1) Jeff Boliba, Global Progression Manager and the North American Sales Manager for Anon Optics and RED Protection at Burton Snowboards
2) Russ Coloton, President, Hunter Mountain, N.Y.
3) Lucy Kay, VP Marketing at Breckenridge and Keystone, Colorado
4) Doug Perry, President of W1, the company that puts on the World Ski & Snowboard Festival at Whistler Resort, B.C.
These four individuals have made serious impacts on our industry in almost every category. From snowboarding to learning centers and from major events to all-around marketing genius, this year’s SAMMY crop is impressive in its scope and talent. But we’ll let some of their nominators tell you about them:
Jeff Boliba: “Jeff has worked very hard with NSAA and a number of other partners in developing the Smart Style program to increase education and awareness in the park, usually on his own time (of which he has very little).”
Russ Coloton: “Russ led the resort [Hunter] to be an innovator and agent for change with the state-of-the-art Learning Center. This center has led the industry’s learning renaissance.”
Lucy Kay: “Lucy has the one incumbent skill found in all great leaders—she grows her people…in my view she is the best marketing person in the business.”
Doug Perry: “The World Ski & Snowboard Festival is the largest festival of its kind and it transformed April from a slow season to an important revenue period for the entire Whistler community.”
The SAMMY awards, now in their seventh year, are designed to target individuals as future leaders, and we think we’ve been pretty dead on. In fact, we are so proud of our past winners that we will be inviting them to “guest edit” the pages of SAM. That is, in this and future issues, we will invite honorees to read several articles in advance and provide commentary and insight. To kick this feature off, we’ve invited Karl Kapuscinski, SAMMY winner in its inaugural year in 1998, to try his hand with the May edition of SAM. Karl is at the helm of Mountain High, Calif., a small SoCal area that regularly packs in a whopping half million visits. His commentaries can be found throughout the magazine and we hope you will find them as interesting, intelligent and entertaining as we did.
So, congratulations again to this year’s SAMMY award recipients—with future leaders like this it’s hard not to be optimistic about our future. And thank you again to our SAMMY sponsors, Acordia, Leitner-Poma of America and Ovo Helmets.
—Jennifer and Olivia Rowan
