USSA Announces Training Partnership Programs

By Published On: February 28th, 2017Comments Off on USSA Announces Training Partnership Programs

Thanks to newly announced collaborative partnerships between the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association (USSA) and its leading clubs, academy programs, resorts and sport performance facilities, young racers from coast to coast will now have more opportunities than ever to hone their skills at some of the best snowsports venues in the country.

The USSA has announced a four-level program to provide low-cost regional training opportunities through co-branding with partners as either U.S. Ski and Snowboard Team Development Sites, U.S. Ski and Snowboard Team Training Sites, U.S. Ski and Snowboard Team High Performance Centers, or as a U.S. Ski and Snowboard Team Certified Center of Excellence.

“Our U.S. skiers and snowboarders have long benefitted from the efforts and generosity of clubs, academies, resorts and individuals across the nation,” says USSA President and CEO Tiger Shaw. “Collectively, these formal and informal partnerships have enabled the raising of our talented young athletes village by village, over many decades.”

Shaw explains that these partnerships are a way of formally recognizing the relationships that have existed for decades in one form or another between the USSA, clubs, and resorts across the country.

Speaking of development sites and high performance centers in particular, the aim is to provide regional training projects for elite-level junior athletes at a greatly reduced cost.

“When a kid is skiing well and coming up through their club and they get invited to a regional camp, instead of us saying that it’s $1,500, we can say it’s $150 for a week of training,” Shaw says. “As a development site, it requires that 20 days of training a year for groups up to 30 in size with subsidized housing and food be provided. It’s not for everyone because you have to have a lot of resources that you control. We want these sites to be a regional resource where anyone who is emerging as an elite athlete can go and train with the other best athletes in the region.”

These partnerships are offered to USSA Certified Gold and Silver level clubs as well as ski and snowboard areas that provide unique on and off-snow training facilities and opportunities for club, regional, and national teams.

“We can push down into the club system what we are learning at the World Cup level.”
– Tiger Shaw

Among the new programs are initiatives to decentralize some of the knowledge of the USSA Center of Excellence in Park City, Utah, at regional locations via certified high performance centers.

“Through our work at the Center of Excellence, we have developed a remarkable catalog of data and education through the work we do with elite national team athletes,” said USSA High Performance Director Troy Taylor. “These partnerships are a platform for us to share our information with clubs, but even more importantly, it’s designed to start an exchange of information from our very knowledgeable club programs with each other; especially as we add more regional high performance centers, we look to them to actively engage with each other.”

According to Shaw, coaches from clubs that do not have full-time trainers and conditioning staff can periodically visit high performance centers and receive education that they can then use to develop off-snow programs for their athletes.

“We can push down into the club system what we are learning at the World Cup level,” adds Shaw. “At the same time, innovation and evolution that occurs at the club level can come to us an be part of the program for the next year, so the innovation goes both ways.”

Some of these newly announced partnerships include Green Mountain Valley School and its GMVS Racing Performance Center; Burke Mountain Academy and the Ronnie Berlack Center; the Mittersill race and training center at Cannon Mountain, N.H.; the U.S. Ski Team’s alpine training base in Soelden, Austria; the U.S. Ski Team Speed Center at Copper Mountain, Colo.; Southern Hemisphere training in Ohau, New Zealand; the Unbound terrain park at Mammoth Mountain, Calif.; Deer Valley Resort in Park City, Utah; and Timberline Lodge on Mt. Hood.

SkiRacing.com is a media partner with USSA.

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About the Author: Sean Higgins

A Lake Tahoe native and University of Vermont graduate, Higgins was a member of the Catamounts' 2012 NCAA title winning squad and earned first team All-American honors in 2013. Prior to coming to Ski Racing Media, he coached U14s for the Squaw Valley Ski Team.