So here’s a story that has been waiting to be told… fair warning: a rather long set of posts!
I’m the coach that had the misfortune to get caught between HeluvaSkier and Blue Jacket from this post http://www.pmts.org/pmtsforum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=5410… It was really a misfortune because I could have just continued to play the average parent-coach role: Have fun coaching my kids as they grew, thinking I knew all I needed, wearing my badges and pins with pride, only to eventually have the kids phase-out of racing, like most, around U16, as they lost interest.
The backstory is like most. I was the parent-coach of two passionate club-level ski racers. Having skied very little myself, I sought to learn quickly, followed the only path readily apparent to me (CSCF) and quickly gained some certifications. I learned the hard way http://www.pmts.org/pmtsforum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=3864 that certification and regurgitation of what we read in books is not an indication of understanding; something that would eventually forever-change my role as ‘coach’.
Fast forward to 2015, now enters HeluvaSkier (Greg), stage-left, with an invitation to ski with him for a weekend at his home mountain. On our first run, he took us to a run that he calls his ‘training run’, a relentless black pitch that drops a mere 140 vertical meters (that’s a little less than 460 feet in ‘American’, and a fairly intimidating pitch anywhere). “Lucky” for us it had rained the night before and re-froze after they had groomed. I was circumspect, but as he went down, linking tight SL turns down this pitch, my son and I looked at each other and I’m like “@#!!% – it’s for real!!” and that was it — we saw how strong, precise and different that skiing was from what we had seen elsewhere and we knew that we want to ski like that (if you think he’s impressive because you’ve seen his YouTube videos, that’s nothing compared to skiing with him in real life). What was more, was he could describe, in detail, how he did it, and what it would take for us to ski like that.
Now we had a choice. He made us understand how to do it right meant putting a lot of effort into rebuilding our skiing, giving up short term gains for long-term expertise… and it wouldn’t be easy, but both sons and I had an epiphany and decided to hit the reset button and go for the PMTS red pill. The initial story of the transformation is told in detail in this article http://www.effectiveskiing.com/wiki/carving-blog/Creating_great_skiers… where we managed to rebuild a talented athlete from the ground up, in a matter of weeks—but the real story only begins where that article left off.
I’m still sometimes left thinking that it would have been easier to go for the blue pill — to believe whatever I wanted to believe… After all, we wouldn’t have had to rebuild our skiing, we would have gone on believing we were doing the same stuff as the academy FIS racers, we would have been better-than-average skiers, average racers and a quintessential club-level coach.
Instead of just doing the typical weekend coaching gig — carrying gates up and down the hill like all other coaches, helping the kids, as well as I, could with cliché phrases like ‘get forward’ and ‘pole plant’, I was caught between a hard-working, capable athlete that was focused on evolving quickly and Greg, who knew what to do about it. I had to learn very quickly to analyze and fix skiing at a high level, in real-time. That took not only the knowledge of all of Harald’s books and videos, which I had read and watched many times; but also countless hours of drills, video, slow-motion video review and late-night discussions with Greg, cutting heavily into my beer drinking and Netflix-bingeing.
And that was not enough (my realization at this point… CRAP, they were right). I now had to bring my own skiing game up to speed. That meant even more work and time spent drilling and slow-speed skiing — combined with video, late night review of my own skiing, and on many occasions a large slice of humble pie (1-800-HeluvaSkier). It turns out that learning PMTS gave me a big advantage, from several points of view.
First, I started to understand first-hand the effort it took and how it felt to do the movements, like real flexing (that came late) or real CA (that came even later), and what issues my athletes might experience as they progressed and how to help them work through the various issues would encounter. This meant I could relay those experiences to the athletes as they worked to build the Essentials into their skiing. The fact that I could explain everything and walk them through it all turned out to be a major success factor in coaching them.
The second big advantage this gave me was that I became able to demonstrate for the athletes. When Blue Jacket above went to University, this became even more important and impactful—my main demonstrator was gone, but I was skiing with the exact same movements he used. This showed athletes, colleagues and parents alike something very important… fast results and repeatability.
Anyway… that’s the story. The rabbit hole is deeper than I ever imagined when I set out and embarking on this journey was the best decision I ever made related to my skiing and coaching. It helped me understand what real coaching is, what great skiing looks like and how to reproduce it, analyze it and course-correct it quickly. If anyone reading is in a similar situation, take that red pill as early as possible, especially if you’re a parent-coach—you will not regret it.