Sun Valley Ski Academy Goes Live

As the trend towards ski academies creeps outward from the Eastern region, many club teams are realizing that they have the means to set up an Academy-style environment by just using their local resources more effectively.  Parents and kids alike are looking for more intensive specific-sport opportunities, but, college admissions being what they are, you can't afford to have poor quality academics.  Ford Sayre Academy set the standard decades ago, when club teams first started to feel the pinch from ski academies and needed to find ways to offer more opportunity.  They offer local kids the opportunity to have a modified public school schedule in the Winter to allow for more training time.  More recently, Ski Club Vail has famously adopted a similar model, though with substantially more funding and a much more comprehensive approach to the local school/local ski club relationship.  What started as a local ski club supported by a public high school has now become something analogous to a charter school - part of the public school system, but with it's own teachers, schedule, and facilities.

Now we can add the Sun Valley Ski Academy to the list, too, as they have partnered with Sun Valley's Community School in an effort to boost participation with the Sun Valley Ski Education Foundation.  The school will offer both boarding and day options, which means it can completely tailored for the local kids, while still attracting and serving athletes from other regions.  The living quarters look new, although not that different from the standard ski academy chic, and the program they propose sounds downright home-like.  From takeout nights to riding the bus to school, seems like it would be a great place to be.

Also, SVSEF is a great ski team and has had tons of great athletes come through in the last 6 years or so.

Along these lines, USSA is also now offering an academic portion to their facility in Park City.  As pointed out by Bill Marolt, "every country in Europe has gone in this direction,” and it's time USSA did too.  Details have yet to emerge about how the program will take shape exactly, but we'll probably find out more over the summer.  Will it be a tutorial program, where athletes receive help on assignments they get from their home schools?  Or will it be a full-on school system in which teachers and administrators design and implement their own curriculum?  Will it be US Ski Team only, or open to any applicant?  In the last couple of years, many people have theorized that the Ski Team doesn't want to nominate athletes that are still in school.  If that's true, it would seem unfair to put skiing and graduating from high school at odds with each other, but perhaps this USSA academy will address that issue.

USSA is also adding an on-snow facility at Copper Mountain for more reliable early season training.  Unclear how that may conflict (if it does at all) with Vail's newly revamped and injected facility, but as Luke Bodensteiner pointed out at the USSA congress when the plan was announced, “That facility will provide incredible terrain in an early season situation.  For the elite teams, it’s a massive advantage but it will be amazing for a lot of development level kids and clubs.”  Definitely true.  We've heard that something like 55% of USSA memberships come from the East, so it will be interesting to see what, if anything, happens there too.

-