I prefer not to remember the number of times this magazine has spelled out our industry’s short-sightedness in failing to develop useable numbers for alpine skiers, cross-country skiers and snowboarders. (No, I haven’t forgotten snowshoeing, tubing, et als.) So, as per usual, our decision-makers select from an obscene variety of mutually contradictory statistics, whose inconsistencies make a mockery of whatever planning process is involved.
Add to this primordial soup a whole bunch of fuzzy numbers tossed out for “lapsed skiers” and the “potentials” (people matching the age and income demographics of existing skiers) and you have a frothy prescription for self-delusion.
Before we plot a savvy course to our future, we owe it to ourselves to know where we are now. We probably have the information now—and a few wise souls instinctively know the answers—but we haven’t developed the mechanisms, sheltered from egos, to put together the pieces that can make a cohesive and reliable whole.
Let me translate the mumbo-jumbo in this riddle. We need to develop some decisive definitions so we know what we are talking about when we talk skiers, boarders, cross-overs, etc. As it is, a skier can be someone who, in a survey, self-identifies as a skier, but who hasn’t been on skis for three or more years. If someone mixes his skiing with some riding, is this person counted both as a skier and as a boarder? If we’re going to describe skiers and boarders as “core,” “frequent,” “lapsed” and “dropout,” do we all agree on what we mean by those terms? (To its credit, NSAA has been attempting this, but in my opinion needs to be a lot more assertive.)
For starters, here are the questions we really need answered:
- How many people in any one November-through-April season actively downhill-ski one or more times at a lift-served ski area? (Give best estimate or range.)
- Of these, how many skied for the first time during that period?
- Parallel questions need to be answered for snowboarding.
- How many skiers also boarded and how many boarders also skied during this time period?
That’s not a very ambitious wish list, and certainly other questions could be added, but a rational consensus on just these would represent a valuable planning tool. So, what is the mechanism for acquiring these standard answers?
I said above that we probably already have most of the information we need. Where is it? There are two principal sources for statistical information about the current universe of alpine skiers and boarders, both based in Boulder, Colo. They are RRC, which handles much of NSAA’s statistical work, and Leisure Trends/NSOS. They compete; they are honest research organizations—and forget the obvious crack about that being an oxymoron.
I am not being facetious when I suggest we lock RRC’s Nolan Rosall and Leisure Trends’ Jim Spring in a room together until they come up with their consensus answers. The odds are very strong there would be little disagreement between them. They would not have to reveal proprietary information. Those numbers, and any other arrived at in this way, would become NSAA’s “best estimates” numbers, modified from year-to-year as needed.
(As a historical note, the mechanism is not unlike that used a number of years ago by “Doc” Des Roches, then head of SIA, who, tired of the statistical chaos that was even worse in those days, put together his savvy, sensible “Doc’s Estimates” for a number of questions. Unsophisticated? Yes, but it worked.)
The effect of coming up with some sensible base-line data would be to minimize the confusion caused by the volatile and unreliable statistics generated elsewhere, especially by two national measurers of sports participation, National Sporting Goods Association (NSGA) and American Sports Data (ASD). Their annual studies, which may be more useful in measuring sports much larger than ours, are interesting for spotting trends because their questions are asked fairly consistently over the years. Their methodology does not, however, yield reliable answers to the sort of questions posed above.
From the modest beginnings I propose could come more common-sense answers and, who knows, maybe even some sensible marketing plans for our industry.
