With the start of the first competitive ski season since the pandemic, the chair of Squamish's Sea to Sky Nordics says that excitement is in the air — people are eager to enrol in the skiing program.
In the group's category across the province, they're second among the six other organizations in terms of growth and sign-ups for programs.
"Our club membership and our programming is just zooming right along, and our big limitation right now is coaches being trained to coach the higher levels," said Rick Smith, chair of the Nordics.
"We're chockablock. We've got all kinds of events coming up this year in the biathlon, cross country and ski jumping world."One reason for the flurry of enrolment may be that this is the first time since the pandemic started that official competitions will be allowed.
"We're very excited, we were able to run some recreation programs last year, but everybody was a little bit on edge...We were not able to run any events. There were no competitions... and so everybody was nervous. We were not allowed to gather indoors," said Rick Smith."This year, while we still don't have access to the indoors, everybody's very excited about the events having been opened up."
Smith said the club is "all systems go" for the upcoming season, and, that, fortunately, everyone so far has been supportive of the association's double-vaccination mandate.New coaches are being trained to keep up with the high amount of enrolment.
"At the beginner level of our program, we've got new coaches being trained right now so they can start with our seven, eight, nine-year-olds who are beginner skiers," said Smith. "We've got some full programs at the next level that we could use more coaches to get what we call to our L2, our learn to train level, so they can coach a higher age group, sort of from nine to 12."He said the club has an eye on participating in the big provincial cross-country and biathlon competitions around March.
In the meantime, the club is getting a quick start on training for its events.Smith said that over the last two years, the Whistler Olympic Park has been storing snow in the off-season, so when the season starts, athletes will be able to train regardless of snowfall.
The snow is taken to the Callaghan training grounds and spread over the area.This year, right after the stored snow was spread out, there was an actual snowfall, which created great training conditions.
Find out more about Sea to Sky Nordics and the programs offered at seatoskynordics.ca.
