by snowtravel » Tue Oct 01, 2013 10:41 am
The PSIA Way
Always choosing the right buzzword, PSIA says it's "student centered." Certainly, our students should learn the basics, one way or another. They don't need to know the whole system, mind you, but some core concepts should be shared, if we expect our students to enjoy the sport. That's how it's done in every discipline I've studied, from music to computers, from aviation to law and politics.
Beginning early in my ski career, first out of naiveté and then later just for fun, I'd often ask students if they'd ever heard of balance, pressure, edging and rotary skills: the crown jewels of PSIA's American Teaching System (ATS). Almost no one ever had. The reason is simple: ATS content is not for the skiing public.
Skeptical? Please don't take my word for it. Go to thesnowpros.org and find something—anything at all—explaining ATS. Check Amazon too. Do it now, it's eye-opening. I'll wait.
Stew-Dent Sintered
Welcome back. See what I mean?
Keeping the substance of ATS out of the public eye brings several benefits. First, it lets resorts put newbie, low-wage workers in charge of almost any class and call it good. It enables high consumer prices for empty but pretty uniforms and meaninglessly "certified" schools. No one ever calls them on it. (OK, Harald, almost nobody.)
Simultaneously, a fugitive system means that teachers regardless of experience aren't ever responsible for their knowledge or skill because consumers remain ignorant of any standards by which to judge them. For instance, it lets teachers use words like anticipation, counter-rotation, foot-turning, leg-turning, rotary, steering, guiding, squaring, separation and even hip angulation interchangeably. (And yes, I've heard these terms used synonymously in PSIA sessions, sometimes within the same clinic.)
My kingdom for a glossary; start with "S," for student.
Blue Cheese, Italian or Thousand Island?
Back in 1990s Park City, and happily for me, the PSIA-word-salad actually liberated higher-level coaches, freeing us to explore our own skiing. (Having ten words for one thing and vice versa will do that.) We read Warren Witherell and watched the US Ski Team. Out on the hill with good skiers, we learned and taught what we wanted to.
With the help of guys like Stew Marsh, I found myself practicing and then teaching fundamentals like carving that decades of PSIA lessons and clinics had utterly neglected right up to my Level III exam. The more I discovered outside of PSIA dogma—like the very simple truth that we ski with our feet—the better my students and I skied.
Today I only wish I'd gotten there about two decades sooner.
The New Economy of Winter Sports
Whatever the uses of ATS, we teachers had more pressing concerns. Over the years, injuries of every sort—collisions, avalanches, falls and just plain wear and tear—took their painful and crippling toll. A colleague I knew at Park City died skiing in a clinic. Many more were injured, often permanently, usually without adequate insurance. Moronic military-style morning lineups—an absurd traditional ski school ritual—gave lip-service to safety, not to make us any safer but for perceived "risk management."
By the new millennium, equipment grew more expensive while pro-forms began to disappear. Teachers now needed two pairs of skis, hundreds of dollars in other specialized gear, plus PSIA membership, training and exams, all at our own expense. People stopped taking lessons and, as snowboarding came into its own, for a while skiing felt like a dying sport. Instead, snowsports went increasingly upscale and costs of living in mountain towns soared.
Compensation fell even as prices rose. Teacher incentives for large classes and private lessons were reduced or disappeared altogether. Our resort handlers, many of whom were also our PSIA clinicians and examiners, learned to over-hire for the early-season holidays, turning a day's work that once included 7 paid hours into to just 4 (or less). Resorts increasingly restricted free-skiing privileges: early and late-season, we needed special permission just to practice or check out conditions. Skiing in uniform became verboten, drastically reducing our familiarity, visibility and relevance.
Of course, we still had to go out and perform like athletes in all terrain and weather, ready or not. Too often, we were not.
"There's No Money in It"
By 2008—the only year for which data is publicly available—top-level instructors were earning just $19.15 an hour on average with no benefits but a grudging restricted pass, and working only a fraction of a 40-hour week. Injuries aside, the lousy compensation and high costs forced out experienced instructors in favor of guileless new hires. Resorts only saw more profit in the bargain. "Control over labor costs"—reducing hours or firing employees who thought they had full-time, winter-long teaching jobs—became commonplace.
That same year, 2008, 64% of the teacher corps was either entry level certified (PSIA Level I) or not certified at all. (Level I is "in-house" at many resorts, and easily accomplished by a parallel skier at the end of a single part-time season of teaching.) In other words, two of three instructors were newbies, earning on average between $10.43 and $12.04 per hour. These comprise the "P" in PSIA: part-time, partially-trained, pathetically-underpaid, and just passing-through.
Meanwhile, ever-wealthier consumers paid top dollar. At popular ski areas the benchmark all-day private lesson price rose to around $500 per 6-hour day. (Today it's approaching $700.) Child group lessons brought in well over a hundred per head, often with 10 or more per low-wage teacher. (Now it's a couple hundred.) Do the math.
With falling costs and rising prices, ski schools had become major cash cows. For 2008, Vail Resorts Inc. reported ski school revenue of 81.38 million dollars. Last year, even with poor snow in the West, Vail's ski school EBITDA ran over $84 million. While consumers pay premium prices and teachers starve and quit, resorts are making bank.
This is what they mean when they say, "world class."
The Heroic PSIA
To this day, the supposedly "grass roots" Professional Ski Instructors of America seems indifferently mute. The PSIA's mission, its leaders consistently declare, is only "educational." Though PSIA's Articles of Incorporation and By-Laws say nothing about the matter, PSIA operatives—almost all of them simultaneously managers or fiduciaries for their respective resorts—tell us the organization doesn't take a stand on wages, benefits, or working conditions. Just like the resorts who pay them to manage us, PSIA elites say our plight is simply not their problem.
Instead we get ATS window dressing.
So if our students don't learn ATS, if we don't really use it, if wages and working conditions fall while prices rise, if resorts earn hundreds of millions on our broken bodies, if the loss of top level coaches turns the whole industry into an oxymoron of starving, professional newbies, and finally if PSIA won't concern itself with any of it, it's only natural to wonder: Who does PSIA serve?
We'll begin exploring PSIA's constituency next time.
Best wishes,
Joseph
Last edited by
snowtravel on Tue Oct 01, 2013 1:35 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Ski fast, don't fall.