2020 Season Recruitment / One Event Waiver process has changed

by Keven Dubinsky | Oct 30, 2019 | Member News

In previous seasons the CSA recruitment waiver for club recruitment events was generated in generally 2-3 days by emailing the request to Keven @ BC Alpine.  For this season the process has changed and the requests must go through Alpine Canada directly and using a special form that has been shared on BC Alpine's website.

The document titled "2019-2020 One-Event Waiver Document.pdf" can be found in BC Alpine's files under Event Files, then Insurance and Sanction or by clicking here: http://bcalpine.com/files/Event_Files/Insurance_and_Sanction_Forms/

Please be sure to have requests created well in advance to your events as it may take 2 weeks to get the certificates issued.

Excerpt from the document:

To allow clubs to open their doors to new members or new programs in which they are offering (I.e. ski cross) the CSA has approved a release waiver which will allow nonmembers the opportunity to participate in one event per season, hosted by a sanctioned ski club.

There are specific requirements in which must be fulfilled in order for the waiver program to be implemented in the club and the event, can only be approved by the CSA.

The below questions must be answered in full and it is understood that there may be additional information required depending on the type of event and location. To ensure that all waivers can be created and delivered to the club(s), a minimum of two weeks notice should be provided allowing for creation and or and additional information to be delivered.

Please ensure that each question is answered with as much details as possible to eliminate further questions and delays in the return of the waiver.

If there are any further questions in relation to the one event waiver program, please connect with Alpine Canada at insurance@alpinecanada.org 

BC Alpine excited to introduce new Coach Education Manager for 2019/2020

by Kathy Stahr | Oct 8, 2019 | Member News

Please join us in welcoming John Newton to the BC Alpine stafff in his new role as Coach Education Manager. Coach Education is a priority for BC Alpine, and the quality of our club programs relies heavily on the relationship between coaches, athletes and the level of coaching provided.

"We are thrilled to get the Coach Education position established, and were impressed by the many qualified candidates who applied for the job, said BC Alpine CEO Anders Hestdalen. "John has a great vision for his new role, and together with the rest of the BC Alpine staff, we look forward to making big improvements to coach education and offering even more support to our clubs."

Our task is to provide coaches with the tools required to deliver high quality programs, fulfilling our vision to develop world class athletes and inspire skiers for life. Our goal is to offer the best coach education delivery in Canada. Newton will implement and coordinate BC Alpine´s development programs, i.e. grassroots program assessment, entry level, development level and parent education. Newton will also be responsible for communicating coach development opportunities.

"I am extremely excited to have John joining the BC Alpine team." said Johnny Crichton, BC Alpine VP. "In the process of delivering and managing the EL courses, John will be meeting with club coaches and parents around the province. We know John's work throughout the season will have a positive and lasting impact on our membership and club programs!"

John grew up in Invermere BC, raced with the Windermere Valley Ski Club and now lives in Vernon with his wife Julia and one year old son Lewis on a small hobby farm with their cows and chickens. In addition to his skiing skills, John is a talented drummer who somehow finds time to play and record music!

"I look forward to being a part of the team at BC Alpine and working with coaches as they pursue their coaching goals," said Newton. "Over the past several seasons I have worked with coaches as a mentor/evaluator and facilitator whenever my schedule allowed. As I move into this new role I will be focusing my full attention on coach education and am excited by the opportunities it presents."

Welcome to the team, John! 

John can be reached at johnn@bcalpine.com

Preseason suggestions, tips and information from Phoenix Sports Technology

by Keven Dubinsky | Oct 4, 2019 | Member News

With snow already falling at some of our hills, the good crew down at Phoenix Sport Technology have provided us a fantastic document to circulate to our clubs and members, mainly those involved in timing races.  In it they've included tips and suggestions, reminders and general light-hearted advice to help you get back into the full swing of things including reminders of things to check out before the snow gets too deep.

Please download and distribute the pdf found below, and make sure you take stock of the equipment your club is using early as ordering replacement parts often takes time, so waiting for the week before a race may be too late! 🙂

Preseason suggestions Phoenix Sports Technology 9-30-19.pdf

Ski community mourns national ski cross & BC Ski Team alumna Mikayla Martin

by Kathy Stahr | Oct 2, 2019 | Member News

READ FULL ALPINE CANADA NEWS RELEASE

BC Team Training Group Stories – Summer and Chile Update by Coach Morgan

by Kathy Stahr | Sep 30, 2019 | Member News

Chile 2019 – Prologue

Here we are, back together following BCST as they navigate the seasons together. This trip in particular has been a long time in the making. Not meaning the weeks of planning done by Nick, although that’s been it’s own vigorous process. It started months ago when everyone’s thoughts were far removed from packing their bags and checking in for the long flight south. Tired perhaps from a long winter or maybe more hungry than ever to achieve the things that eluded them when the last course of the season had been torn down. The finality of the last race sinks in differently for most, but to start a new chapter you must first end the one you are in. This end to a season is inevitable, if not always welcome.

The new start comes in your off time. Your motivation gets a gut check during those few weeks. If it’s a yes, then you start to form an understanding of what you think you are willing to give, the kind of effort you think you are going to put in. All the good intentions you have are fresh and at the forefront of your mind. Then the break ends.

For us things pick back up on the Whistler T-bars, a taster of sorts and not exactly a normal feeling camp. Mid-summer snowfield skiing, when it’s full on bike season in the valley, gives it a strange sensation unlike when you are traveling for a camp. What a camp like that does do (outside of the actual training and habit making) is give the team a pretty good sense of if this is what they want to do, or only what they thought they wanted.

Make it through that and you’re into sweating season. (This gets ranty for a sec) For many that means it’s time to start talking about grinding. Spending some quality time in the pain cave. You know, being “gritty” and making sure to hashtag how you work. If you’re actually gritty as hell you’re too busy with your head down working your butt off to bother. You’re too out of breath to make sure the world hears about how you’re “grinding” and too busy trying to make yourself into something better to stop and get the flattering angle.

Make it to mid July still doing the things you thought you’d be willing to do way back in April when this all started then you are right on track. If that’s where you are at you are also feeling a little itch. Thoughts about putting all this sweat to use begin to materialize. August still needs to come and go though first. Training continues and that little itch becomes excitement and anticipation. The whole team gets it at some point or another, the moment you start being very much so conscious of how many days until it’s time to ski. 5…4…3…2…1… Get me on the plane, it’s time to buckle down and start the build to race season.

Chile – 2019/2020

I suppose when you have a prologue then what comes next is just the story. Perhaps a prologue even warrants some sort of epic tale of heroism and struggle. I don’t know about all that, but I do know that the BSCT/BCSTG has spent the last few weeks writing their own story here in Chile. For each person the plot has it’s own subtleties but they are all unavoidably intertwined while living life on the road. Where to start? The differences or similarities?  Those things that can’t be helped other than to be shared or the small moments that give each person their own subplot to this “choose you own adventure”?

I’ll go with glue and magnets, honey and duct tape, gum and spider webs, this hotel and the common space it holds… a far reaching set of analogies and a far cry from my best work but to arrive at the point, we are stuck at this hotel… It’s a bit of a good news bad news situation. Good first: the Alto Nevados kills it with lunch and dinner, which is a luxury at Chilean ski resorts. It provides rooms that look like the misbegotten love child between European and western hotels (that’s actually a nice thing). The views at sun up and sun down are stunning here at 2000 meters and the team has barely missed a single one. Now this is a positive from my point of view and I’m sure it could be up for some debate amongst the crew, but the internet is god awful and confined to all of two and a half rooms. Screen time is down across the board and I’ll be damned but the evenings have been filled in part with conversations and card games, uninterrupted by the cry of social media. It would be a lie to say it’s not still present, but a small respite is a large victory. The bad comes in the form of some relatively small inconveniences. Each room in this hotel, even if it’s not separated by a door is a different temperature… it makes no sense and I’m sure would baffle scientist the world over. -10 degrees at night and your windows are wide open, + a million degrees in your room. Go into the hall and expect another massive swing in temp. The afternoons are 20 and gorgeous, right until you walk into the dining hall where it’s wool socks and sweater weather. The less first world bit of bad news is this hotel is also somewhat escape proof. Remembering that there are no restaurants, corner stores, or leisure activities of any kind to be found you are essentially tied to the hotel if you aren’t planning of dying of thirst and starvation. What makes it escape proof is location more than anything. Built on a plateau half way up the mountain any walk or jog to take in the fresh air is met by a steep incline or an equally steep decline. Hello spin bikes.

Now you have a sense of our home base this month. All you have to imagine after that is being surrounded by the same people every waking minute. More inescapable and more things shared. Lucky for us, the crew is meshing and they are unified by another thing: the mutual exhaustion they feel from pushing long demanding days together. Needless to say, everyone has a daily nap schedule and who knows what will happen if they miss too many of those.

I picked “choose your own adventure” as my book reference of choice because in a much less morbid way, that is what we are having the team do each day. As the staff we are doing all we can to script this groups day, camp, and season. Knowing the possible outcomes prior to ever setting foot on snow. No we don’t have a crystal ball, and no way we are egotistical enough to assume the mantle of gods gift to ski coaching. But do the right things, in the right environment, minding the details day after day after day and the outcome is going to be close to where you want to land.  So instead of taking option A, flipping to page 97 and going into the woods to investigate a strange sound with nothing but your toothbrush, then inevitably getting eaten by some swamp creature and starting the book over again only to find your demise another thousand ways over. The athletes are choosing their own fate run to run and gate to gate, remembering what lead them further than last time and what choice is a sure bet to end up back at the beginning. The way you get through those stupid books is a sharp memory, good recall, and patience. Patience is not to be confused with the ability to blindly stumble along for longer than most. That I suppose is aimlessness, and it’s the demise of many a wannabe ski racer.

When we are skiing are they making the right choices? Or at least the righter choices? I’ll waffle and say yes and no. The “yes” coming from improvements shown and the “no” coming from the standard of this team, which is in part also the level of potential shown in this group. Without drowning you in too much detail I’ll say the bulk of the team is skiing with foreign and new/adapted feelings on their skis right now. The mid point in change where they are putting what they have conceptualized into action, and having that translate into a feeling. Then the feelings come with stronger resolve and after that it’s gone from habit breaking to habit forming and we’re rolling.

Change of pace real quick. What do I know about volcanoes?  We are on one. They have lava. It’s the idea place to make some kind of sacrifice. That’s about it. You may remember from last year that this one coughs smoke, steam, and ashes on the daily. Perhaps it was juvenile but both Ashman and I were really hoping that one of these mornings we would be going up the lift and the top of the volcano would be glowing and fiery, I mean how cool would that be?! Then it hacked up plumes of ash at a rate we hadn’t seen before. Strange, yes, but none of the staff were running for the hills and the level of concern was very low. Too low even… first query on google was titled “Volcano at Thermas de Chillan shows most activity since 2015 eruption”. Ominous much? But now we are head first into the rabbit hole and reading all about the possibility of impending doom. Next was deciphering that it was an amber alert in volcanologist terms and that, that has nothing to do with children. Soon we had a video of molten rock oozing out of the back of our volcano. Still not too much stress, but of course attached to the video with the magma was a photo headed “lava flow zones”. Wait now, this can’t be right, they built the hotel and the one road in or out directly in the flow zone? Of course they did… Now I’m just speculating but this all coincided with the Masters world cup. Coincidence that the mountain was threatening to pop it’s top (a gentle pop I’m sure, but a pop none the less) at the same time as what seemed like all the masters in the world were in attendance? Well I kid you not, the “world cup” ended and the next day the yellow volcanologist helicopters stopped there twice daily observations of the mountain and the threat level was recued to yellow. I will let you draw your own conclusions.

Chile camp has almost reached its conclusion for us, which means the end is as far away as it’s ever felt. The team is still going strong though and on the backs of hard work and determination the crew will finish strong.

This entry I will leave you with something a little different,

Sage wisdom, collected from the last few weeks.

• Don’t worry, there is a full moon. It’s always clear weather on the full moon. (It was currently dumping 40cms on us, the moon didn’t stop it)
• This kind of volcano doesn’t have lava, I’ve seen a show on discovery, it’s not shaped the same way as the lava kind of volcanos

(Literally watching a video of molten rock coming out of it)

 – I’m staying away from the seafood here, it’s a safe bet. (First person to get sick… yeah okay, it was only a cold, but still. Meanwhile everyone is eating the seafood every meal every day, totally fine.)

~ Submitted by BC Ski Team Coach Morgan Pridy

PHOTOS ABOVE:
1.  Author Morgan Pridy, BC Team Coach
2. BC Team Training Group en route to Chile (l to r back row) Frances MacDonald, Gerrit van Soest, Heiko Ihns, Marcus Athans; (l to r front row) Ella Renzoni, Tait Jordan, Nathan Romanin, Asher Jordan
3. Marcus Athans GS
4. Active Volcano in Chile with BCST
 

Training group athletes in Chile with Head Coach Nick Cooper and Coaches Ryan Jazic and Morgan Pridy:

• Frances MacDonald, Grouse Mountain Tyee Ski Club – 1999

• Ella Renzoni, Whistler Mountain Ski Club – 2000

• Marcus Athans, Apex Ski Club/Okanagan Ski Team – 2000

• Asher Jordan, Whistler Mountain Ski Club – 1999

• Gerrit van Soest, Vernon Ski Club/Okanagan Ski Team – 2001

• Nathan Romanin, Whistler Mountain Ski Club – 2001

• Tait Jordan, Whistler Mountain Ski Club – 2002

• Heiko Ihns, Red Mountain Racers – 2002 

7th Alpine Athletic Champion U16 Challenge Invites the Province to Compete

by Keven Dubinsky | Sep 27, 2019 | Member News

This highly successful U16 athletic challenge which has historically only been available to clubs in the coast zone has opened up it's entry for it's 7th season to the entire province!

The event features four events including both indoor and outdoor challenges to test an athlete's balance, agility, coordination, edurance and more.  Entry is free, there are plenty of draw prizes and awards to the top 3 male and top 3 female athletes.

For more information or to sign up visit the even on BC Alpine's Calendar.