Tiger Shaw, who was named CEO of the US Ski and Snowboard Association in March of 2014 and runs the US Ski Team, met with the Globe at the US Alpine Championships at Sugarloaf to discuss the state of Alpine racing in the United States. Here’s the Q&A:
What is the state of American ski racing right now?
“We had a great season, we had amazing results. We won a ton of medals, a ton of World Cups, a ton of event titles between Mikaela [Shiffrin] and Lindsey [Vonn], just stunning performances. So what I like to say is our superstars are doing great. They’re doing what they do, they dominate the world. It’s absolutely stunning, and we’re thankful for them, and they’re incredible leaders on our team. At the same time, we don’t have enough people behind them. Our pipeline is not as strong as we’d like it to be. If you look at the Swedes, the French, the Norwegians, a lot of times they’ll have three, four, five athletes behind their superstar that wins, and we need that to truly be sustainable as the best in the world. We need that. It’s a five- to eight-year project, it’s not something we can change overnight, but it’s something we are changing, and we’re really focusing on.”
How are you working to change the situation?
“What we’ve done is we’ve reached out to our feeders, the clubs, schools, and academies that feed the most and the best kids to the US Ski Team, so there’s a number of them all over the country. CVA [Carrabasset Valley Academy] here at Sugarloaf is one of them, and we’ve been partnering with them for a number of meetings. We’ve probably met for more than 30 hours so far in the last six months just brainstorming: How can we do it better?
“Because it’s that juncture between being the best at your club and academy and then your state and your region, making the US team, and then making it to a podium. That is a very difficult transition. Not many make it. We need more to make it, and we need to be better at it. You know a lot of these leaders in these clubs were national team coaches at one time, who have retired and are running clubs, so the knowledge base is staggering.
“We’ve gotten together and said, ‘How are we doing it now, how are the other countries doing it, how can we do it better, how do we change to do it better?’ And let’s change it in a very stable way that’s sustainable and predictable in five or eight years and produce better skiers. Or provide the environment that they can bloom in and move them to the next level.
“Athletes ultimately do it for themselves, but we’ve got to provide all the infrastructure, all the coaching, all the expertise.”
Do you find tapping the talent pool particularly challenging, given all the other sports available to children, including other types of competitive skiing?
“We totally combat other sports. Like a lot of sports, we battle for them when they are 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 years old. We want them to get into our sport, enter our sport, so this is one of the things we’re studying, is how and when do kids enter Alpine ski racing, and the answer is, basically, their parents join clubs. Fortunately, we’re 413 clubs strong around the country that provide this. We need to help that and augment that. We can’t directly impact it — that’s all the grassroots part, and they do an amazing job — but what we need to do is an amazing job at retention.
“So the pyramid is wide at the base. We’re OK, fortunately, in that situation, but we need to keep it as wide as possible as you move up through it, and not lose kids to other sports, to other events. And part of that is making sure it’s fun, and a huge part of it is making sure it’s affordable, and it’s not. It’s not cheap.
“But we can control some of the expense by keeping the travel at a suitable level. That’s a lot of what we’re talking about. We call it calendar reform. So it’s the races that you can go to, and as you get older, once you become an FIS [International Ski Federation] level racer, which is ages 16 and 17, then it’s this world ranking system, and the points that drive this world ranking system are available to any given FIS race, but going to every FIS race does not solve that for you. You need to go and do really well at only two a year, and that’s a little bit broken.
“We have parents that don’t all understand how that works best, and they drive, trying to go to every one of them, so it’s a little bit of missing the race that was a really good one to be at. Fear of that drives everyone to go to all of them, and it drives expense, and we’re going to really fix that, I think.”
That sounds like quite a challenge.
“It is a big challenge. There’s a lot of people involved with that, and you start with having a frank discussion, an open discussion about how are we doing this, are we doing this the right way? Nobody disagrees with lowering costs.”
Have there been any early gains or examples of success?
“We’ve got a number of people working on the calendars that understand this. If you have too many races, you don’t have enough kids in any given race too, and that hurts the race organizers. The flip side of this is you get to be home more and train more, which is when you get better.
“You don’t usually get better on a race day. You take two race runs, you ski around, you warm up, you stay in the lodge, you try to be fresh for the race, and then you get in the car and go home. That’s not a training day. Mikaela’s really led this. She went into very few races. I mean, she probably has fewer races under her belt, given her age, than almost any other racer in the United States.
“To quote Malcolm Gladwell and the whole ‘The Outliers’ and the 10,000 hours rule, think about this equation for a minute: The only time you’re getting better at your sport, this sport, is when you are sliding over the snow. So count those minutes. Add them up. And think about how long it takes to get 10,000 hours of doing that under your belt. Riding on the lift doesn’t count. Sitting in the base lodge doesn’t count. Driving to a race doesn’t count.”
What will happen when you spot talent?
“The beauty of this sport is it is timed, not judged. There’s no Moneyball problem here. You advance based on merit, purely on merit. We can look at a kid up there today, let’s say a 17-year-old, and say, ‘Wow, she is really good, she’s got great fundamentals, she’s skiing well,’ but we don’t act on that. She has got to get a good time to move forward. What we’ll know is she doesn’t have a lot she needs to work on. Keep doing more of what you’re doing.
“Then we watch another kid who maybe has a bunch of flaws, and then we realize that person needs a lot of technical help. So what happens is you watch somebody who doesn’t look that talented or doesn’t ski well technically and you have this feeling like you need to put a lot of work into her and help her or him, and then they’ll get better times, which will advance them.
“But there’s no pet peeves, there’s no picking favorites. It’s all based on time, and that's the beauty of this and I think we’re blessed in this sport that it’s not figure skating and it’s not how you look in front of the judges, or your makeup that day, or how you looked in practice. It’s how you get down that course.”
Follow Matt Pepin on Twitter at @mattpep15.