Q&A with U.S. men's alpine coach Phil McNichol

It’s been a long season, but another successful one for the U.S. men’s alpine team. Despite some post-Christmas struggles and some challenging personalities, the team managed double digits in podiums and a smattering of victories. SR’s Hank McKee sat down with head men’s coach Phil McNichol at U.S. alpine nationals to touch on a number of topics. Highlights of the interview appear in the April 30 edition of Ski Racing magazine. Here is a more complete interview.

Ski Racing: Your contract is up. Are you coming back for another year?
Phil McNichol: I’ve been struggling with that for a while, since the conclusion of ’06, and on many fronts — my family life, my personal life. Right now we’re in a transition, probably more so than typically what our transition is post-Olympics. I worked hard to get through that transition season and keep things consistent and stable, but you can’t avoid the transition whether you actually change staff, or whether I leave or stay, there is a transition which needs to occur. You need to retool, or recycle, for the next go. I’m struggling a little bit with the direction, with where we should be heading.
    I want to do the right thing for the team, I want to do the right thing for myself, so … at this point I’m undecided. I do best when I just focus on my job. Right now the spring is busy and I have a lot to do to in any regard if I’m going to around and through the spring in terms of re-setting the mechanism. Ninety percent of the season happens in the spring. [That’s when] you cock the hammer and spend the rest of the time pressing the trigger. I can’t really say right now. I’m still working through things.

IT'S BEEN A LONG SEASON, but another successful one for the U.S. men’s alpine team. Despite some post-Christmas struggles and some challenging personalities, the team managed double digits in podiums and a smattering of victories. SR’s Hank McKee sat down with head men’s coach Phil McNichol at U.S. alpine nationals to touch on a number of topics. Highlights of the interview appear in the April 30 edition of Ski Racing magazine. Here is a more complete interview.

Ski Racing: Your contract is up. Are you coming back for another year?
Phil McNichol: I’ve been struggling with that for a while, since the conclusion of ’06, and on many fronts — my family life, my personal life. Right now we’re in a transition, probably more so than typically what our transition is post-Olympics. I worked hard to get through that transition season and keep things consistent and stable, but you can’t avoid the transition whether you actually change staff, or whether I leave or stay, there is a transition which needs to occur. You need to retool, or recycle, for the next go. I’m struggling a little bit with the direction, with where we should be heading.
    I want to do the right thing for the team, I want to do the right thing for myself, so … at this point I’m undecided. I do best when I just focus on my job. Right now the spring is busy and I have a lot to do to in any regard if I’m going to around and through the spring in terms of re-setting the mechanism. Ninety percent of the season happens in the spring. [That’s when] you cock the hammer and spend the rest of the time pressing the trigger. I can’t really say right now. I’m still working through things.

SR: You have had, arguably, the most successful run for a men’s team — not counting the pair of twins.
PM: It is. I checked.

SR: How do you orchestrate that?
PM: If I knew that, I could be truly content. It’s a bit of a recipe that’s hard to know. Much of it is calculated and determined, much of it is — I don’t want to say luck — you pursue certain things, and if you are fortunate enough, some of it comes together. It is a delicate arrangement: the right people, doing the right things for the right amount of time. It’s been a joy to be a part of it, and bringing those elements in synch. And also, great athletes are a component. I’ve always said we’ve had great athletes. I think as soon as you allow yourself to think that athletes are a limiting factor, you discredit the whole process. Granted, we have had exceptional athletes — the Bode Millers, the Phil Mahres, the Daron Rahlves, Bill Johnsons and Tommy Moes, they only come around every so often. They only come through the system when [the system] is hitting on all cylinders. And it has been.
    My first move as a head coach was to put Johno [McBride] in a position of leadership with me, and he and I coached together our whole career. There’s a certain chemistry there that’s almost unquantifiable, and I think we built on that in terms of other decisions in personnel. He was also a great sounding board for me both professionally and personally. We made a lot of mistakes also along the way, and I’ve always been one to go about things in a manner which one could say was error-prone. But I learn as much or more from my mistakes as I do from my success. That’s how I do things. I push and I charge, and sometimes I shoot first and ask questions later.

SR: Are you a Taurus?
PM: A Leo.
[Former U.S. men’s head coach Bill] Egan did many things right. And I think, without discrediting Bill, he didn’t have maybe everything together. He spent most of his time developing a certain thing on the speed side which one could say was quite remarkable. I was able to be more fortunate and was able to do that across the whole program. … And Jesse [Hunt] also did tremendous things which I was able to build upon. I did things my way and tweaked things around and again it was a culmination of keeping the right people, moving people around to the right situation and giving them enough room to succeed.  Life, and sport, which is a mirror of that, is just a balance of discipline and flexibility. I erred on the side of too flexible. I erred on the side of too staunch, or too strict. But I’m always trying to figure out the right dance. By no means have I got it all right. But I got it pretty damned good.
    One of things that makes me nervous the most — we can’t dilly-dally, or fiddle with things which are somewhat mysterious. Yeah, there are certain principles that we put in place, like skiing comes first, not fitness; quality is as important as volume; that every athlete is an individual and needs an individual approach. Yet, you have to instill the group effort to success in that we do this together, and we do that only to make it better for you. We’re just a collection of individuals and if you service the individual, you make a better team, at least in this sport, in my opinion. If you try to service the team, sometimes you don’t get to the same end. Again, it’s a balance. I’ve been able to thread that needle, but it’s very tenuous. I worry that we can keep doing that.

SR: Do you juggle?
PM: I do. Chainsaws. And I’ve caught many by the blade. But I keep trying.

SR: What’s your personal record for length of time in ski boots?
PM: In one single span? New Zealand one time, I remember putting boots on in the parking lot as the sun was coming up, so I’d say before 8 o’
clock. We watered that night and had dinner that night in our ski boots at midnight, so …

SR: We can do the math. It’s unfair to ask for names of favorite athletes. So what have your favorites had in common?
PM: That’s a great question. I’ve had many, and those I hold the fondest are athletes I’ve been around the longest. So I have had relationships which far exceed the coach-athlete relationship.
Are there certain traits about those guys? They’re very different people, many of them. They are all strong individuals, that’s for sure. Not all of them have been great athletes but have reached a level that have the casual onlooker say that was a great skier. They could all deal with adversity and keep things in perspective.
    I have to deal with new guys as a friend, as a father, as a coach. I don’t look at myself as a mentor. You try to coach your athletes to be good people and fast ski racers. You hope to keep it all in perspective. Life is a big mystery and there’s a lot going on, and to be judgmental or jump to conclusions or to look at the wrong thing is an easy shortcoming in the journey. All the kids I’ve grown to come really close to have had the ability to look beyond, to see who they are and see things for what they can be, not necessarily what you think they are. There are maybe six or seven of the hundred I’ve been involved with.

SR: Have you ever treated unfairly by the media?
PM: If being taken literally is being treated unfair, I have been taken advantage of to a great extent.
    One of my problems is I’m very open. I wear my emotions on my sleeve, as some people say, and I say what I think. I tell people too much. I tell the guys too much sometimes. I tell the other coaches too much sometimes. I’ve never really been able to play that role. … I’ve worked with a lot of people who do it well. They play their cards close to their chest. They keep people in the dark, and I see that sometimes as a strong attribute, but for me I run with my strength and I don’t fight who I am, I’m honest and I tell people the way it is and let the cards fall. I think many athletes have learned to respect that. With some athletes it has created issues. It has created issues with my employer. It’s created issues with the media. It created issues in many, many facets. As I continually grow and learn, there’s a certain temperament and measure of which you should provide honest information. Clearly in this business with the media, in light of how popular we’ve gotten and in terms of how interesting some individuals have become, you have to be cautious. And I’ve learned that. I can be, I wouldn’t say reckless, but … I wouldn’t say I’ve been mistreated by the media.
    The whole Olympic thing — I really don’t think the media was wrong. It’s just that the general spin on things — it was hero to zero so fast, I was caught off-guard with it. I may have jumped on the boat too much. If I look back, I think I was probably overconfident personally going into the Olympics. I think I let my expectations run a little bit and didn’t treat the Olympics with the respect due in terms of how hard it is to medal at the Games. And things like that. For the masses of the media, all the love went away really quick. I don’t know if I felt mistreated, but I definitely felt unloved. And that was sad for me, because it was an amazing group of guys and an amazing group of accomplishments. I look at Ted winning the first gold medal for the men in 12 years, and now in hindsight I can look at what a truly remarkable accomplishment just that was.
    And still, just bringing the strongest, best-prepared team to the Olympics in U.S. history, the fact that we didn't have the ’84 replication, or done what could have been, it’s not really the issue sometimes. Even I would say that. Those with the sword, or the pen, were definitely taking shots.

SR: Judging from the talent coming to the team, are the development programs doing their job?
PM: Development is a complex issue. We’ve tried many different approaches, as you well know. Right now, we still have good talent, we still are moving guys well. We’re not, in my opinion, as deep as we need to be and again, one of our limitations is just numbers. It’s not that we don’t have enough people ski racing or enough talented people. You always have to improve that if you can. How you do that is a whole other discussion. But you have to take what you have and optimize. You need a lot of numbers to push out more of the best. We find ourselves fluctuating back and forth on how many we can bring through cycle to cycle. You see a cyclical effect in how many good athletes come along, and you see a cyclical effect in how many you can support and how many you can bring along, how many you can start with to get so many at the top. And all these cycles aren’t in opposition, but sometimes they all roll together and you can have some big up and downs. I think currently we’re doing some really good things with the national team in terms of selection, in terms of what we do with the athletes when we get them — it’s probably the best it’s ever been.
    Would I like to see more athletes coming through? Of course, but we have limitations. You have to start with a big system. You look at other countries, other sports, and generally, the bigger the base, the more people you have standing up on top of the pyramid. We struggle with this concept. Our current tact is to drive education and drive development through the regions and the local programs. I personally feel that as a country we’re too divided. We have too many special-interest groups and too many facets, or people, or programs or what have you. We need consolidation. You need a system. People come back and say, “Well, that’s just not the American way, that’s too socialistic or that’s too Eastern bloc.” I don't know. I’m just telling you what I think.
    Everyone talks about needing patience. You need to have athletes to build athletes. You need money to make money and all that kind of stuff. You need to have the best athletes together and our system isn’t designed for that. Once you drop further and further down the system, all the clubs are in business, and the regions are in power in a certain way. I think the regional structure could be fortified in a manner to bring the best athletes together. In the East, a true Eastern team would require all the academies to lay down their ownership so to speak, and that’s a big step. To really pool their resources to get their best athletes, to actually operate as one team, I don’t know if that’s possible, but to me, conceptually, if we go with that model … we’ve tried the other model where you pull all the best athletes at a young age to make sure they’re together and the regions and the clubs yell they don’t have the pace, they don’t have the density to pull the next level forward. We have to figure that thing out. We need a strong national program. The bigger the base, the bigger the pyramid. It’s a resource problem. But, as you drop down, you have to replicate the consolidation of talent and resources all the way through.
    You can evaluate other sports and other federations and other nations. Those systems, those models are out there. We’re trying. We’re definitely tighter as a country with folks in on the right stuff.
    I stood at the slalom here [at nationals], I watched the first 15 to 20 guys come down the hill and in slalom it’s better. Even though we&rsquo
;re struggling on the World Cup right now, as a nation, slalom is better. It wasn’t too many nationals ago that I watched the field ski, and outside of the half-dozen national team skiers in the field, it was pathetic in terms of tactics and technique that was going on. [Today’s] slalom is better. It’s way better. In terms of execution, in terms of tactics that I was seeing, I think we’re making an impact with the right information coming down in terms of people buying in. There’s far more agreement on what the national team is doing, far more agreement in technique, far more acceptance of what’s trying to be taught, educated, passed along. The system is still extremely proprietary until at least the development team or further. That really narrows our base.
    The national team, based on what I know, will never be able to carry the base of that pyramid. We’ve gone back to the clubs and regions to partner up on that. It just now needs to continue to work on having a less proprietary setup.

SR: Weeks on the road, and is there a ski area anywhere you would consider for a vacation?
PM: I would say one of the things I contemplate the most is if I were to shuffle or sidestep away from what I’m currently doing, would I ever ski again?

SR: At all?
PM: Yes, at all. I’m still young. I’ve been coaching over 20 years. I’ve spent half my life in ski boots in this business, close to it. I didn’t grow up as a great ski racer. I ski raced, but I never seized the dream until I was a ski coach. I’ve lived that dream long and hard to get where I am and I’ve enjoyed every freezing moment of it. I don’t know if I can come back and find the passion in skiing that I once had. I’ve been skiing with my son and it’s great. It’s there, I’m sure I could find it. But if I walked out the industry, I don’t know how much skiing I would do.
    I was a big windsurfer. When I look at kitesailing I say, ‘God, I'd like to do that … naww, I’m not going to do that because I’d have all the s—.’ I’m an obsessive compulsive and that’s the way I am at my job, at my play. You can get a lot out of that, but you have got to be careful about what you get yourself into.
    If I were to take a ski vacation … when I talk to people who actually do that, I tell many people, especially if from the East Coast, why the heck are you flying to Colorado or Utah and spending the kind of money that you are, when you could get on a plane and find yourself a sub-thousand dollar ticket to Munich or Milan and go into the Dolomites or into Austria and really have a kick-ass vacation. By all means if you want to spend the same money, go nuts. But you’ll get a lot more for it. But I’ve never had that kind of money. I would probably go to St. Anton, or somewhere in the Dolomites. I really like the Dolomites. Or to Taos, New Mexico. I used to ski there when I coached out of Flagstaff, so I might go back and stay at the St. Bernard with my brothers and climb the ridge and ski the ridge. I could probably do that.
    How many weeks on the road? I don’t know. I’ve tapered back. I miss a few World Cups every year, but I’m still skiing. It’s a long time. I think if you add up all my time not doing ski stuff it’s probably four months. counting the stolen day here and there. And that’s probably being generous. It’s over 200, less than 250 days on the road.

SR: Realizing that Bode is a unique individual — from my viewpoint he seems like a team player, course reports, hanging in the base lodge. … Is that right, and what types of problems does his popularity present? Or that of any superstar, for that matter?
PM: Daron [Rahlves] was a superstar in one way and Bode is a superstar in the way that he is.
He is loved, and immortalized by almost everybody. Yeah, there’s probably a part of the ski world which is frustrated with Bode … but he is loved in the rockstarish, Beatles kind of way: “I don’t care how you ski, I don’t care what you say, I love that kid.” With Daron, on the other hand, he didn’t have the fanatical following, he had a more traditional sort. “The guy is a great skier, I love the way he skis, I love the way he acts.” And he had a strong fellowship, but Bode has fanatic fans. He is endeared by so many. He’s unique in that sense, and if we’ll ever have another Bode Miller on the U.S. Ski Team or in skiing for that matter, I don’t know. Yes, as a team, it presents problems when you have kids coming into the hotel everywhere and requests for this and that. But it has opened as many doors as it has created headaches, and that’s OK.
    I’m not going to kid you, being popular is pretty cool. Being successful and having people know who you are and having people look at your team and your athletes and what you do as admirable and successful, is pretty damned nice and I’ve enjoyed the s— out of it. Bode is a particularly unique guy because he has a love-hate relationship with his fame. And I don’t think he understands it. He is a man definitely in turmoil and conflict over it. In many ways he thrives on it and in many ways he hates it. As we get to the team thing … he has changed and evolved so substantially and so vastly over his career and for sure the last seven to five years that I’ve been the head coach. Whether he accepts it, or whether I understand it, it doesn't matter. He is very different than he was in 2002. He really enjoys the team, he enjoys people being around him. Just as he enjoys, as I see it, the part of the popularity is being popular, what he hates is how it manifests itself. If he can control it he loves it. He’s the guy people look up to, but you can’t control people.

SR: So the team is a bit of a sanctuary for him?
PM: Yeah, he loves the team thing when it’s people looking up to him and he can control it, especially the young guys that he can have more impact on. He thrives on a situation he can control. I’m not saying he is a control freak , but for sure, my impression in watching him is he really hates when the whole thing comes together, but he likes having all that at his disposal. And when he can play with it, basically work it, and be the pied piper, then it’s enjoyable. He likes being involved with the guys, but is he a team player? Is he really helping the team? I question that, I question where he is. He’s evolved to where he’s bigger than the team, and if you deal with teams, you deal with a collection of individuals with a single purpose. Even if that purpose is to better themselves as individuals, which is our game as a team. When the individual becomes bigger than the team, it poses certain problems. I think he has kind of evolved to a place where it is very hard for him to be a team player. Hell, he has a hard time managing anything in terms of his life, his stuff. He’s got a lot going on. Any relationship — which I think Bode will continue to learn — requires a lot of work, a lot of sacrifice and give and take. I imagine Bode perceives he has given more than he has ever received, and that’s again his perspective I think on many things, and many people have that view because you can only perceive things through your own windscreen. He’s a challenge to the team. He’s great with the guys and great in many, many, many, many things. And always, to this day, he has been an attribute and that’s why we’ve worked hard — and I won’t kid you, it hasn’t been easy to keep this thing even close to the center lines &mda
sh; but he’s grown to a place where … I got called out for making a comments about Bode leaving the team back in ’06. Maybe this is one of the times I was wrongly taken advantage of or whatever. I said it was time for Bode to evaluate if he wanted to be on the team. It’s a big responsibility, there’s a lot that goes into that and you have to do a lot of stuff probably you don’t want to do and control a lot of things you could otherwise let go of. And sometimes he loses sight of that.
His stardom, we have to agree at least that it is going on. He has to make the decisions, not us necessarily saying, ‘Hey, hit the road, it's what do you want to do?’ Because you really have to call the question on some stuff or this really has to be done this way. Yeah I can even agree maybe it’s not the greatest thing. But it is the thing.

SR: How many numbers on your cell phone?
PM: Oh my god … 2,500. I manage my cell phone, I actually sync my outlook. And in my coaching career, I manage my contacts by town. Seriously. Say you are at some race in Abtenau and then in Schruns. I could never remember what was that motel we stayed in A-B-C, so I just go to Abtenau and then usually have two hotels listed or three depending on how many times I’ve been there. Hotel, lift supervisor, or whatever. The last five years has been the gravy train, my German has gotten much worse and the hotels are all laid out for you. But I have a lot of phone numbers.

SR: You are leading a large group in different countries, hell, different continents. And they all have you to turn to. Who do you turn to?
PM: Johno. As head coach, I probably have empowered the discipline coaches far more than they have ever been to run their own groups. I feel sometimes people have thought I was arrogant, or overly ambitious, or obsessively driven as a coach. I don’t know, maybe I was. I always believed in myself and have gone after certain stuff, didn’t work out because of the pay. Life is timing.
    I was stepping out of Intermountain division because I was tired of the politics and things that were going on there, and I was thinking, “OK, I’ve had a good run in ski coaching, maybe it’s time. I got a kid on the way.” And then Aldo [Radamus] talks with me. And Aldo and I were big rivals when he was at Steamboat. So he’s the guy that got me going on the national team as head development coach and that was the hardest job I ever had.
    My guys who work for me, when we talk about the lows, I say “Hey, when I was doing development, when I had to walk 15 miles to school.” I had two groups of guys, hell one year, I had the junior group, and an elite non-junior group of 15 guys. We had a file full of 30 guys who had been accepted for some project or another during the year. Trying to keep tabs on who was who and what was going on by myself with Aldo coming in and helping, but also he would go over with the girls, so it was often by myself. Then I would still go and do tryouts for Topolino, cover Topolino, so in one year going back and forth with different invitees all through the summer and trying to manage that whole deal, and then off to NorAms and then to Europe with my main team, the junior group, and sent them home, went to Topolino tryouts at Lake Placid, then back to Europe with a different conglomeration of the speed group and junior group, sent them home, picked up the Topolino kids, dropped them off at the airport, did junior worlds, which was in Poland but got canceled on my drive from Vienna. So I went back to Vienna, then to junior worlds at Chamonix, dropped them off, picked up the newcomers trip then went to World Cup Finals with Jesse and the World Cup guys.
    I didn’t even remember who I was coaching.  And then I went to NorAm Finals … and forget service — hell I had the bench … and a different guest coach every trip.