And the MVP Goes To…

By Lane McLaughlin,
PSIA/AASI-NW Technical VP

I’m not sure if you’re a sports fan at all, but if you are and you’ve happened to watch an NBA basketball game this time of year as the regular season is over and the playoffs start, you may have noticed the chant of “MVP-MVP-MVP” hailing down from the stands of the arenas as fans salute, promote, and honor their team’s star player and cast their informal vote for them being the Most Valuable Player of the league. It got me thinking about our business and organization, and a successful season, business, or membership experience certainly does not hinge on the performance of any one person. But, it’s my feeling, and shared by many I’ve talked to, that the Most Valuable Position within a ski school and throughout our organization is the Training Director – a.k.a. the “TD”.

If you look at the nature of the snowsport school business, it relies every year on bringing new instructors into the business. Many people join the instructor ranks with an interest for teaching, a passion for skiing/riding, but perhaps very little knowledge and understanding of how to teach skiing/riding and probably not much awareness of how challenging it will be to become proficient in the craft. The paying public deserves professional service and quality instruction every time they buy a lesson. Therefore it’s critical to the success of a school and the health of our industry that we work from the ‘bottom” up and help mentor, train, and prepare new instructors to get through those early learning pains and moving them to a level of proficiency where they can truly enjoy the experience and fulfill guest expectations.

To help with the initiative to educate and train instructors, PSIA is chartered at national and regional levels to develop educational materials, host training events and define standards. The leaders and trainers throughout the organization have a wealth of knowledge and the passion to disseminate this information to the membership. Demo Teams, Divisional Clinic Leaders, Examiners, Vice Presidents, etc. – the organization is filled with talent and leadership to fulfill this charter. However, in this “top-down” process of passing along information and connecting with the membership, the organization is only able to actually “touch” a certain number of instructors a certain amount of times over any given season. A developing instructor will spend vastly more days on the hill at their resort and school compared to spending some, if any time, connecting with the organization.

Where the “bottom-up” collides with the “top-down” is squarely at the role of the Training Director. The TD is at the epicenter of instructors wanting mentoring and guidance to become better while also being the critical link for PSIA to pass through what’s intended to be valuable information; educational products and new practices to the membership. The TD also functions as the person that takes perhaps general information from PSIA, which applies to a variety of situations, and tailors the information and message to what applies specifically to their school’s program and makes it more real for their staff. While PSIA constructs models and concepts and conveys the information through seminars and symposiums, it’s the TD who helps the instructor practice within the framework of the models, explore the concepts and test their boundaries, and does so on a routine basis to help instructors measure progress and set new goals.

PSIA-NW feels strongly that it can only be successful in helping members by partnering with the TDs. We know that a TD’s opinion of the value of membership will influence their staff’s opinion of membership. A TD’s understanding of performance and teaching concepts will affect their staff’s learning of these concepts. And, a TD’s passion to grow professionally will affect their staff’s inspiration and effort to grow professionally. As a leader within PSIA-NW, I understand that while in any given year I may meet hundreds of you, it’s TDs throughout the NW that meet all of you – everyone has a TD whether or not they read a newsletter, go to a clinic, review a national manual or aspire to take an exam.

Therefore, for the health of our industry, the vitality of our organization and the benefit to you as an instructor, it’s critical that our organization does its best to support TDs - that we help them help you. It’s important that schools do their best to assign the TD role to those on their staff that can put the extra time and energy that goes beyond just getting through the operational schedule for a school and requires good training sessions and even extra-curricular mentoring. And it’s important that you do your best to challenge your TD to be an advocate, a guide and a teacher for you and your needs. However you define success in the snowsport education business, I bet you’ll find that the most successful schools have dynamic and dedicated people in the TD role. If this is true within your school, reward these people with a little change of MVP as they are, in my mind, in the Most Valuable Position to help us all be successful.