After their first race weekend of the season, the Whitewater Ski Team is off to a great start with one of the largest representations in years.
For the first event, 14 skiers from Nelson ages 11 to 15, as well as a few adults, travelled to Panorama in the East Kootenay for giant slalom racing on both clear and blue snow.
“It was a bit of a learning curve just to learn how to ski blue snow — World Cup snow, which is water injected grooming — and so there was a huge improvement over the weekend,” said Dylan Henderson, Whitewater Ski Team head coach.
Henderson said the 14 racers who attended was the biggest representation from Nelson in about 10 years.
It’s evidence that ski racing has become more popular, which Henderson says is a product of a restructuring of the entire team.
“We’ve rebuilt the whole team from the bottom up,” he said, adding that there’s currently a totally of 75 racers on the team, whereas four years ago there were only about 25 racers on the team.
“The team has been growing, but from the bottom up and so it’s taken a bit for the part of the team that are elite racers to grow. And it’s really starting to pay off now.”
Henderson is the head coach for the entire ski team, but he also coaches the smaller group of the elite racers that travel more closely with the help of another coach and Henderson says that as Whitewater has put racers on the national team before, he doesn’t see why that wouldn’t happen in the future as well.
“That’s not a goal that we talk about with the kids really, however because our philosophy is more about the here and now and having a good time and building more skills for life. It’s about the journey, not just about the end goal.”
“A lot of the kids in our [racing] zone actually live in Calgary and [their focus] is not about skiing, it’s about racing, whereas our program is about skiing.”
“We feel that ski racing is the best way to get good skiing skills and basically gives you a lasting love for skiing in general — the racing is just the icing on the cake really,” said Henderson, who competed at an international level himself with FIS, the international ski federation.
So far, the Whitewater Ski Team has competed against some very elite teams with much larger budgets and racing facilities.
“We’re the underdogs in the zone and we’ve got really soft snow, so we don’t have [ideal] race training here, but we’ve got awesome skiers and good coaching and a really fun atmosphere and that seems to be all you need to compete against these [more privileged racers],” said Henderson.
Whitewater’s own Jamis Beattie, 14, is proof of that as he had two fourth-place finishes last weekend against some of the top athletes in his age group.
The rest of the team is looking forward into the season with the BC Games, and Whistler Cup approaching, which is what the racers will be working towards.
This weekend the Whitewater Ski Team will be travelling to Kimberly for their first slalom race of the season.
Racers will be aiming to improve their national seeding with good results, but Henderson says that above all “we’re about the enjoyment of it.”