• For more information on how to avoid pop-up ads and still support SkiTalk click HERE.

NCAA alpine skiing it not a fair level of competition.

tball

Unzipped
Skier
SkiTalk Supporter
Joined
Nov 12, 2015
Posts
4,362
Location
Denver, CO
This thread makes me happy my son is heading down the football path, flag football through 8th grade, then likely tackle football in high school. Many smaller schools offer partial scholarships if he wants to play football in college.

I can't imagine forking out the money for a ski racer kid unless they loved it and had no expectations of continuing in college.
 

no edge

Out on the slopes
Skier
Joined
May 17, 2017
Posts
1,300
Football is all well and good, but your kids won't learn to ski doing that!
 

wnyskier

Out on the slopes
Skier
Joined
Feb 1, 2021
Posts
259
Location
On the hill
Yes, I have attended the UVM Winter Carnival. Multiple times. It does get a nice crowd for a ski race. I have also attended many other carnivals in the East that have very little crowd interest. For example, pre-pandemic, I was at the St. Lawrence Carnival at Whiteface. The only people at the finish were the racers parents and maybe boyfriends/girlfriends of the racers. Whiteface was very busy that day, and the skiers there had for the most part zero interest in what was going on. On one chair ride up, a couple noticed the race course. One said "Wonder what's going on over there" The other replied "Probably a high school race" That is the state of ski racing for the vast majority of people in the U.S. that actually participate in skiing as an activity.

Look, I know where you are coming from. I love ski racing. I have spent most of my life in it either as a competitor, coach, or official. It has been pretty much my life for over 50 years.

Compare that to this:

A friend of mine, who is a Penn State alum, invited me to a home game this past season vs Minnesota. He tells me "You better get a room in State College months ahead of time". So I drive down to State College, PA for the game. There must have been 500,000 people in State College that weekend. Nearly 110,000 people in the stadium for the game and it looked like another 200,000 people tailgating in the parking lot. It was totally insane and that is an understatement. That is when you realize nobody cares about college ski racing, for that matter, any ski racing at any level, in the U.S.
Thanks for pointing this out, I wasn't aware that college football is bigger than ski racing in the US.
 

James

Out There
Instructor
Joined
Dec 2, 2015
Posts
24,453
As a long time club (part-time) not a ski academy coach, I am a huge fan of collegiate ski racing whether it's NCAA or USCSA. Over the years I have had kids race at both levels, although the majority of them compete at the USCSA level as that conference is growing while NCAA skiing continues to shrink, with some schools teetering on the edge due to funding challenges. NCAA skiing only has a total of 22 schools competing between the East and West. In SR Media today the first page announces "UVM Catamounts Dominate New Hampshire Carnival". On the EISA circuit UVM has traditionally been the Alabama of eastern skiing. However it's hardly a fair competition when UVM has nearly all their skiers in the first and second seeds of every carnival. So for the men's GS UVM had bibs 7,1,33,20,27, & 34 and the women's bibs were 9, 23,7,6, & 36. I couldn't find the 6th female skier from UVM on the results sheet. I realize this is FIS skiing but in this case it's kind of like Alabama is playing Florida Atlantic in football, but the Crimson Tide gets to receive kick-off every three out of four times. Again I love college ski racing, but it makes you wonder what is wrong with NCAA alpine skiing???
You might want to listen to these guys. In BC Alpine,(Canada), they’ve been doing random start lists and 2nd run is opposite of first.
You probably have to get half way through before they get into it.
—————-
Johnny Crichton Vice President of British Columbia Alpine and Sam Damon of US Ski & Snowboard Eastern Development Manager
—————-
 

James

Out There
Instructor
Joined
Dec 2, 2015
Posts
24,453
I have to listen an hour to find out what they think? How about some bullet points?
Go to 35:30 and it comes up pretty quickly.
They don’t use alpine points in BC U14/16 because of so many zones in BC.

Sam Damon of the USSS East says they’re moving that way, already doing it for U10’s.
 

Lifer

Putting on skis
Skier
Joined
Dec 29, 2016
Posts
75
This season, the Eastern U14 Championships were seeded randomly for all events.
 

sparty

Out on the slopes
Skier
Joined
Feb 15, 2018
Posts
1,005
This season, the Eastern U14 Championships were seeded randomly for all events.
Yeah, but Eastern U14s don't have national ranking points, and even if they did, the lack of mid-season interdivisional head-to-head competition would make it tough to get accurate rankings. U16s do have points.

My short take is that while the national points system is far from perfect, it works pretty damn well most of the time. Particularly with the modern ability to flag anomalous races ("hey, look, half the U16s in this field were less than a second off the carnival team hosting the fundraiser...that seems interesting"), as long as there's a reasonably consistent amount of head-to-head racing going on to avoid creating "islands" of intra-group racing, they tend to reflect racers' performance fairly well.

Random seeding for the whole field seems like a reasonable solution when you have a relatively homogenous field (and while I don't know the state of play in the U14 world, doing so at U16 champs would not have been horrible), but it gets risky quick when you have bigger disparities within the field. Having a handful of 400- and 500-point racers set a track and then sending a 77-point racer not only has the potential for issues with the race surface, but it's going to challenge your normal timing intervals, especially on a longer GS or SG.
 
Thread Starter
TS
W

wolcoma

Getting on the lift
Skier
Joined
Jan 30, 2023
Posts
161
Location
Vermont
We only have ourselves to blame for poor alpine skiing media coverage in the United States. For example, you can add up all the ski academies in this country and the total enrollment is probably less than 1,000 kids. What other sport in the United States costs $65K to participate? Be like Mikaela? No worries as BMA would be happy to clean out your investment account................LOL

Here in the Northeast we have thousands of kids who live within 30 to 60 minutes from a ski area and most of them will never have the opportunity to even enter a NASTAR race.
 

bluefish

Booting up
Skier
Joined
Jun 4, 2022
Posts
63
Location
The way life should be
If it has already been said I apologize but the problem with US skiing right now is cost. We have effectively shrunken the talent pool to near zero. Moreover, the top US ski colleges are taking Euros first. It's an abomination. Numbers generate talent. Period. All kids near a mountain should have the chance to race or at least ski. We can do better! Shiffrin is a generational talent. Jeez, the US Dev team to the B team should be 200 athletes strong for men and the same for women. The talent is out there.
 

ski otter 2

Making fresh tracks
Skier
Joined
Nov 20, 2015
Posts
2,920
Location
Front Range, Colorado
It was once a sport for the rising middle class, rising hopes, that favored the rich somewhat less than now, when it came to racing.
And it favored folks who were locals.

We are in a time of shrinking middle class, with inequality ever greater.
And racing favors locals with deeper pockets.

At least for now.
 

James

Out There
Instructor
Joined
Dec 2, 2015
Posts
24,453
You guys realize there’s no money to pay these “hundreds” of kids to be on the team?
 

bluefish

Booting up
Skier
Joined
Jun 4, 2022
Posts
63
Location
The way life should be
You guys realize there’s no money to pay these “hundreds” of kids to be on the team?
Totally understand and not suggesting that as reality but only to say American ski racing would be so much deeper if there were ways to have so many more kids skiing around the country in the wintertime.
 

Jerez

Skiing the powder
Skier
SkiTalk Supporter
Joined
Nov 25, 2015
Posts
2,993
Location
New Mexico
It is a shame. Had two grandkids from the midwest who raced from elementary school to college. JOs every year and both got scholarships, one to an east coast ski school and the other to a ski high school in the rockies; first also skied in college..

They are solidly middle class. Their Dad volunteered for doing timing and equipmentnt to get lower fees, they drove hours to a small bump for practice three times a week. He figures it cost him about 15K a year for gear, travel and training. Still, they were competing nationally with kids whose families flew them to races on private aircraft had their own tuners and three pairs of top shelf skis for each event.

We were the ones to take the second child to visit colleges with ski teams and watch a heart get broken when confronting the reality that going from high school, even a ski high school, onto a college D1 team is pretty much hopeless. The team rosters where we visited, the median age of the skiers was 28 and most if them were not from rhe US.

In sports, you need a funnel with a very wide opening if you hope to have a competitive group filter out the other end. And if the ability is skewed by access to special equipment and training you may not end up with the very best prospects.
 

Sponsor

Staff online

Top