Lessons and I

My Portfolio

I have been instructing since 1982. I started at Bear Mountain in Southern California, where I did most of my training, taking my exams at Mammoth Mountain in California

I really like teaching. Nothing gives me a greater joy than seeing people excel at the sport I love and enjoy. Not only it a physical workout but it is also an extremely satisfying sport. The adrenal rush of doing something for the first time, no matter how steep is ALWAYS rewarding

ALL LESSONS WILL BE BOOKED THROUGHT THE SNOWBIRD MOUNTAIN SCHOOL - NO EXCEPTIONS

Private Ski Lessons

Taking a private lesson is like taking a session with a personal trainer but with no grunting and yelling. We will develop a beginner lesson for you or work on your style, sort out your trouble spots, boost your confidence and take your skills to the next level. It's all about you!

What you get:

. Private lessons offer the advantage of personal service with a personal focus for whatever level you ski.
. Lift queue priority.
. Get the best start you can for your time on the snow.

The Advantage - keeping things simple.
. Families –Taking the hassle out of getting the family sorted for a private lesson.
. Beginner lessons that are all about you!
. Private lessons focus on the individual not the average of a group.
. Skiers looking for the right people to take them for a lesson tailored to you!
. Anyone who wants to know who is teaching them and that they are the right person to meet their expectations.

Full and half day lesson options. (shorter on request).

How much time, how much practice, how many repetitions, does it take to build solid new habits on skis? In my experience it takes a minimum of three days of focused practice and repetition to turn new movement patterns into solid skiing habits. In general, it takes a week.

The easiest thing to do is to commit yourself to a week of lessons with the same pro. A cost-effective approach is to share a week of private lessons with several skiing friends who ski about the same way you do. A skilled pro can easily give each member of a small group a totally personalized program of instruction. And there are still mountain schools, though not many, that do offer five-day programs with their top pros. Call me today and schedule YOUR week at Snowbird Mountain School

Maybe “program” is a better word than “campaign.” Because what I’m suggesting is that you devote five straight days to the process of making new skiing patterns into new habits. You’ll find there are no short cuts.

Why Lessons

I’m going to let the cat out of the bag. No one I know is satisfied, really satisfied, with their own skiing. Instructors certainly aren’t. Ski instructors are obsessive about “working on their skiing,” trying to improve, to polish and hone their skiing skills which often are highly polished to begin with. I’m no different. So if you aren’t completely satisfied with your skiing ability–and most skiers aren’t–at least, you’re not alone. In fact, you’re in good company. But you can do something about it, you really can ski a lot closer to your ideal image, or self-image, of motion down a mountain.

Begin with this simple idea: skiing - not idealized perfected skiing, but the way you and I really ski - is a habit. When we head down a slope, we may be thinking about ski technique, or selecting a certain technique from our bag of tricks and then applying it. We may simply be reacting, by habit, to the snow in front of us. Where we turn may be a conscious choice, but how we turn may not be.

We formed our skiing habits the way all physical habits are formed, by repetition - repeating a pattern of movement over and over, until finally, our bodies seem to continue repeating these movement patterns on their own, without any conscious direction on our part. So the problem of learning to ski better, is not really one of gaining a better understanding of skiing. Rather, it is a matter of overcoming old and deeply ingrained habits. In fact, we probably can’t change our habits at all, what we can do is to replace them with newer, stronger, more effective habits. This is not only a big job, it’s a slow one.

Mark Twain said it perfectly: “Habit is habit, and not to be thrown out the window by any man; it must be coaxed downstairs, slowly, one step at a time.” I believe that to change a skiing habit, takes more time than most skiers or ski instructors realize. This is the main reason why single ski lessons (whether one hour, or one day, whether private or group lessons) generally don’t work That’s right: most ski lessons don’t work. Even when the instructor is motivated and skilled, even when the student is motivated and enthusiastic.

Does this mean it is pointless to take a single ski lesson? No. But I believe that a single ski lesson should only be the starting point in a longer more sustained campaign to change your skiing habits. This is a controversial opinion. Most ski instructors, most ski-school directors, will disagree. For me, the principle “product” that modern ski schools are selling, the single lesson, resembles the myriad diet plans and books and nutritional supplements sold to the American public, which all sound great in theory, but which never seem to result in permanent weight loss. Of course, ski instructors are far more sincere than those who peddle quick weight-loss schemes. Most ski pros really do care about their students’ progress.

Remember the last good ski lesson you took? Remember how for a while a lot of things made sense? But how the very next weekend, you realized that it didn’t “take,” that you were still skiing the same old way? Now you know why. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad skier, or a bad learner, much less that there isn’t an expert skier inside you. It means that the task is harder - or, actually, longer - than you imagined. Give yourself five days in a row and you can change your skiing habits permanently. It’s worth it. Life is too short not to become an expert skier.