By Peter Minde
Editor’s note: This interview was conducted at Spring Series in Lake Placid in late March. Its delayed publication in these humble pages is attributable to neither the reporter nor the interview subject. Mea culpa.
MT VAN HOEVENBERG, Lake Placid — In a break between the 40-kilometer races at Spring Series and the award ceremonies following, Nordic Insights caught up with USSS Development Team Coach Greta Anderson. She kindly gave her time to answer some questions about identifying and retaining talent in American junior skiing.
Nordic Insights: How do you identify talent?
Greta Anderson: That’s a big question.
We saw a meta-analysis in sport come out a few years ago with over 71,000 different studies and situations that were analyzed. We know that we are not very good at identifying talent as people that are looking to do talent identification in terms of like the superstar children and the success rate of them becoming world-class adults in sport, right?
It’s about a 7 percent success rate. So of the 100 people that everyone says, “Oh, they’re the next Babe Ruth” as a 10-year-old, only about seven percent even make it to world-class sport. And so we’re trying to make sure that our systems are built to bring out world-class levels of success and also to include more athletes in those systems, rather than looking for reasons to eliminate them.
I’ve read about a high burnout rate among youth in organized sports. [Read more: the original scholarly paper; the nightly news version of same.] Can you speak to that in skiing in particular, or in sports in general?
I think [that in] anything performance-related, you’re going to see high burnout rates, right? It’s a stressful environment for some; it’s an environment with a lot of pressure. It takes a long time to develop in those environments. And not everyone is going to be the best in the world, but everyone is trying to be the best in the world.
And as you find that they’re not, you might lose them in the performance arena. They might pivot to other arenas, in the sport in particular, or to other high-level things in their life, but we do see an attrition rate. I don’t know that it’s burnout or quitting, or it’s any number of things. We certainly use the term “burnout” a lot in the U.S. right now.
A writer recalled Alison Crocker. Crocker was a standout Dartmouth nordic skier who, in 2005, was vying for a spot on the national team before she won a Rhodes Scholarship and ultimately transitioned out of competitive skiing. Crocker now teaches physics at Reed College in Oregon, races locally, and coaches.
Which is a great reason to leave skiing. For another opportunity — that’s a huge opportunity.
There are some veteran athletes on the team that are maybe looking towards retirement. How do you replace them?
You could say that about everyone on the distance podium this year, on the World Cup, on the women’s side.
I guess my question is, how long? Again, I guess this gets back to development in general. How do you fill the shoes of those athletes that have made such huge contributions to U.S. success?
I don’t think you ever replace those athletes. But you do hope that you have enough depth that you have other athletes coming up to occupy those spots on the podium and spots in the top 10, and have a strong presence as leaders on your team. On the women’s side, we have Jessie and Rosie, who we certainly look at as veterans on our team. Alayna Sonnesyn is a veteran on our team, in terms of on the World Cup team.
And in not too long, we’re going to have Julia as a veteran on our team, and I remember not so long ago when she was one of our rookies. She’s going to be morphing into that role as she’s now gained a lot of experience, and is one of the people on the roster with more World Cup starts than many of our athletes. So we hope to fill that with depth, but we’re never going to replace the ones that leave, and we’ll remember them forever and look fondly on their careers forever. And we’re seeing careers with more longevity, which I hope continues to add to our depth as a nation.
We want more youngsters, but we also don’t take for granted the athletes that are maybe in the second half of their careers where they’re the best they’ve ever been, and with the most experience they’ve ever had, contributing in a positive way to our performance.
It seems to be a really difficult job to execute. Is there anything about the development process that I should know, that I haven’t asked?
Probably everything. It’s a huge job. My job description is very general. U.S. ski development is much, much, much larger than myself or my job role entails. We rely on and live and die by how engaged and educated and involved and passionate and skilled our community is. We want to be really respectful of that, and also continue growing and supporting that so that we don’t live and die with human capital, but we live and die by a really good system that we’ve all contributed to.
Ski racing is not inexpensive. [See, e.g., Mansfield Nordic’s estimated annual costs for a junior skier’s season. Add another zero to some of these numbers for a junior training with a club like Ski & Snowboard Club Vail.] What is USSS doing to hold down costs?
That’s something we delegate to the club level. Some communities go out of their way to make it affordable; in other communities, it’s more cost-prohibitive. We’re reliant on the clubs making it affordable.
There’s no secret that performance in sport is expensive, and it seems like it’s getting more expensive all the time. World-class anything is expensive. We look at what other, better-funded nations do, keep an eye on what they’re spending, and we try to make sure we’re trying to keep in range of that. We’re doing the most we can with what we have.
How can U.S. Ski & Snowboard expand the demographic of people who ski. Would that expand the pool of potential athletes?
We’d love to grow skiing across the board; that’s part of our mission.
NANANordic and Skiku are Alaska programs successful in spreading skiing across a wide demographic. We’d love to see more of these programs created. We rely on local clubs for this. We want to see more people on skis.
Thank you so much.
You bet.
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