Skier/rider visits have hovered around the 54 million mark for over a decade, with a hiccup now and then, such as this past season’s upward spike to over 57 million. Frequency of visits of the average skier/rider has been trending upward from around 8.4 days in 95/96 to 8.9 in 99/00, using figures derived from an average of over 30,000 skier/rider interviews each season by the National Skier/Rider Opinion Survey. This fact indicates that the core group of downhillers has shrunk, perhaps by as much as six percent since 1996. The calculation yields a figure closer to six million total downhillers who participated in the 1999/00 season. [Ed Note: The author uses “downhiller” to include skiers, snowboarders and other downhill snow sliders.]
The pattern of increased frequency by a core, but shrinking group of participants, is not unique to downhilling. The same thing is happening to almost all sports except for nascent ones such as snowshoeing. Several factors contribute to this change, not the least of which is time poverty. Americans are choosing to concentrate on one or two activities at the expense of other sports they are interested in.
There is, in fact, an increase in the desire gap, defined as the number of Americans who say they want to participate in a sport, but do not. This is more than likely what contributes to the over-statement of skier and rider numbers—something that has been prevalent since A.C. Nielsen reported 60 million Americans were skiers some 25 years ago. It is not an uncommon occurrence for responders to these polls to confuse their desires with reality.
A more diabolical problem faced by all sports lies with the under-24 age group, especially teenagers. Sports participation among teens is decreasing in favor of staying home and doing their own thing. The middle and upper middle class kids live in increasingly larger homes where they define their own boundaries. They order in their own pizzas on their own cell phones, listen to their own music systems, eat in front of their own computers, with their preferred TV shows providing occasional distractions.
The situation has so alarmed the sporting goods industry that Jim Baugh, president of Wilson Sporting Goods, has spearheaded a fund-raising program to establish an office in Washington D.C., called PE4Life. The effort is focused on getting more phys ed programs in schools and increased government funding for this and for sports generally. The Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta considers the problem so serious it is sponsoring a conference on the subject at Whistler/Blackcomb later this month.
The fear is not only that inactivity during the teen years will contribute to obesity and other diseases later in life, but that lessons historically learned by participating in a sport will be lost to a generation of cyber hermits
For the snow-sliding industry, the message is mixed. More families are skiing and riding as a percentage of the total mix, while the percentage of singles, and especially the percentage of 16- to 19-year-old downhillers, has dipped, the latter having fallen from 11.9 percent in 1999 to 8.4 percent in 2001.
The slippage is also fueled by the fact that Americans, younger ones especially, do not want to invest the time it takes to master the rudiments of skill sports. Even golf, with all of its television coverage, is treading water. Others, like tennis and skiing, are losing. Snowboarding is showing signs of having reached a plateau.
What is replacing these sports among younger Americans? Going to gyms and exercising—activities that are easily accessed and require no skill. Among the young, dancing is now mentioned as a sport and has a higher participation incidence than the sum of skiing and riding, according to the Leisure Trend’s SportTrack.
The only thing keeping the downhill industry going are wealthy and healthy baby boomers. They are not dropping out as early as some futurists anticipated. Even women are skiing (mostly) well into their forties and early fifties, which is a change. This may be because they are having children later in life and they keep on downhilling with their families.
Harvesting
Faced with these realities, most destination resorts are in the business of harvesting a very valuable asset: the existing core population of downhillers. They are leveraging their substantial investments in infrastructure by offering more amenities and improving the experience. Their resources are spent on building new hotels, lifts, opening new terrain and otherwise tweaking and enhancing their total product. Their mission is not to build new skiers or riders but to retain them and create loyalty, both to the sports and to their resort.
Destination resorts also have to consider societal pressures. These pressures come from the communities where resorts are located, communities concerned about racial diversity and the behavior of young people; concerned about land use, growth issues and maintaining real estate values.
Management needs to keep the promises made when selling properties and homes, most often at lofty prices. Introducing changes that may attract a different customer base may alienate bread-and-butter customers, to say nothing of the community. Striking a balance between keeping the existing client base happy and the financial reality of the need for new blood is going to be difficult for larger areas.
For example, take Aspen, which only last year opened up its traditionally exclusive doors to snowboarders. While it hasn’t said so, opening the mountain to them is at least partially a result of diminishing skier/rider visit numbers in a season when there was a record number of visits in skiland (2000/01).
Building
The building of the skier and snowboarder base is happening where it counts: at the smaller areas near major metro areas. This past record season, as measured by skier visits, happened because of increases at the smaller areas in the West, Midwest, South and East. Most of these areas have been aggressively promoting ways to attract former downhillers and finding new ones. With the help of some natural snow, and by making their ski areas more accessible, their efforts with public schools and ski clubs paid off.
While these efforts are paying dividends for these areas, the core skier/rider market for the overall industry remains mostly baby boomers. And, they won’t be around forever. The fact that they are sticking to downhilling a little longer will only buy us eight to ten years.
Clearly, there is still a need for bringing new skiers and riders into the sport, but where that building responsibility lies has not been articulated. It needs to be. Small resorts are doing what they can, but they are limited in scope. The bigger ones have different agendas.
Which leads to the two primary suspects, NSAA and SIA, both of which have rallied their respective troops in the past to begin the building process. Those efforts ran out of gas for any number of reasons. The result has been the worst of all situations: they appear to be gun-shy about proposing aggressive initiatives.
One of the more coherent and better programs for building was the SnowBlast campaign sponsored by NSAA several years ago. It went after the right demographics with a clear message. The problem was it did not have the funding to keep it going. Because of the seasonality of the snowsports, the downhill industry needs to keep a program in front of the public for at least three years to measure its success. Everything happens so quickly with us; we have one shot per year to be either right or wrong.
The numbers say the industry had better go after young people and trends show us that we have our work cut out for us. We need to better address the cyber hermits and their parents. We had better find out how to offer counter culture or cool culture that will get kids off the couch and onto the hill.
We must avoid being romanced by over-stated numbers of the downhiller population. Likewise, the upward blip of this past season should not lull us into imprudent optimism or unawareness of the overall bleeding in our numbers.
