Go, Team!
How about those Yanks? The U.S. Ski Team is enjoying one of its best seasons ever. The season-long string of successes culminated at the recent Alpine World Championships, where Americans earned six medals—the most ever at an Olympics or World Championships. Bode Miller established a U.S. record with three individual medals, including gold in the combined and giant slalom and silver in super G.
But others stepped up when it counted most. Eric Schlopy was third in GS, his best result in two years. For the women, Kirsten Clark and Jonna Mendes stunned the favorites by placing second and third in the super G.
These results capped a year’s worth of achievements. Bode Miller has shown surprising ability in downhill this season and leads the overall World Cup; he could be the first American male to win the title since Phil Mahre. Daron Rahlves won the famous Hahnenkamm downhill. And the women’s speed team has demonstrated impressive depth all season long.
The results have been equally strong in freestyle—mogul skiers also won six medals at the recent World Championships. Jeremy Bloom, last year’s World Cup moguls champ, returned from playing football for the University of Colorado and placed fourth in his first World Cup event, then went on to win a gold (dual moguls) and silver (moguls) at the Worlds. Toby Dawson won both bronze medals. But both trail behind teammate and World Cup leader Travis Cabral, who had won three times by mid-February. Teammate Sharon Bahrke leads the women’s World Cup mogul standings, and took a third in dual moguls at the World Championships. Michelle Roark, fifth in the World Cup standings, took a silver in moguls at the Worlds.
All this success has been made-to-order in a year where there has been a great deal of TV exposure. NBC aired two hours of the World Championships on consecutive Saturdays and Sundays in February. All winter long, network and cable channels have been serving a steady diet of alpine and freestyle events. And, the Ski Team has been delivering in spades.
—A SAM Editorial
Are Trade Show Repairs Needed?
A SAM Editorial
Let’s cut to the quick: Over its 41 years, NSAA has been a remarkably effective trade association for its ski area members, and never more effective than in the last ten years since its divorce from its three-year union with SIA. Whether in its role of education or government relations or generating vital programs like “Sustainable Slopes,” these and other activities add up to valuable member services for ski areas, large and small which, in turn, results in member satisfaction. “Membership renewal is not an issue,” NSAA’s Michael Berry tells us. But NSAA has also, with long-time acquiescence of suppliers, operated the marketplace where equipment and services can be presented to the NSAA area members. Thus we have the NSAA trade shows staged as part of the national convention and the regional conferences.
This arrangement works well—for the customers: NSAA derives a handsome percentage of its revenue from supplier dues, supplier exhibit fees and from the sponsorship dollars of the bigger suppliers. But it can also go sour when the marketplace is not effective in key matters such as cost, timing, type of attendee, etc. For a number of reasons, this is where we are today. It is not working for suppliers, and this is serious, because NSAA’s history clearly shows that the fault line between NSAA’s area members and its supplier members can be critical.
The key to managing (we don’t say “solving”) these problems in the past has been nothing at all more complicated than 1) NSAA leadership making the effort to truly reach out to suppliers and get to understand their needs; and 2) suppliers studying and defining their needs and energetically presenting them to NSAA. As we have in the past, we urge zero-based thinking: “How would suppliers do things differently if they were managing the marketplace themselves?” Then the mechanisms (a joint task force?) for hammering out solutions should be reestablished.
We also urge NSAA to think back to their excellent initiative of 1989 when RRC was commissioned to do a study of attendees (and non-attendees) at the convention/trade show. SAM commented, “The starkest conclusion that can be drawn is that the convention as a convention is working, and working very well. However, the trade show aspect of it is not working.” (Sound familiar?) No such research has been done since, and, alas, little is done to get exhibitor feedback. (SIA, by contrast, a supplier organization, is constantly seeking feedback from their retailer customers to help them plan.)
A less definable need, but equally important, is for NSAA to make stakeholders out of its supplier members, rather than just a revenue source. Remember, NSAA is an organization of ski areas. The non-voting supplier “members” understand this. But NSAA misses an opportunity by failing to make suppliers “partners” in working together on the health and growth of the industry that both serve. (If NSAA can partner with the Forest Service, it surely could with its suppliers!)
We hope there is change. Specifically, we hope there will be a return to living the commitment made by NSAA’s president, Pete Seibert, in 1973, as he straddled that fault line and promised, “If these trade shows are to be successful, they must meet the marketing needs of the suppliers, and we intend to make sure they do.”
Slippery Slope
Hal Clifford’s book, Downhill Slide, has, as the author intended, helped fuel the debate on the future of America’s ski towns. This debate is occurring at both the local level, with residents in many ski towns questioning the direction of local development, and national, as publications such as USA Today take up the issue of growth in the mountains.
This makes Downhill Slide required reading for resort managers. For better or worse, the book lays out a framework for evaluating development plans for both resorts and their communities. One need not accept Clifford’s premise—that all resort town ills can be blamed on the resorts themselves—to recognize that development has brought urban and suburban problems to rural mountain areas.
Many of the Western mining towns whose gentrification Clifford laments had problems before resorts arrived. And resort managers might argue that some of the worst development problems have occurred beyond their jurisdiction. But that doesn’t change the fact that bad decisions have been made, or that these decisions contribute to a resort town’s character and thus reflect badly on the resort itself. For this reason alone, resorts should become active participants in local decision-making.
Whistler is a great example of how the town and resort worked together. A large part of the success of Whistler as a resort town stems from the strong, almost dictatorial leadership of the town manager, who strictly controls development from all sources to make sure that every project contributes Burlington, VT to the betterment of the town. In the absence of such strong direction from local governments elsewhere, leadership has to come from some other source—and it is often the resort that has the most to gain, or lose. After all, guests—and the press—don’t make the distinction between what the resort has built and what they find in town.
—A SAM Editorial
Cutters Camp—A Winning Idea
A SAM Editorial
It would be hard to find a project that all of us at SAM have bought into as much as we have Cutter’s Camp. It shows so much promise for providing a really important service for ski areas of every size in every part of North America.
You don’t know about it? In a nutshell, a hands-on learning camp will be held May 4-8 at Timberline, Oregon where the brightest and best in the art of building on-hill terrain features will be conducting how-to sessions on all aspects of the design, construction and maintenance of terrain parks. This will include safety considerations, signage and all other operational aspects of this vital ski area function. A registration form is bound into this issue at page 29.
The camp is not really about learning how to build a rail or moving a ton of snow. It is not even about teaching someone to be head cutter at Breck. What it’s really about is learning to be efficient and make the best out of whatever the available resources are, no matter how abundant or limited.
SAM is really proud to be co-presenting this first Cutters Camp, together with Timberline Lodge, Ore. Also with the help of sponsors Bombardier, Kässbohrer, Acordia Resort Insurance, Salomon, Zaugg AG, Burton and Snowboarder Magazine, producers of Cutter’s Cup, April 21-28. We hope your area will get a chance to participate in this exciting initiative.
Time to Read
by Rick Casner, Benefit Street Design
It’s quiet here in our office following the New Year’s holiday. Economy jitters, war jitters, ski industry jitters all combine to produce… quiet.
So I took a couple of days to rescan my two-foot-high stack of old Ski Area Management magazines, looking for truths.
What I learned was that David Rowan can write, and write well. Clearly, insightfully, passionately, thoughtfully. Through the 15 years of my stack of old magazines, he can surely write.
So, thanks for all those words. And keep writing.
