Is it any better now? Does the money actually make it to the athletes as it should or is the organization so top heavy with administration that it all gets eaten at the top?
As
@Average Joe intimates, it's still not flowing as it should.
The Center of Excellence is a lovely building whose services are available to a privileged few. It wasn't cheap to build and even though it is LEED certified, it's not cheap to operate. What it does offer is office space for every paid employee of U.S. Ski and Snowboard under one roof - something not easily done at their old Prospector Square digs.
And they pinpoint where their spending goes, often to the detriment of their greater USST athlete pool. Again, I'm going to concentrate on alpine.
Witness "Project 2026," which is essentially "spending all our athlete development capital on River Radamus." OK, so it's not
quite that, but it's very close. Radamus has a huge amount of cachet around him (it doesn't hurt that his father is a big mover and shaker in alpine racing circles) and USST is pulling out all the stops to have him as a "guaranteed" gold medal favorite at the 2026 Winter Olympics. They are spending on him like they would a member of the A team - i.e. he's not having to fundraise outside of the team to make ends meet. To wit, he is marching up the ranks, especially in GS.
And then there's "Team Mikaela." We all know that her entire training and competition setup is as a "team of one." She has her own coaches, trainers, techs, and budget from USST. Sure, her sponsors pick up a lot of expenses but her mom (who is a Level 100 coach in USSA circles, her certification dating back to 2004) is paid as a full-time coach out of USST's budget, with travel expenses and the lot covered. MS doesn't train much (if at all) with the other tech skiers on the USST: Moltzan, O'Brien, Hurt, Hensien,
et al. There's no brain trust sharing happening at all - and kudos to the others for making it work even with the huge budgetary suck from Team MS.
Meanwhile, almost every other USST Development, C, and B team member is left scraping the bottom of the barrel and having to fundraise to be able to attend the competitions they need to remain in the mix. It's true that the optics of skiing in the U.S. are almost 100 percent on the quadrennial IOC showcase events and that these years are when funding is most abundant, but it also means that in the lean years (and 75 percent of competition seasons are "lean years") USST still focuses the funding on a chosen few.
And these funds also pull from the greater USSS budgets for regional athlete and coaching development. There are a lot of people on USSS/USST payroll for regional development and most of them are very good at what they do. But there are layers upon layers of administrative staff who are paid handsomely (by ski racing standards) for what amounts to part-time work as most are still coaching at their home mountains. Sure, there are some who are exclusive to USSS but not all are in this situation.
So yes, the organization needs a CEO who is adept with nonprofits and knows the budgetary realities of the winter sports world. Let this person be the chief fundraiser, much like a college or university president. Then have two leaders below this CEO: one for the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Teams, the other for the development/regional end of U.S. Ski and Snowboarding (i.e. the old USSA). Heck: call the reality what it is and divide the two up again by name. I know that their branding is trying to get rid of abbreviations and acronyms but... it doesn't serve any useful purpose right now.
Dan Leever would definitely be a possible choice but he brings with him baggage that would need to be bought into critical review. Now that he's in charge of the
de facto PR machine for ski competition in the U.S., he has a bit of influence on some things coming from 1 Victory Lane. But I'm not sure what his business acumen actually is, especially with nonprofits.
Tiger Shaw was elevated to where he is now partly to placate the Eastern Region of USSA. The whole region was preparing to split away from U.S. Ski and Snowboard because most of the money and attention was staying west of the Mississippi River and they'd had
enough. Tiger's lifelong standing in the Eastern Region and his "boring" nature (i.e. he wouldn't ruffle feathers) made him a strategic pick, with the USSS board saying "hey, we're picking one of your favorite people to lead the national organization - we dare you to leave with him in charge!"
The bluff worked, and USSS did, in fact, direct more attention, funds, and staffing to Eastern Region development. That said, the lion's share of this goes to Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, and New York (and Vermont likely gets the most of it due to its high concentration of ski academies that feed the USST pipeline). The outlier states and divisions are left searching for scraps. The message being sent by USSS is basically: "want your kid to be considered for any development funding once they're a U16? Best to ship that kid to an academy."
It used to be that there were young athletes coming out of weird places who made the USST track
without attending an academy and uprooting their social and family structures. They were able to claw their way up, maybe going to a premier program for junior or senior year of high school, thus saving their families some money and giving the athlete a more grounded social life with their hometown friends.
Nowadays? If you're a talented U16 or U19 and
not racing in New England, you're as good as dead to USSS in terms of advancement opportunities. The Eastern Region is geographically
huge, and its membership is large. If USSS had lost it due to politics they would've lost not only a great talent pool of athletes, but also a huge amount of funding for their overall budget.
At any rate, sorry this turned into a bit of a critical rant but I wanted to point out where things have been, where they are, and hopefully inform as to where I think things
should go with U.S. Ski and Snowboard. I've been a member of USSS for 40 years now and it deserves to be great to everybody it serves, not just a prescriptive few.
