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Note: Part I of this article appeared in the September 2014 issue. It chronicles NSP’s struggles to keep up with changes in ski area liability and shifting priorities of resort management, as well as NSP’s internal conflicts and management turmoil. Part I is also available here.

“The National Ski Patrol doesn’t really understand what it is anymore,” a long-time and highly-placed NSP veteran—we’ll call him “Joe”—tells us.

Change is complicated. In the 1980s, as skiing’s legal climate changed, NSP abandoned any pretense of operational control at the resort level and re-classified itself as an educational organization.

Today, given the way that education is delivered, one could argue that the NSP is actually more of a not-for-profit publishing and catalog sales company, printing books that support training and gear for members to use later. Members, through their dues, are effectively shareholders.

Why are these changes important? Because ultimately, it’s up to ski areas themselves to decide whether NSP’s pedagogy, materials and curricula meet their needs.

WHO NEEDS WHOM?

“Much of NSP really believes that ski areas survive because of their patrols,” Joe says. “Even if that’s true, NSP members don’t seem to understand that those patrols don’t need to be affiliated with NSP. Resorts have other options.”

Therein lies part of NSP’s problem: too many members—including recent Board members—still see NSP as something other than what it actually is. Rationally, most understand the change. But emotionally, NSP seems stuck in the ’70s.

How is that possible? Start with tradition and demographics. NSP is graying; nearly half the membership is at least 50, and more than 15 percent is 60-plus. Many, including leadership at all levels, started when NSP still called its own operational shots.

Third, the relationship between frontline volunteers and management at many ski areas remains at a remove, where volunteers assume that their Patrol Director, also a volunteer, is setting policy based on NSP standards.

But beyond its flagship Outdoor Emergency Care (OEC) program, NSP actually provides no standards. Even the description of OEC as a standard is open to interpretation.

Everything else NSP provides is essentially a recommendation. Affiliated resorts have—by active consideration, inertia or ignorance—simply accepted those recommendations.

At many resorts, management happily lets Patrol do its thing so that resort managers can focus on more pressing matters. But by every measure that counts, patrollers are actually agents of resort management, not NSP. Legally, there’s little difference between patrollers and lift operators.

This reality conflicts with NSP’s brand identity. Through marketing partnerships and lobbying efforts, NSP still presents itself to the public—and government—as a unified voice, and the source of safety and security on the slopes.

No wonder people are confused.

STRUCTURAL ISSUES

NSP’s Board members generally rise through local, then regional leadership. They aren’t immune to the belief that NSP still carries operational clout.

The Board has allowed itself to be drawn into regional squabbles and other issues best managed at a local level. It has been known to micromanage the administration on small issues and respond slowly to serious staff errors (one example: though tax-exempt, NSP has been chronically delinquent in filing returns). It has used heavy-handed tactics with critics that might have worked 10 years ago, but not in the social media age.

Board seats were once controlled by the regions. When NSP changed to a national slate, it traded one set of problems for another.

Today, there’s a nominating committee that vets members who express interest in a seat. But not everyone makes the cut, and with the Board in the de facto position of choosing its own membership, charges from dissident members that NSP’s senior leadership is self-serving are easily understood, regardless of whether the accusations are valid.

That’s another part of the problem. Well-functioning not-for-profit (NFP) boards focus on strategic, rather than tactical, issues. They set tone and direction, scrutinize a limited number of key functions, and step back and let staff perform to measureable expectations.

They also recruit and slate candidates based upon specific organizational needs, such as finance, marketing and legal acumen, rather than things like passion, congeniality and years on the job. Passion is important, but not at the expense of the organizational management skills needed to produce continuity.

One generally doesn’t learn those things inside the handles of a toboggan. Yet all too often, NSP has treated Board seats as a form of lifetime achievement award.

Pros in some areas are again questioning the value of affiliation, and some resorts are starting to look at their volunteer rosters and wondering, just as Killington did in 1978, how many are actually contributing—and, in some cases, still physically competent to handle a difficult rescue. There are active patrollers who are well into their 70s.

The aging membership is an issue of which Ed McNamara, NSP’s new Board chair, is keenly aware.

“Volunteerism is different today than it was when many members got started,” he says. “For a lot of people, the economy requires second jobs. Say you join NSP as a student patroller—then you go off to college, and you may be into your 30s before your life allows you to come back. Some ski areas have more applicants than they need. Others don’t have the population base.”

Everyone SAM talked to—including some who requested anonymity—agreed that the OEC program is the jewel in NSP’s crown, and its single greatest asset. As former executive director Tim White puts it, “It’s a great way to get started.”

But there’s comparable—and arguably superior—training available, such as Wilderness EMT (W-EMT).

That’s important because in many states, ski patrols are increasingly viewed as extensions of the EMS network, which means that state-mandated reporting protocols and standards of care are potentially in play.

NSP is aware of this, specifically citing W-EMT in a strategic planning document provided to SAM. McNamara, who heads up an NFP EMS agency in Massachusetts, believes it won’t be an issue, at least short-term, because OEC is calibrated to provide training between the levels of Emergency Medical Response (EMR) training, required of cops and firefighters, and EMT training, the minimum for EMS work.

But how long NSP can fight off efforts requiring patrols to toe the local line isn’t clear, and there are other state concerns. In at least one ski state, a strict interpretation of labor laws suggests that the use of volunteers of any sort by for-profit companies may be unlawful. There are also issues related to workers’ compensation, though McNamara says that NSP works closely with governments in ski states to hammer out those concerns.

RESORT/NSP ISSUES

The NSP’s power base—as defined by its most active voting members—is located in regions with lots of small ski areas, many of them operating lean, and grateful for coverage by volunteers. But companies like Peak Resorts and Snow Time prove that smaller resorts aren’t immune to consolidation and the increased awareness of risk management that entails. How much longer liability underwriters will continue to allow the essentially collegial relationship between resorts and volunteer patrols is an open question.

There are small, independent ski areas asking similar questions. Paul Rauschke, who co-chairs the ski area management program at Colorado Mountain College, has patrolled since 1990 and served on the NSP Board from 2000 to 2004. He’s currently finishing up a sabbatical/consulting project with Ski Cooper (Colo.)—which, like many smaller resorts, essentially ran two patrols: a small pro patrol and a larger volunteer corps.

“It became a two-headed beast,” he says. “Cooper’s general manager got tired of serving as a referee between the groups.”

Rauschke led a restructuring effort that produced one unified patrol, with a professional director reporting to management and a mix of pros and volunteers on the line. About a third of Cooper’s volunteers remained after the change.

“I don’t know if there’s a healthy future for NSP, and I’ve thought about this a lot,” he says. “Compare NSP’s mission statement with that of the Red Cross. I think we’ve forgotten that we’ve got two main customers—in order of priority, the skiing guest, and then the ski areas. Right now, that whole thing has slipped. It seems like everything is done to keep members happy. Over the years, NSP has evolved from Minnie Dole’s vision of providing service to skiers to providing service to its members.”

IS THE BOARD UP TO THE TASK?

NSP’s current leadership team is clearly aware of many of these issues. The Board began a strategic planning process about a year ago. McNamara acknowledges that “leadership issues—and credibility problems—continue to be a factor. But when it comes to relevance, we’re still the organization that provides trained patrollers to the industry.”

He says the Board is currently functioning well, and notes that NSP has been actively working with NSAA to address a number of issues facing both organizations. “My goal is to fix problems from the past so we can move forward,” he says. And at present, “we have a Board made up of people willing to make the decisions to do so.”

That may be. But NSP has seen fractious Boards recently, too, and no one SAM spoke with offered a specific prescription for preventing future flare-ups. The fact that a seat on the Board continues to be something of a reward for longevity is a point that’s conspicuous by its absence in the Board’s current attempt at envisioning the future.

It’s a safe bet that the vast majority of NSP’s members wants no fight and never has. They just want to patrol, and most do so superbly. And most ski areas still enjoy excellent relationships with their volunteers; even the most acrid battles haven’t, to date, drilled down far enough that the skiing public has been impacted—or even noticed.

But any time an organization’s leadership can be forced—or lured—into focusing more on politics than mission, it’s in trouble.

McNamara knows the EMS and NFP worlds, and points to a new executive director, John McMahon, who has a successful track record with turning around troubled NFPs; improved IT systems; and the creation of new programs such as Mountain Hosts, who can assist patrollers with activities like slope monitoring and accident scene support—trained under NSP curricula.

The Board is making better use of its Legal Committee, McNamara says, helping it make better decisions than in the past.

He says that “we now have a clear agreement between NSP and NSAA that spells out what each of us is responsible for. We want to make sure that both the ski areas and the patrols understand how it’s all supposed to work. A lot of people don’t.”

Given its inertia, add selling that idea to the list of challenges the Board faces.

INTERNAL CHALLENGES

The external threats to NSP include ever-evolving regulatory and litigation climates, staying on the good side of EMS systems, and figuring out ways to recruit younger members, which will be no small feat in this era of two-job families, time poverty and cheap season passes.

But those things pale when compared to the internal challenges, which are enormous—and systemic. Documents provided to SAM suggest awareness of some, but not all, of the problems.

Harsh as it sounds, many of NSP’s recent troubles appear to source to older patrollers, at every level, who dearly want to hold on to the way things were when they were young. From candidate to Chair, NSP needs to ensure that members clearly understand what NSP is, what it is not, and why. Although it’s almost certainly due in part to resistance from the old school, NSP has been ineffective in presenting that change of mission for nearly 20 years, and it’s now struggling to catch up.

For their part, NSP’s members—particularly its activists—might be wise to remember Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”

NSP has seen plenty of the latter. Since the first part of this series was published, SAM has been surprised to see the bitterness with which some members still cling to years-old, even decades-old, slights, real or perceived. In SAM’s view, NSP’s current visioning, while it addresses several key areas, fails to recognize the role of its governance structure in creating—and exacerbating—this problem.

CHARTING A WAY FORWARD

At minimum, it would seem that NSP would be wise to slate board candidates who are skilled in addressing specific organizational needs, rather than who possess the most impressive ski patrolling bona fides. But given the decades of rancor that stem directly from its history as a “member-driven organization,” NSP would be wise to explore the idea of a different governance structure altogether.

There is no direct analog to NSP in the United States, but if one examines other large NFP service organizations, one rarely sees boards that consist primarily of people who rise through the ranks. Instead, one finds highly accomplished professionals who believe in the organization’s mission.

The current visioning also includes little that would point the way to clear procedures for evaluating and addressing member concerns, and doing so with transparency—something many of NSP’s critics have claimed, almost certainly with merit, has been sorely lacking.

And NSP’s expensive taste for adjudication must end. “This recurring theme of lawsuits and threats of lawsuits,” says Tim White, “may well cause the undoing of NSP in the future.”

However NSP confronts its need to change, that change must ultimately be recommended, and communicated, in a manner that can be approved by the membership—or, at least, by those who bother to vote.

For their part, it might help if more members did vote. But either way, it might help if NSP’s members concentrated on the primary vision of serving fellow skiers and snowboarders.

Patrolling is a service one enters because it’s the right thing to do, not because it affords deals on equipment and skiing in exchange for time. NSP’s current role is limited to helping them gain the requisite skills to do that.

Resorts also have their role. The days when ski patrols could be considered to be operating on autopilot due to NSP guidance are gone. Patrollers may be trained by NSP members, using NSP materials; they may pay NSP dues, and they may attend clinics stamped with the NSP brand. But when push comes to shove, they’re actually working for the resort, not for the organization that brought them to the dance.

Given NSP’s turbulent history, it’s anyone’s bet if all the needed changes can happen. But if the National Ski Patrol can change—and change is complicated—Minnie Dole’s beautiful idea may have life in it yet.