"You can't fix something you don't understand"

This is the terrain we have to work with for the next few days. The U16 athletes have been skiing slalom on the bottom portion of 'show off". Our lane allows us to set approx. 80 slalom turns if we so desired. 

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Tonight we had a great chat with the athletes about understanding the process of ski racing and the importance of communication between coaches and athletes. We wanted them to understand a few things about being a U16 ski racer. We engaged this conversation in a very creative format that we like to call dinner trivia.  For those who are new to the team: dinner trivia is where we ask the athletes a variety of ski related questions in a competitive format [girls versus boys]. The first group to 3 correct responses to our questions gets out of doing the dishes, our current score can be viewed on the right. You are reading that correctly, the boys are enjoying their time in the kitchen.

We like to have themes to the questions so tonight we asked the athletes a variety of questions involving the rules of the game (ski racing being the game) and the qualification process for different events for both Ontario and Quebec affiliated athletes. Lets just say we had to dig deep into the rule book of items they should understand in order to get to a very tight score of 3-2. Lets just say that this may be one of the many circumstances where loosing is fun and the learning is quite evident.

We skied in sessions 1 & 3 today in stubbies. The athletes completed a circuit in the weight room after skiing today and they re-fuelled with pulled pork sandwiches on ciabatta buns with some broccoli slaw and raw veggies with hummus. We will move to full gates tomorrow if mother nature decides to let up on the accumulation out here. If not - we ski pow! In our books thats a win/win :)