By Gavin Kentch
Last week’s USSS Spring Congress was not without its meetings and its scheduling spreadsheets, but mixed in with all the logistics that make the sport run in this country were some pretty interesting substantive discussions, too. Matt Whitcomb gave an update on the national team, for example. Bryan Fish spoke to last season’s domestic racing. Rosie Brennan, in her capacity as athlete rep, reported on results from this year’s athlete survey.
And Greta Anderson, Development Coach for the national team, gave her annual year-in-review speech regarding U.S. ski development. You can view her whole PowerPoint deck here, and listen to the full presentation starting at the 1:44 mark of the third recording in this folder if you would like (you want the one that says “Bryan Fish” on the preview screen).
Or you can read my highlights. I excerpted Anderson’s thoughts in three major areas that I think have broad relevance for coaches and athletes alike: current areas of emphasis for development, what coaches can do, and some tactical considerations that the national team is focusing on this year.
Each topic has a relevant screenshot from the presentation, and then Anderson’s discussion about same. This is where I typically say that Anderson’s statements have been lightly edited for brevity and clarity… but frankly this is all nearly verbatim. Speaking as someone who has read tens of thousands of pages worth of legal transcripts for his erstwhile day job, this is impressive. Greta Anderson not only knows more about ski technique than you do, she also speaks better than you do. Or at least a heck of a lot better than I do.
Anyway. Here are some thoughts on development from last week’s meetings. I hope that something in here helps you with your coaching, your athletes’ understanding of that coaching, your athletes’ skiing, and/or your own skiing. As to the last point, you should 100% read this article imho even if you are, like this reporter, a Masters athlete who does not coach others — how much time are you currently spending on mobility? On pack skiing? On conscientious viewing of World Cup footage with an eye to strategy? Speaking personally, my honest answer is “little to zero”; I suspect that most citizen racers can similarly find something here that will help them.
Here’s Greta:
Last year: speed and movement mechanics and biomechanics; this year: raw speed (turnover & limb velocity), coordination, starts, tactics, thinking about being a ski racer, technique skill building
Focus areas for development last year were speed and movement mechanics and biomechanics. So we did a lot of work on the ground of, How do you move well, how do you transfer speed, how do you increase limb velocity.
This year, along that same thread, we’re working on raw speed, turnover and limb velocity, coordination.
We’re driving home working on starts. We would like our athletes to be able to win the start and come out of the blocks in the first 200 meters of a sprint race in first, second, or third place.
The other thing that we’re really driving home at the NTG camps this year is thinking about being a ski racer and technique skill-building. So maybe not having to improve their technique necessarily, but being able to ski in multiple ways, so that they have more tools in their toolbox. So they’re a very good strider and a very good runner, not just somebody that’s really good at one and hardly ever does the other in racing.
More “fun” during development projects
Some of the athlete feedback that was pretty consistent, and Cami mentioned this to me a few years ago, was if we could make the trips and projects more fun.
That’s a pretty big value of the athletes. So we’ve been working on that — doing more volleyball, hacky sack, making a bit more time for cooking competitions, being a little more competitive about putting good NNF videos together, that kind of thing, team bonding. So that’s something that we’re certainly focused on at the national camps.
Adding mobility alongside strength per se
We’d like to see a one-to-one ratio for athletes, not of stretching and yoga, but of mobility, to their strength sessions. So doing more prehabbing instead of rehab.
I’ve worked an increasing amount with a couple different PTs, but in particular this year Zuzana Rogers, trying to figure out where we’re tight and how it’s affecting our movement and technique, and figuring out how we can get on the front end of that with our junior athletes. And give them skills, tools, movement patterns that will help them avoid those traps, so that they can train more with fewer tweaks in the long run.
Get that FIS license and SafeSport status updated, please
What you can do as coaches: I know Bryan [Fish] already hit this on the head: please get everyone a FIS license, please make sure they’re SafeSport-current. That’s like the biggest, dumbest roadblock you can run into, but we have people run into it every year, and if we could just avoid that, it would be great.
Sprint starts: lots of them
We’d like to have you all doing sprint starts all year in all formats with all of your skiers. So what we would like to see is in the next calendar training year, 1,000 more starts in training. So it averages to about three a day.
It doesn’t really average three a day; it means two or three times a week you’re maybe getting together and doing eight or 10 starts with your skiers.
Try to make it fun. You can start them laying down and have them get up as quickly as they can without using their arms, but we really want to work on that limb velocity and turnover.
Encourage learning new techniques
Encouraging learning new techniques: “Hey, we’re going to try to ski like this person today.”
Don’t pick somebody on your team to make fun of. Pick a World Cup skier and say, Hey, what do they do really well, or, What are they doing different than this other person?
Encourage focused pack skiing: How many times did you lead the group today? How many times did your work your way to the back? And work your way to the front again?
If you have a group together, I think often we fall into the same pecking order with our athletes, or the same order that they are used to skiing in. A couple of people always — you know, [one Steamboat athlete] often skis behind [other Steamboat athlete], and they’re teammates, and they’ve been together since they were literally two years old.
How do we take those guys and make sure they’re skiing around other people? So asking, Hey, how many times did you lead the group today? How many times did you work your way to the back and work your way back to the front again?
Just making sure that they’re really comfortable moving in traffic. That’s a skill that you need on the World Cup that we know we can work on, but we often don’t.
Work together with your athletes on building training plans: discuss why they are doing what they are doing
Working together with your athletes on building training plans so that they understand why they’re doing what they’re doing at what time of year. And they don’t have to know it enough to write the plan themselves. But, you know, say, Hey we’re doing this this month and we’re not focused on this other thing because in two months we’re going to work on that by itself, once we’ve built this piece.
The athletes are really smart. They’re inquisitive. They’re — most of the ones that we see are already quite successful. And so they have a plan and they’re working on it. Often if you ask them why they’re doing what they’re doing, they don’t have a good answer, but they would like to know. And so that’s a place as coaches that we can all provide a lot of resources to them.
Check in often about their goals; be open to adjusting these if needed
Checking in often about their goals and being open to adjusting those goals if it’s needed. If they get sick, all of their JNQ goals might bump back a month. One conversation about that can save them 20 hours of bad training and staying sick.
Provide feedback to me about what athletes need – we appreciate and use this and will adjust as the needs of our sport dictate
Providing feedback to me about what athletes need or what’s needed at camps. We super appreciate this. You all see your athletes every day and know them better than anybody; you’ve seen them over a span of many years.
If there’s pieces that you’re seeing that we’re missing, or messages we’re sending that we think are helpful that aren’t, I’m always open to adapting and adjusting that to improve the camps and the way that we’re helping the athletes or helping them at major races.
We are talking a lot this year about tactics. We feel like at Junior Worlds and U23s in particular we could do quite a bit better in our tactics as a group.
Drafting matters; being able to move well through a pack matters
Obviously as the speed comes up in ski racing, drafting really matters, and being able to move well through a pack matters.
Winning the start matters
Winning the start — so working on the starts so that you get to where you want to be early in the race without burning a bunch of energy — that matters.
Taking the hole when it opens matters
A few things we talked about particularly with sprinting is taking the hole or line when it opens. We saw a lot of opportunities open for athletes, and the decision they made was to wait, and then that opportunity was gone and they didn’t have it again.
And so discussing with the athletes, you know, choosing to go for the hole, choosing to wait, and choosing to not take the opportunity. That’s actually three different decisions — choosing to wait is not not making a decision. The action is really important. And so getting athletes to intuitively do that is something I think worth discussing with your athletes.
Women and kindness in sport: This is cultural, and we need to talk about it with our athletes
Something that we’re seeing a lot with women is kindness and cultural expectations in sport. It’s a lot of, Well I didn’t want to go because I could have knocked her over and she would have gotten upset. And at the international level, if we waste any energy worrying about that, we’re going to be behind.
So, talking with our young female athletes in particular about this and saying, She’s just as good a skier as you are, and there’s an opportunity, and you’re racing. So what you owe somebody is fairness and good ethics, but you don’t owe anybody kindness on the race course.
This is pretty important, especially for our younger women who are really kindhearted and gentle, for lack of a better word. That’s probably not going to put you in a sprint final. So helping them get over that and find a part of them that is an aggressive racer is going to help them improve their skiing.
Your athletes should be watching the World Cup and talking about it
Your athletes should be watching World Cup and talking about it. We talked a lot with athletes about maybe not watching always the final 100 meters, but in a 20km, watching seven kilometers to 18 kilometers, where the meat of really good movement and racing is happening. Not just the final sprint and the fancy moves that you see, but how fast you need to be moving, how good does your technique need to be, how economically do you need to be moving, and how patient are the racers when they’re in the pack.
So that the athletes are used to watching that, seeing it and seeing in their mind’s eye what they should be looking like when they’re racing.
You’re reading this on Nordic Insights, one man’s labor of love dedicated to publicizing American nordic skiing. Last season’s GoFundMe is literally the only reason why I turned a profit in year one of Nordic Insights, and in turn the only reason why there is a year two of Nordic Insights for you to be reading now: I was okay with working for very little money to get this love letter to American cross-country skiing off the ground, but I didn’t want to lose money for the privilege of doing so. If you would like to support what remains a brutally shoestring operation, this season’s GoFundMe may be found here. Thank you for your consideration, and, especially, for reading.
