Educating and synchronizing

Canada’s Interski Team prepares for Bulgaria

Carving down Exhibition in perfect formation, the Canadian Ski Instructors’ Alliance Interski Demo team spent Jan. 27 to Feb. 2 finalizing their choreography for the Interski Congress in Pamporovo, Bulgaria March 17 to 22.

The Interski event, which takes place once every four years, is an opportunity for the top ski instructors in Canada to assess their techniques against 18 other countries.

Canada’s Interski assistant coach Tom Klingspohn described the event as an on snow symposium with each country getting time slots to showcase their knowledge.

“For us, we try to get to all the countries and all the sessions to find out what everybody’s doing and collect all that information. We bring it back to our own organization, and we go from there,” he said. “It creates a discussion around what we are doing, where we should be going and what direction we should be headed as far as the rest of the world.”

Canada has been attending the event regularly since 1965 but this year they plan to focus on relatively new experiential education.

“That’s a new thing that we’re going to be presenting as well. It’s based on some Einstein and Kolb’s theory of education and learning,” said Klingspohn.

While their on-snow sessions are one of the main focuses in Bulgaria, the team has been working on their synchronization while at Sun Peaks.

“We’ll get three runs on the demonstration slope to show off our ski technique. We’ve been working on some different formations so that it’s not always the same one every time, so we need to practise a little bit,” he explained.

Klingspohn said they have been focusing their training time on Exhibition because it has the steepest and most consistent slope, similar to what they’ll be skiing at the Congress.

“There is so many teams skiing on the same slope and doing demonstrations on the slopes it’s usually injected.  It’s a very hard surface usually it’s quite a steep slope because we want to show our best technique.”

In addition to training for their own event team members spent the week conducting a level four course. The course is the highest level of training a Canadian ski instructor can receive. The course had 56 level three participants.