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Being a part of the 2012 PSIA Alpine Team selection was a special experience, I’m not sure I have even come down from my high of participating in such a tough and rewarding event.  Snowbird is a BIG mountain, lots of terrain, lots of vertical and steep.  This is coming from a girl that skis Alpine Meadows & Squaw Valley on a regular basis!  The first few days before the tryout was spent getting the lay of the land, understanding how long it took the snow to get soft, which pitches got sun first and which ones stayed frozen (and then skied the frozen ones first), discovering how much acceleration you got or not out of certain pitches during different times of the day.  Much like inspecting a course in ski racing, we inspected the whole mountain.  There were pods of candidates skiing around and checking out the competition. 

The selection process began on Sunday, April 22 with a welcome reception in the Cliff Lodge.  At the reception we found out which group we would ski in, all the candidates were split into two skiing groups and then 4 smaller teaching groups for Days 1 & 2.  The reception was very low key, except you could feel everyone’s nerves and anxiety in the room.  The message was repeated several times that you had to be the best to simply be standing in the room.  Although encouraging, I don’t think it really eased anyone’s nerves. 

I fell into a shallow sleep that night as we were meeting at the tram plaza at 7:45, they opened the tram an hour earlier just for us.  The snow conditions were very tough as temperatures were shooting into record highs before noon and they wanted the skiing done shortly after lunch as the snow conditions were pretty sketchy.  At 8:00am, Monday morning all 42 candidates and 12 selectors loaded up the Tram.  There was so much excitement in the air, despite how early it was.  The group split up into their respective skiing groups and explored the terrain and snow as we did our warm up runs.  Everyone met at the bottom as we could not miss the 8:30am tram.  This tram was even tighter packed as PSIA staff members and bystanders and support crew loaded the tram with us. 

We split up into our skiing groups at the top and followed the selectors to our first station:  One legged garlands.  Everyone was nervous, the chatter diminished significantly as the first person stepped up to the starting point.  As it came to be my turn, my heart was thundering in my chest, my hands and legs felt shaky.  I took three deep breaths and then pushed off.  By the third set of garlands, I had calmed down and got into my groove.

The tension broke after that first task, and our whole group bonded around it.  From that moment on we cheered for eachother, encouraged one another and even cracked jokes to keep everyone loose and relaxed.  I gotta say I never laughed so much during a competition.  What it felt like to me, was that we were not competing with eachother but  with ourselves and everyone was encouraging each other to summon their best. 

Day 1 consisted of precision and accuracy tasks and a Movement Analysis session.  Later that afternoon our impromptu indoor sessions began.  You pulled a topic out of a hat for which you had 5min to prepare a talk on and then present to the group. 

Day 2 was the same schedule as the previous day, except the skiing tasks were different.  Our first task of the day was a dynamic medium radius turn on a frozen black diamond pitch.  It was certainly slick, and all I could do was trust in the tuning work of my skis.  I could hear echoes of the coaching I had received for this exact situation.  After a big deep breath, a double click of my poles, all I could hear was the sound of my skis on the snow, it was so loud.  That evening the indoor presentations began. 

Day 3 on the snow involved sharing one of your core beliefs about skiing through a 30 min on-hill teaching presentation.  What threw a wrench in the plans was that the mountain was only going to be open from 8:00am-2:00pm as the conditions were too dangerous in the afternoon.  The remainder of the indoor presentations were completed.  We were in the home stretch!

On Day 4 we were split up again into 4 groups of 10 or so.  Our mission was to crank out 10 minute impromptu teaching progression.  Again, we pulled topics out of a hat and worked our magic.  Our group was so motivated to get this over with that we knocked out all our teaching progressions by 11:30!!  We took a couple of victory laps, and wouldn’t you know it, headed straight for the mank on our first victory lap – as if we hadn’t had enough of it already! 

It was great to finally meet in person and get to know the names of so many people I had just heard of.  It was hard to not be starstruck at moments when meeting some true legends.  It was very moving to share such an experience with so many talented and warm hearted individuals.  There was not one person that I did not meet, that I wouldn’t want to be friends with.  We are blessed in our little community of ski instruction to have such kind, passionate and inspirational individuals.  Congratulations to the PSIA 2012-2016 Team Members, you guys are outstanding indviduals and I look forward to skiing and hanging out with you all in the future. 

By: Kim Mann