One of the most exciting aspects of the EpicSki Academy over its young life is that our coaches are not restricted to any rigid system; they have “academic freedom”.  What this has meant is that we select great ski pros, and we trust them--with their judgement, skill, and experience—to create the magic learning place for each student.  I have had the good fortune to manage many fine ski schools in my career, and when asked why this or that ski school was such a good one, my answer was always the same:  We hire top pros, and then get the hell out of their way.

Photo © Brian Porter

ESA has been the ultimate in hiring really good people and getting out of their way. As Arcmeister has often said, “I’m a non-denominational ski instructor.” ESA is a non-denominational ski camp.

Yet, the flexibility in this approach is neither random nor chaotic. There is an underlying logic and unity that top pros bring to this game. The Sports Diamond™ model describes and represents this unity, as well as the vast range of approaches available to our coaches. Therefore, it acts as a catalyst to coaching creativity without risking the destructive effects of inconsistency.

The idea of the Sports Diamond™ is that there are four important gateways to growth and performance. I call them:

• Power—technical, biomechanical, physical issues
• Purpose—tactical, strategic, goal oriented issues
• Touch—sensory, emotional, rhythmical, awareness issues, and
• Will—commitment, accountability, determination, anxiety issues

The unity that I recognize in the best practices of great athletes and coaches is that they ultimately maintain a balancing tension between and among these four gateways or resources.  Whether they accept, use, or care about the terminology of the Sports Diamond™ doesn’t matter.  What matters is that they intuitively shift with great skill and agility between and among these resources.  Furthermore, by doing so, they seem to be able to balance the opposing values of both flexibility and clarity as well as those of both process and results. 

Through the use of this model, we can impart that skill to our ESA participants. With the indoor (and sometimes on-slope) discussions and debriefings, the diamond will be a platform or framework for clarification. It will help us understand where we are at any moment, and where we might go next.

To illustrate the challenge of our endeavor, think of a statement, made often by coaches and athletes (and maybe even you?), that begins with the phrase, “The most important key to skiing (or golf, or kayaking) is…”  You fill in the last word or phrase.  Put in the first word that comes to your mind, and then read the short list of other possibilities below.

The most important key to skiing is….speed control, line, carving, managing anxiety, rotary, having fun, no rotary, rhythm, just a little rotary, facing downhill, squaring off, turning for fun, turning for speed, turning to change directions, turning to brake, focus, making new friends, commitment, shaping turns, long turns, short turns, pressure to the outside ski, wide stance, narrow stance, moving forward, moving inward, trust, good gear, flow, snow sensitivity, finesse, fun, being in the moment, going fast, going slow, awareness, skiing flats, skiing steeps, fitness, image, sexd&rugs&rocknroll.

Oops.  There are a lot of pieces to this puzzle! Now the question becomes how do I select the right key (or cue) for right now? How do I organize the pieces? How does my coach select what I need? Some of us need attention to pure technique, while others aren’t sure what the skis are supposed to do in the snow.  Some of us have all the moves, but no sense of rhythm or timing, while others need to discover that commitment piece within that allows us to actually stand up and perform what we know.

We must always beware of the coach who is tied to the “one thing” universe. Those who really believe that they can reduce a sport to one simple all-purpose idea, at the expense of all others, devalue the richness of their sport and its students. ESA coaches don’t do that!

The Sports Diamond™ helps the athletes and coaches decide among all the possible and legitimate keys (or cues) which ones to use, and when to use them. It helps create the gateway to your success at any moment on any day—realizing that this gateway may not be the same as that of yesterday or this morning.

It also takes into account that the gateway does not equal the breakthrough—that learning is a process of trial and error and that life is fluid.  Snow changes, attitudes and moods change, and tasks change. You also have to change and learn to be fluid. If you learn to change from resource to resource as the situation changes, you don’t get stuck.  The diamond is a tool to help you move effectively within the chaos of real life out there.

It is one of the few tools out there that is applicable to any technique. If you decide you’re going to ski around switch, with your bindings mounted on your forehead, the diamond will support that. And, it won’t become obsolete if they start shaping skis like surfboards and make them out of epoxy-impregnated pasta. Diamonds are forever!

So with ESA, we’ll use the Sports Diamond™ as a framework for decision making. Furthermore, it will help us store those decisions for future reference so we can retrieve them when they are needed again. In essence, we’re helping you develop a storage system for your own bag of tricks.

In summary, ESA coaching is about learning to ski through the development of a unique and fertile relationship between student and teacher. The goal is to create a motivated and wise student working in collaboration with a master teacher. This will create improved skiing with small risk, big fun, effectiveness, efficiency, and versatility. The ESA coaches are dedicated to providing coaching that is relevant, sustainable, compelling and current. They are also committed to adding the following four benefits—benefits that the Sports Diamond™ is designed to enhance.

• Collaboration. Often students and teachers work at cross purposes. In ESA they both learn to be “learning centered” (Horst Abraham’s term) so that each can participate fully in the process. The teacher really learns and supports what the student wants and needs. The student really learns and accepts what’s available, and takes responsibility for what it will take to achieve it. Together they move forward.
  
  
• Self-coaching. The student and teacher will not always be together. If the student, while skiing alone, cannot perform at acceptable and realistic levels, then the relationship (the learning) has failed. The cues to this performance, while skiing without the coach, must often be quite different than those which were used during the lesson because it’s a different day—with different conditions, different attitudes, and different chemistry. The student, for success, must be given some manner of finding what is needed each day in order to continue to move ahead.
  
  
• Transferability. If the athlete can achieve success or progress in other sports by applying a set of principles learned in the ski lesson, then the ski lesson has became invaluable. This is not just a matter of clever metaphor, but rather the development of a systemic understanding of what it takes to keep moving forward in any sport. (It is important to note here that master teachers are often fine athletes in other sports. It is a great gift to the student to help this crossover process.)
  
  
• The learning IS the breakthrough. This is what the title of the book implies: Brilliant Skiing, Every Day—even when not at peak performance. One of the greatest skills that versatile, effective, efficient athletes have is the ability to move through the ups and downs—the failures and successes—of sports development and truly realize that “it’s all good”. In this sense, the student maintains interest (even fascination) through all the potential pitfalls and frustrations. A great coach and a willing student can easily co-create and sustain this type of environment. This state, heretofore the realm of young children and of top athletes, can be achieved by all recreational athletes.

So that’s the deal with the new ESA: more of the same with diamonds sprinkled on top. This season’s Academies are in Stowe, AspenSnowmass, and Big Sky. See the threads for details. So treat yourself! You know what to do!