We’re all aware of the usual lists of reasons for why we are having troubles increasing participation in our sports. And the reasons we all discuss are rational, like time constraints, cost thresholds, competing attractions and hassle factors. But I want to return to a message I have pushed before, because the industry still doesn’t buy into the old news of another way we shoot ourselves in the foot.
There is no sporting activity I can think of that imposes such an awesome equipment barrier on the participant as skiing does. Certainly none of the racquet sports, not golf, no team sports; no water activities, even scuba, with its high-tech breathing devices to keep you alive; nothing even comes close to matching skiing’s barrier of high-tech skis, boots and bindings, with each item fractionalized into countless models, based on considerations of sex, size and skill of the user, to say nothing of the type of terrain and snow conditions the user plans to ski on.
Yet this is all part of our sales message to the public. The consumer publications devote endless space to describe the design and inner workings of equipment, with armies of testers, fluent in tech-speak, who seek different words to parse the differences between dozens of different brands and models—differences that are often so minute and so subjective as to be unrecognizable by any but the testers themselves, and certainly not by 99.9 percent of the people they are writing for.
Because we in the industry tend to be interested in this stuff, we forget that a sizeable part of the public may not be. We don’t think like non-skiers; we cannot comprehend we may turn off someone who approaches the sport because it looks like fun, possibly involving some cute guy or chick, but who finds himself (and especially herself) in what to many is a threatening high-tech world.
What can ski areas do? In dealing with their customers, start to emphasize that the sport is, and always has been, about people having fun in the snow, not just about equipment. Reach out to the beginner skier on rental skis by having instructors, when on duty instructing, use the same basic equipment that is used in the rental operation. The message? “What we’re teaching you is what it’s all about. Your equipment is great. Don’t worry about it. See, it’s the same as mine.”
This would simultaneously correct two evils: first, renters would no longer be made to feel like turkeys, and second, it would force the instructors into proclaiming the truth that, “it isn’t the equipment that allows me to ski like a god, it’s because I’ve learned to ski well, just as you’re about to.” This is a warm and friendly message that would help the conversions our industry is so rightly concerned about.
Let my message not be misconstrued: I am full of admiration for what equipment designers have done over the years to make skiing easier and more enjoyable. I hope they’ll continue to innovate, occasionally making an exciting and, one hopes for them, profitable breakthrough. But we should get over the conceit that people who skied 20 or 30 years ago couldn’t have had fun because they didn’t have the advantage of today’s advanced technologies. It is not disrespectful of progress to remember that the sport’s greatest growth came when people were on long, stiff skis, their supportless leather boots attached by bear-traps. Again, it’s not at all that we should go back to those bad old equipment days, but rather that the sport is about fun on the snow. Yeah, and today’s gear is great!
Of course, I recognize that a few people—usually males—are attracted to the sport for the very reason that the gear looks cool. My point is that we probably get these people anyway; the others we probably don’t and we don’t even know we are missing them.
Let’s market the sport for what it is: matchless winter fun on the snow. Let’s make it fun-centric and skill-centric. Yeah, and today’s gear is great.
