Twenty years ago, most competitive ski clubs shut down when the snow melted. Today, many of them run year-round operations with six- and seven-figure budgets, full-time staff, international travel programs, scholarships, sponsorships, and thousands of family transactions flowing through their books every season.
The sport did not set out to become this complex. It happened because participation grew and expectations rose. What were once seasonal race programs quietly became full-scale organizations. Most of the people running them—often former coaches, volunteers, or parents—were never trained to run a business. They learned by doing it because the show always had to go on.
That reality gave birth to Ski Club Pro.
A coach inside the chaos
Matt Wigdahl did not bring ski club software in from the outside. He grew up racing at Snowbird, returned as a coach, later led development programs, and eventually served on the club’s board and financial committee.
By the late 2000s, he was sitting in meetings where the sport he loved was being strained not by lack of talent, but by administrative overload. Registration systems did not talk to accounting. Spreadsheets filled the gaps. Parents were confused. Staff spent countless hours chasing information instead of supporting athletes.
Ski clubs were not breaking on the hill. They were breaking in the back office.
Wigdahl began building tools for clubs he knew personally, including Snowbird, Snowbasin, and Jackson Hole. These early systems were designed around the realities of ski clubs: season-long programs, multi-athlete households, travel billing, scholarships, and constantly changing schedules.
They were not intended to be products. They were solutions to real operational problems.
By 2013, it was clear the need was not limited to a handful of clubs. Wigdahl productized what he had built and launched Ski Club Pro under his development firm, Lever Pulley. With no marketing budget and no sales team, it spread through the industry by word of mouth.
Two steps forward, one step back
Building software for ski clubs was never simple. Each new feature exposed new edge cases. Each improvement introduced new complexity. Bugs appeared. Clubs became frustrated. Development costs grew.
The early years became a constant cycle of progress followed by setbacks.
By 2020, Wigdahl reached a crossroads. Lever Pulley was winding down. Ski Club Pro had proven there was demand, but it served a small, specialized market while competing with well-funded sports technology companies that did not truly understand ski clubs.
The question became whether continuing to fight uphill made sense—or whether it was time to walk away.
Choosing the harder line
Encouraged by his wife, Jane, Wigdahl chose to keep going. In 2021, Ski Club Pro LLC was formed as a dedicated business focused solely on ski and snowboard organizations.
He recruited Arthur Turlak, a veteran software architect, and Jeremy Rasmussen, a DevOps leader with deep experience in scalable infrastructure.
At that point, the company had little more than a proof-of-concept platform and a small group of loyal clubs. Turlak joined anyway because the problem was real and unsolved.
Together, the team rebuilt Ski Club Pro from the ground up, creating a stable system that handles the financial and operational complexity of ski clubs. They chose to remain self-funded to stay aligned with their customers’ long-term needs rather than rely on outside investors.
From building software to building a community
Once the new platform stabilized, Ski Club Pro addressed the technical problem. The next challenge was growth inside a tight-knit sport where trust matters more than marketing.
Ski racing does not adopt software because of advertising. It adopts it because someone inside the community says it works.
That is where Eric Gomes came in.
Gomes first encountered Ski Club Pro as a customer. All three of his children raced in a program that used the platform. Later, as president and sole administrator of a growing ski club, he relied on it to manage registration, billing, communication, and travel logistics.
During one season, his club grew from just over 100 athletes to nearly 300 without adding staff, because the system absorbed the operational complexity.
As Gomes transitioned out of running his club, Ski Club Pro was ready to expand. With deep industry experience, he now leads business development and customer success for the company.
What Ski Club Pro actually does
Most ski clubs still operate with a patchwork of tools: spreadsheets for rosters, group texts for communication, one system for registration, another for invoicing, and QuickBooks sitting off to the side waiting to be reconciled.
Ski Club Pro was built to replace that patchwork.
It is not a ball-sport platform adapted to snow sports. It is an integrated, purpose-built registration, operations, and financial platform designed around how ski clubs actually function.
When a family registers, Ski Club Pro automatically:
- Places each athlete on the correct team roster
- Adds them to the correct communication groups
- Assigns them to the appropriate travel invoicing groups
Those records update in real time across the platform.
The system integrates directly with QuickBooks Online. It checks for existing households, generates invoices, applies payments, manages payment plans, and keeps financial records current without manual entry. Club administrators can see accurate revenue, balances, and receivables at any moment.
Travel billing—one of the most painful parts of club operations—is handled through roster-based invoicing. Clubs can invoice entire teams at once for coaches’ fees, lodging, transportation, and lift tickets. Parents receive invoices directly and can pay from their inbox or dashboard. When payment is received, QuickBooks automatically closes the invoice.
The platform also includes:
- U.S. Ski & Snowboard validation (SafeSport and background checks)
- Team pages with calendars, rosters, staff, and communication logs
- Event registration that automatically builds rosters and groups
- Custom reporting
- A mobile-first platform (desktop and mobile are identical)
- Optional ski-club-optimized websites
There are no ads. Club and family data belongs to the club.
Keeping the sport accessible
Ski Club Pro exists for a simple reason: When clubs run better, the sport becomes more accessible.
Lower administrative burden reduces payroll strain. Clearer finances reduce surprises for families. Better systems allow clubs to grow without losing their culture—or burning out the people who run them.
Ski Club Pro is not trying to be everything to everyone. It is focused on serving one community well and helping it thrive.
About the Author: SR Staff Report
