It’s one thing to want to diversify your resort market, but as most ski industry experts know, it’s quite another to make that a reality. Take a visit then, to tiny Pats Peak, New Hampshire, on their annual Martin Luther King Day Diversity Day.

The mountain is packed (as most are on this busiest of season days), but here, it’s a rainbow of faces. Hispanics, African Americans, Asians, gays, every type of person imaginable is on skis or boards, learning or carving out perfect turns. A band strums out tunes, some years Reggae, others hip-hop. The smell of creative ethnic foods saturates the air, instead of that familiar hamburger aroma you equate with most resort festival days. State leaders speak on the power of inclusion; proclamations are made and displayed. It is, from morning through the end of night skiing, a celebration that proves skiing and riding truly are for everyone.

And it’s not just a once a year thing. While the festival itself is a one-day affair, diversity has taken hold at Pats.


It Takes a Vision
How did a tiny mountain break the code that has many ski giants scratching their heads? Rather than a planned response to a market study, Pats Peak took on diversity via an inspiration of their director of services Jim Wall.

“I was working in the rental shop and one day, I saw these inner city kids come through. They sort of had that defense, or swagger, about them. Anyway, I just noticed them for some reason. Later, I went upstairs to get lunch in the café, and when I looked outside I saw those same kids. They were laughing, falling, having a good time, and it struck me: the toughest of the tough was falling and laughing with the weakest of the weak. I realized our sport is a great equalizer.” Born and raised in ethnically mixed and economically challenged Danville, Illinois, by a blind father, Wall may have been equipped with a particular sensitivity to the situation.

That next summer, working at an all-white country club, he looked around at the purposeful color of the clientele and had a revelation: unlike this club, skiing had never been intentionally exclusionary. If minorities were given the chance to feel what mountain life was like and see they could be a part of it, he thought, they’d be hooked. And everyone in skiing would welcome them. Right then he decided to do whatever was necessary to open skiing up to all races.

This year, Wall has expanded his diversity initiative. Pats is now working in cooperation with Boston-Based Youth Enrichment Services (YES) and the National Brotherhood of Skiers (NBS) to bring more minorities to the slopes. What the area is learning is that reaching out to ethnic markets pays off.

“Our first year (of the Diversity Day, in 2001) we offered $11 tickets to ski or board from 3 to 10 p.m. (the reason for the $11 cost: that’s what a pair of Chuck Taylor sneakers, the most amazing holiday gift a kid could get, cost when Wall was a kid). Well, we hoped for a couple of hundred people, since that night was historically quiet for our night skiing. We got over 1,000. We knew we were onto something,” Wall says.

From there, Pats Peak has reached out and built a mountainwide diversity program. Saturday nights are POP (Pay one Price) night of $29 for lifts and lessons; they work in cooperation with groups like YES and NBS to find inner city youths who are interested, get them to the mountain and then teach them, the right way, our sport. Response has been shattering: while Wall refuses to track the numbers (he compares that to profiling), the visual evidence, he says, tells the tale.

“I guess one way to say it is this: on our first Diversity Day, you looked out on the mountain and it looked different, I mean, palpably different,” Wall says. “It used to be, six years ago or so, if one black person was skiing on the slope everyone would be saying, ‘did you see the black person skiing?’ Now, it’s barely noticeable. And that means it’s working.”

In fact, he says, on any given day or night at Pats Peak, the mix of white, African-American, Hispanic, Asian and many others is so complex, you no longer notice anyone is anything other than a fellow ski lover. And most, he adds, have transferred from special offerings and programs to become full-fledged paying customers.


Enlisting Those Who Get It
Mary Williams, whose late husband founded YES, says the key to Pats’ success is simple: they knew to reach out to those who truly understand the ethnic community.

“They (ski resorts) know the woods and the slopes and the snow and the skiing better than we do, but they are not experts at the different ethnic/cultural economics of this community,” she says, “Pats Peak uses us for that.”

She says that Pats goes for quality in the ethnic experience, not just giving minorities a place to see others of similar race around then on the slope, but providing the means they need to master those slopes. Like Spanish speaking instructors. Instructors trained to deal with children who have attention issues. And coaches who know how to get through to a minority in their own special way.

In particular, Pats uses a program created at the Boston University School of Education to train coaches to help minorities learn the “mental toughness” they need to become skiers. “It’s hard without a lot of other people of color out there,” Williams says. “You have to have an inner strength to get into it, and that’s an aspect we push not only at the start, but throughout our racing programs.” She compared it to a white person walking through an inner city neighborhood. “It takes some guidance and mental toughness to do it, and not just the first time.”

Williams credits Wall and Pats Peak for making the major investment they have. “They’ve given us over 1,000 passes for a trip, tickets and lessons,” she says. And while Pats (with the help of sponsors such as Pepsi) is comping those kids initially, she points out in the end, Pats will benefit as much as the kids who become skiers.

“Ski areas need feeders of young people to create the market of the future,” she states. “If you plant some seeds, they will grow into customers down the pike. Well, Pats Peak is substantially ahead of the rest. By planting these seeds and investing in the staff and resources, they’ve put in all these kids’ heads that a mountain is a great place to go, and that there’s really a whole lot to do out in this big, wide world.”


The Theory in Practice
Leonard Lee of Dorchester, Massachusetts, is a perfect example of the difference such a program can make. As a teen in that blue-collar city, he was on the edge of slipping into a stereotypical inner city life. Instead, Lee, now both a YES staffer and vice president of the local NBS chapter, became a full-fledged skier thanks to such programs.

“As a kid, I looked at skiing on TV, and it was just so far from my reality,” he says. “I grew up in housing projects, so you did what you did there. Mountains? Skiing? That was just too far off.” But a member of YES offered a chance to go skiing for free. The kicker was this: he would be expected to behave and be respectful. In other words, there would be no inner-city posturing. “The guy who asked me kind of bugged me, but I figured, this sounded cool and this was the only way I was going to get to do this. So I decided to put up with him and give it a try.”

That man, a ski coach, was one of the many YES and Pats Peak use to train kids in skiing—not just so they ski well, but so they cope better in life. Similarly, the NBS racing program looks to teach minority youths not just how to race and race well, but how to have the mental stamina to succeed in places and situations where others might not expect you to be. The lessons clearly translate to life beyond skiing. Lee credits his coach for guiding him to become the successful adult he is today, a hard working non-profit leader with a family, a home, and a love of backcountry skiing.

“Before that, the perception of me was that I could play basketball and I could dance. Now people are like: ‘you can ski? Where are you from? They ski in the projects?’ It totally equalizes the playing field, not just out on snow, but out in the world. It breaks down a lot of barriers.”

Which thrills Wall, who thinks back to that early motivation. But he’s not all against the business benefit either. “I don’t look at this as just a charitable thing,” he says. “We are a for-profit business. We want to reach the inner city not just because it’s the right thing to do—and I’m not embarrassed to say this—but because it’s the financially smart thing to do. The under-18 ethnic force of decision making in this nation is endless. We are tapping into that—not by going into the inner city and putting up some billboard, but by reaching them in a real way. It’s working for them, and it’s going to work for us.”

There’s indirect evidence that it’s already working. “I don’t think it’s just a coincidence that we have had a string of eight years that we’ve had the best years in our company,” Wall says. “I know Ski New Hampshire was on the news last night saying all the resorts are down this year, but Pats is five percent ahead of last year—and last year was one of the best years in history. I believe it is because we’re hitting a market that’s growing.”

And while YES hopes resorts nationally take a cue from Pats Peak, Wall has a more immediate goal. “I don’t think there’s anything we’re trying to show the industry,” he says. “We’re just trying to solidify our own niche.”