Side cut turns verses balanced turns.

[h.harb]

I find I have to make a big distinction between "Side cut turns" and "Balance turns" with kids I am coaching. The reason, they come with no idea of how of balance on a ski throughout the whole turn.
The sad thing is they ski mostly on slalom skis, incorrectly! And their home coaches don't understand the difference either.

A side cut turn is just leaning on the edges and waiting for the side cut to engage, then stepping off it. This involves no completion to the arc against the falline or bending of the ski. Skiing at Copper and A-Basin the last 4 weeks, I watched teams from all over the country doing the same thing, side cut turns. Sasha Rearick rightly says in his presentations that we can't ski slalom in the US. He's right, of course I've been writing about it for years, he states many reasons, but the main reason is the coaches don't know how to coach a balanced turn. They let the kids just ski sloppy with rotation and leaning; just using the side cut of a slalom ski to make short useless arcs. This is a waste of a ski day and a lift ticket in my view. No slalom race course in the world allows you to ski it with side cut turns. This is the state of coaching in the US. I see this from some of the so called best programs in the country, like Stratton for example. Very poor free skiing and free skiing is a reflection of the coaching and the limitations that will show up as the competition gets tough.

[mrvilliams]

Hi Harald are you speaking of SMS program or the stratton mountain race program? The SMS program has some of the best coaches with WC coaching experience. What did you see in their kids free skiing of lately?

[h.harb]

I beg to differ, the Stratton School coaches may have worked for the US Ski Team but they are not showing the understanding it takes to develop racers. This is a big problem in many programs, once you wear the "patch" everyone thinks you are a super coach, nothing could be further from the truth. These are just regular coaches who grew up ski racing and got a job with the US Ski Team, many didn't learn much while there either. The Stratton kids were some of the worst offenders, of side cut skiing, rotating and leaning. I listened to the coaching and no one addressed any of the issues, I bring up. This is just one of the many programs doing the same thing. The Stratton Alpine program, has fallen far behind the other top eastern programs. When I was at Stratton, we had the best alpine development skiers in the country.

[mrvilliams]

I hope SMS was the best program when you were there since it was one of only a few programs in existence. Of course the number of alpine national team athletes it produced was higher than today- there was little to no competition from other schools trying to produce ski racers. Today there are hundreds of ski academies and prep schools training racers. SMS sent 12 athletes to Sochi a few of them alpine racers which says they are doing something right with their top athletes just like Burke and GMVS.

Either way seems like most kids rotate around the turn today when free skiing unless they are told that they are being watched and are told to focus on counter and not to rotate.

[Max_501]

Today there are hundreds of ski academies and prep schools training racers.

Hundreds???

IMO, when it comes to the success of an athlete one needs to look at all of the coaches involved. For example, who should be credited with Shiffrin's development?

[WNYSkier]

That would be Kirk Dwyer at Burke. She worked with her mother while on the EC and early WC much to the chagrin of the USST.

And FWIW I understand Resi Steigler was dropped by the USST team at the end of last season. She has been training independently and is getting decent WC SL results now that she is healthy and has been getting coaching outside of the team.

Cheers,
m

[mrvilliams]

Max,
I was including prep schools in the hundreds statement. I would guess there are maybe 10 academies at the level of SMS in the NE/NY area. My point to Harald was that at the time he was at SMS there was only a few other ski academies and therefore somewhat more likely that the number of US SKI team athletes to be higher from SMS.

I know that today most prep schools have race programs in New England. Most do not focus on racing as much as the SMS, GMVS, Burke, OMS or CVA type schools however they do compete and can produce athletes that go onto these programs once they show promise. So, yes there are a hundreds of schools with race programs when you consider not just the east coast. We have something like 5,000 prep schools between NE and NY and most have the money for some type of ski program and these kids race and do move onto college or can make the US team without a ski academy and it does happen.

[Max_501]

In that case shouldn't we include every mountain and non-prep school that has a race program too? While they exist my understanding is that they aren't anywhere near the intensive training from a race specific academy (of which there are few).

[h.harb]

Max is right when I was at Stratton there were still hundreds of programs that developed national level skiers. But they were smaller programs, but many had mid-week training and afternoons off. Just because there were not as many School academies there were many good programs such as Stowe, Waterville, Sun Valley, Steamboat, Summit County, Lake Tahoe, Mammoth, Green mountain, Burke, Mt Hood, White Pass, Mt Snow, Killington, Pico, Gunstock, Cochranes, Buck Hill, Lutsen, Park City, SnowBird, Jackson Hole, just to name a few.

Still we dominated from Stratton, my boys team got 5 of the top 10 at the Junior Nationals, when they were still 18 and under, "a true national championship". This doesn't diminish in any way, the results and the fact that there were not as many academies. We also had 1st, 2nd and 5th place, as well as 7th and 9th. We also won every women's race, with 3 in the top 4 in the GS. No program does this any more.

Stratton lost it's dominance when the coaching level dropped.