2021-2022 Calendar

The full event calendar for the upcoming season is now available on our website, and registration is open; check it out!

Save the date for Slide Into Winter: December 10-11 at Solitude.

Meet IMD’s new CS Manager: Meaghan Lovely

I am a New Hampshire native who grew up ski racing for Franconia Ski Club. After graduating from St. Lawrence University in 2008 I moved to Jackson, WY. Thirteen years ago, I was a hesitant new member of the Jackson Hole Mountain Resort Mountain Sports School who wasn’t sure of my place in the industry. Participating in the CS2 changed everything for me. It changed me as an instructor, as a teacher and opened me up to all of the possibilities that PSIA-I and Jackson Hole Mountain Resort had to offer. Since then I have become a member of the JHMR training staff and am a soon to be children’s supervisor. I am also the mother of a 3 year old, Emerson, and live on a homestead with my husband Matt, our dog Nelson, 2 cats, 20 chickens and 13 goats. I am blessed to have made a life here and am excited to continue growing my career. It is an honor to follow Mark Nakada’s legacy and be the new CS team manager. I am beyond excited to see us through the many current changes and see how we grow as a division in the future.

The Value of Cross-Training

J. Scott McGee, IMD DECL for Cross Country, Telemark and Alpine

From my first year of teaching, I always had access to training for Cross Country and Telemark. Later came Alpine, and then Backcountry, and then even some Snowboard, Adaptive, Freestyle and Childrens Specialist training. There were always light bulbs popping on over my head (in my mind), whether relating one skill on one set of gear to another discipline, or discovering a new way of learning, and therefore a new way of teaching.

This season, when cross-training opportunities come across your radar, whether an in-house or PSIA/AASI clinic or certification, know that you don’t know what you don’t know until you know what you don’t know, and that you’ll gain new insights for your primary discipline in the process of learning a ‘new sport’ and discovering a new secondary discipline.

Embrace the learning – there is inestimable value in the experience of being a beginner again. And the light bulbs don’t stop when you take off the new gear. Back on your primary setup, you’ll be delighted by insights that didn’t come in the moment, but as you put together the pieces that reward you with an epiphany about the gear you’ve been riding on for most of your days on snow.

Member School Shout Out

PSIA-AASI Intermountain is thrilled to announce our newest member school in Wyoming. White Pine is excited about the opportunities for expanding training and professional education at their mountain. They have jumped in with three planned clinics this year! Check out their website at whitepinewyoming.com and sign up for one of these events to see the resort up close:
- Ski Improvement, December 10
- Alpine More With Less, Janunary 14
- Alpine General Assessment Prep, February 11

Welcome White Pine!

Strategic Alignment and Assessment Update

Stephen Helfenbein, IMD Alpine Education Manager

Over the past few years our association has been going through a comprehensive strategic alignment process. As a result, in addition to using the same National Standard for certification all 8 PSIA-AASI divisions are now using many of the same resources. These include:

- A performance guide used to design divisional process and education
- A national candidate assessment form (scorecard)
- A shared scoring scale.

The goal is one we’ve desired and pursued for a long time: consistency!

As PSIA-I integrates these new tools into the certification process, you can expect some changes. Some will be obvious while others will go unnoticed. An obvious change is the addition of a day to the assessment process for Alpine Level 2. This additional day will be used to assess the technical competency of movement analysis.

The latest revision to the National Standards categorizes movement analysis as a technical skill. In the past, our process only assessed movement analysis during teaching assessments and this will continue. However, the movement analysis performed during the teaching assessment is only one piece of the student assessment process that instructors use to plan their lesson. They also assess the students' understanding, motivation and experience. The addition of the technical movement analysis assessment day gives us the opportunity to evaluate the instructor’s technical knowledge and understanding in a way that complies with the National Standards.

As I mentioned before, there will be some more changes. As the season approaches, we will do our best to proactively preview these changes with you. You can find more details about certification requirements for each discipline on the Intermountain website.