam Osborne on the current developments by US Ski & Snowboard and it’s members in race officials training (this includes various chiefs that make up Organizing Committee teams). The eventual goal is to have more tools to offer these volunteers and TDs – some really exciting stuff to help build upon the great work our clubs are already doing.

We headed down the hill from the Outing Club building to enjoy lunch in the Dublin dining hall and mingle with participants from the Coaches Symposium. After an excellent meal and great conversations, we met back up at the Dublin Nordic Center Trails, where we chatted with Dublin Head Master Brad Bates about school’s program and facilities. The groups then ventured around the venue working on concepts for hosting various aspects of a race, including a kids play area, venue safety, a sprint course, Para nordic options, etc. After stretching ours legs and minds, the group reconvened at the Outing Club building to share their thoughts and findings. Many in the group said this was their favorite activity of the day. We followed this up with a discussion on event marketing and how to format events to engage other facets of our local ski communities.

In the late afternoon we enjoyed a crowd favorite – Allan Serrano led us through review of rule infraction videos from last season, with the crowd trying to see if we came to the same conclusions as the race juries did. For the first time, this was held jointly with the Coaches Symposium. This is a highly useful exercise, teaching officials how to consistently officiate as a collective, in addition to informing. coaches on how the jury reaches sanctioning decisions and what the recent rule changes look like in real time, particularly the new obstruction rules. Following this activity, we enjoyed another delicious meal and unstructured social time in the Dublin School dining hall. Those that remained after dinner, were treated to an engaging panel discussion on Mental Health in our sport.

This event is truly a community building exercise. Event organizers, volunteers, officials, some coaches and NENSA staff spend the weekend building relationships through activities and personal interactions, which improve our ability to work together successfully to put on events all across the region. We are very grateful to have such an engaged community helping to support the grass roots of our sport. A huge thank is deserved for all the participants for sharing their passion, ideas and expertise to make this a very successful Event Organizer and TD Seminar. Many thanks are also due to the Dublin School staff who worked with us to host this event!

As someone who first became acquainted with New England through time spent on a Liberal Arts college campus, visits to campuses like the Dublin School impart an extra sense of this old, idyllic, region. The boarding schools that form a unique part of the educational landscape here are scale models, producing a “Christmas Village”-like effect where things seem a little more quaint. Standing on the quad, the classrooms are right to your left, and dining hall is right over there; there’s kids just minding their time, the view goes on for miles, and at Dublin at least, Kathy Maddock and Brad Bates can help you to find wherever you want to go with a smile. The whole scene might be small, but you can’t help but feel a buzz that makes you feel that big things are happening.

Which means Dublin is the perfect setting for our nordic community. We’re small, but we do big things. That’s a mantra for our sport, done out on the frozen edges of existence, always together.

On first glance, the NENSA Fall Symposium looks much more anodyne than those sweeping terms. Days at coach conferences and officials meetings, where we might spend hours parsing the finer points of the FIS rulebook, don’t exactly end in the same kind of triumphant podium ceremonies like an Eastern Cup. The latter cannot happen without the former though. The Fall Symposium feels a little more familiar, a little more steady, because we believe that the small points lead to the big moments. At any one of our NENSA gatherings, there is likely a coach that will work with an athlete that goes on to compete at the highest level of our sport, and a focused effort from the organizers and officials that put the infrastructure in place for them to get there.

With that belief, we’re looking to understand how we might do more days like Saturday for our coaches across the region. As NENSA looks to put the same kind of thought into Coach Development that our coaches are putting into Athlete Development, we’re looking for your guidance! Please take this brief, 5-minute survey below:

Coaches Symposium Program Recap

Of course, there are whispers at our Fall Symposium that speak to how our smaller program is connected to the big, wide, world of skiing. The most apparent this year was Bryan Fish, the US Ski and Snowboard Sport Development Director, who is that direct link from what we do locally to the US Ski Team by design.

Bryan flew in to help administer the first of the new USSS L100 certification assessments, which is a revamped effort from US Ski and Snowboard to help draw more coaches into a unified national curriculum. Find our guide to navigating these changes HERE.

We had 5 coaches participate in this assessment, and all passed to become the newest of our certified coaches in the region. Congratulations!

NOTE: this USSS certification program is evolving especially fast ahead of a requirement for all coaches at USSS-sanctioned races, i.e. Eastern Cups, in 2025-26. We will have more certification opportunities announced shortly through the NENSA calendar!

On-Ski Clinic

Bryan also led a clinic with the whole of our conference attendees in the afternoon, which was the kind of peer-learning that we want to focus our efforts on providing for coaches in our region going forward. After some 15 years with US Ski and Snowboard, Bryan not only brings technical experience from Park City to his coaching, but also a grab bag of stories from time spent working with the skiers that we watch on the World Cup every winter way before they ever were on the World Cup. As I participated in the warm-up exercises that he was demonstrating for us, I found myself pondering why he is so good at what he does. And maybe it’s my knowing he grew up in the same neck of the woods I did in Northern Wisconsin, but I can’t help but think it’s in his mix of deep knowledge delivered straightforward for the most part, but with a little flair here and there that carries a hint of plainspoken Northwoods mythos. In other words, I left his ski clinic satisfied that our New England coaches learned both how to “Plan. Do. Review,” and what a Hodag is (which, if you don’t know, you really should find out).

Off-Ski Programming

Apart from our time spent on-skis, the Symposium looked to bring together old-faces and new to do a little thinking about the way we coach, why we do it, and how we might do so with more intention.

The morning began with a dryland workout with Dublin XC Coach Kathy Maddock. The best way to get coaches ready to coach skiing is remind them that they too are skiers, and Kathy does so with enthusiasm and passion that emanates through as soon as she sets the group off on a warm-up run. Former Harvard Head Coach and Patient Leadership Founder Chris City delivered a program entitled “Beyond Technique” that focused in on how coaches benefit from an active development of their philosophies and values. It was laced with stories from the EISA circuit, and left us all with a roadmap to map out our own intentions for taking on the expansive role of “coach.” US Ski Team Technical Director and ORDA Nordic Sport Manager Allan Serrano ran us through the jury decision process for rules infractions via a video discussion that had a whole auditorium discussing who and what and when a ski moved in a fair place on course. Finally, a panel discussion featuring NENSA Board Member and Former US Ski Team member Katharine Ogden, NENSA Community Development Director Isabel Caldwell, Former Stratton Mountain School Sports Psychologist Elle Gilbert, and Bryan Fish capped the day by going deep into the complex relationship of skiing to a wider-life, and how to help cultivate a mental health practice among the athletes that we work with in often critical points of their overall development as people.

From Here to Out There

As we were setting up on Saturday morning, Isabel Caldwell pointed out the sign that is posted right across from the Dublin admissions building that marks the start of the trail straight from campus to the top of nearby Mt. Monadnock. “Pretty cool,” she said. “Pretty cool,” I agreed.

Skiing is a sport that fits into a complicated world and brings with it its own complications. Credentials, LOCs, FIS Juries, L100, L200, TDs and a whole lot more jargon (V1, V2, so on…). Let that all fall away though, and there’s a reason that each one of us choose to partake in this particular form of gliding on snow. The notion that from here, you can get to anywhere. That trail sign at Dublin seemed another sign (literally) that we were in the right place to layer all the extra complications on for just a day. Hopefully, with the right mix of people, in the right place, you can do a little focused thinking to equip you for wherever that trail may take you.

Survey

As NENSA looks to put the same kind of thought into Coach Development that our coaches are putting into Athlete Development, we’re looking for your guidance! Please take this brief, 5-minute survey below: