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Ski and Snowboard Club Vail wins 2 U.S. Ski and Snowboard Alpine awards

The club won its fifth Alpine Club of the Year award and U16 coach Lisa Perricone was named development coach of the year

SSCV won U.S. Ski and Snowboard's Alpine Club of the Year award for the fifth time. "The program consistently produces strong athletes that feed into the national team pipeline and the NCAA circuits," a USSS press release stated. "It is clear that their development programs thrive."
John Locher/AP photo

After one of its most successful domestic and international campaigns, Ski and Snowboard Club Vail was recognized with multiple U.S. Ski and Snowboard annual awards this past month in Park City, including Alpine Club of the Year.

“Our coaching staff is excited and I take it as we’re moving in the right direction,” said Brad Wall, SSCV Alpine program director. “There’s plenty we can do better and we’re trying every day to help the kids get better.”

But the club is obviously doing a few things right.



SSCV’s fifth Alpine Club of the Year Award was paired with four other U.S. Ski and Snowboard (USSS) annual honors: Snowboard Club of the Year, Snowboard Coach of the Year (Chris Laske), Alpine Development Coach of the Year (Lisa Perricone) and the Paul Bacon Award (P.J. Jenick).

“A lot of the people on that list before me are people I’ve either worked with or been coached by,” said Perricone, a former NCAA DI All-American at CU. “It’s a pretty big honor to be on a list with such great coaches.”

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Excellent coaching “across the board” is SSCV’s main secret sauce, Wall said. Under the hood, however, a few other items proved critical to the club’s 2024 successes.

When asked what he believes is behind SSCV winning Alpine Club of the Year, director Brad Wall said, “Across the board, we just have unbelievable coaching. From our U8s all the way to our PG athletes. They absolutely do whatever it takes to help kids get better.”
SSCV/Courtesy photo

Set up for on-snow success

Wall rooted SSCV’s Alpine achievements in the club’s targeted focus on maximizing its home venue, especially in terms of snow surface manipulation.

“I feel as though we’re in a place now where the entire coaching team is motivated to put out the best training environment on any given day,” he said. “And (they) understand that the results throughout the season will be dependent upon that.”

Wall’s crew employed an elaborate process to transform Golden Peak’s dry Colorado snow into the dense, firm and even icy track athletes see on the international stage. On clear, cold nights throughout the season, snowcats opened up the surface, water from snowmaking hydrants was poured in and the run was re-groomed.

“(But) we were looking to try and take it to the next level,” Wall continued before explaining how the operations team repeated the process and sprayed water over the final, freshly-groomed top layer. The resulting “icy situation” replicates “what athletes will see down the road competing in Europe and hopefully the World Cup level,” Wall said.

“That’s just a huge team effort from the whole coaching staff in terms of going out there, spending the man hours, putting water into the hill, and doing it a couple different ways that I don’t really feel like have been tried in Colorado before,” he continued. “And we had excellent results in terms of the training environment.”

Not only were single-focus practice sessions improved because of increased snow consistency — an added benefit of the aforementioned method of track preparation — but the club was able to host “unbelievable, super fair races,” Wall said.

“I think that was recognized, too, around the discussion for this award,” he added.

The first was a National Junior Race on Dec. 16. First-year FIS athlete Maizy Douglas came from bib 36 to take the win.

“That just sort of speaks to holding high quality, super-fair races,” said Wall.

Golden Peak also hosted the Rocky Central Junior Championships in March, where SSCV athletes claimed four wins and 15 individual podiums. A few weeks later, the club’s 17 qualified athletes notched six podiums at U16 Nationals — also held on home turf.

“It took all the ski club Alpine coaches to come together to put in the work to set up a venue like that,” Perricone said, adding that it was “fun to race at home and showcase what we have.”

Mari Renick sped to giant slalom and super-G silver and Katie McDonald finished runner-up in the slalom, followed closely by Lara Huml (fourth) and Renick (sixth). Perricone said the girls called themselves ‘the drip queens’ this year and made stickers of their anointed team mascot, an athlete’s pet pug.

“It was a pretty fun, all-in team atmosphere this year,” the coach said. “I can’t express enough that they deserved their successes. These girls worked their butts off all year long … and they’re into it.”

On the boys side, Jackson Leever and Weston Roach led the way with a 1-2 finish in the U16 national championship giant slalom; Roach also placed second in the super-G, where Leever took fourth and William Erickson placed eighth. Finally, SSCV qualified three athletes for the OPA Cup team and another for the Alpe Cimbra squad.

When asked to identify additional other Alpine season highlights, Wall said its hard to look past Viktoria Zaytseva.

Viktoria Zaytseva competes in the women’s giant slalom during the U.S. Alpine Championships in March at Sun Valley ski resort in Ketchum, Idaho.
John Locher/AP photo

“It would be hard to pinpoint even, a single performance,” Wall said of the 16-year-old.

Zaytseva won two U.S. junior national titles and claimed a top-10 at the U.S. senior Alpine championships in Sun Valley in March. She was the No. 1-ranked female super-G skier in the world for athletes born in 2007. The SSCV FIS men’s team was pretty good, too, with FIS coach Pat Duran sending 12 boys to U18 nationals.

On the international stage, Nicole Begue and Stewie Bruce placed sixth and 10th, respectively, at the Youth Olympic Games and the club watched three alumni travel to Haute-Savoie France as part of the 16-member U.S. Alpine Junior World Ski Championship team.

Chief Operating Officer Bryan Rooney pointed to being on snow in Vail by early November as a key reason for the championship-season success.

“That kind of set the stage for the rest of the season,” Rooney said. “We had really hard, well-prepared surfaces and challenged our athletes. Looking back, I think it worked out nicely.”

Shepherding speedy skiers

In terms of age groups, Wall described the 2023-24 winter as one with “top-to-bottom success.” While Perricone labeled the U16 chapter as a “benchmark,” she also knows it’s not the end of the journey.

“At the FIS levels, you truly see fast skiing and the maturity of athletes,” she said. “You still are developing skill, but it’s a bit more sports management — where you highlight which races to go to, how to balance workouts, training, etc.”

“When I moved back to U16s, every year I’m like, ‘oh my god, we have so much work to do,’ and you forget they’re 13,” she continued. “But you do have a lot of work to do and their bodies are still able to change their muscle memory and truly develop skill.”

Seeing evidence of such growth throughout a season is one of Perricone’s treasured coaching rewards. Still, there’s one overarching target.

“I’m competitive. At the end of the day, I want to create fast racers,” said the coach, who is entering her eighth season with SSCV. After graduating from CU in 2008, Perricone spent four years coaching at Eldora Mountain Ski Club before another five at Aspen Ski Club. Other than dealing with phones and social media, not much has changed over that time when it comes to working with kids, she said.

“Skiing is a really life-encompassing sport, so I think if kids really want to make a go at it, they need to be fully committed and into it,” Perricone said. Her own professional development has benefited from bouncing between the FIS and U16 age groups over her almost two-decade long career.

“At both age groups, a lot of my approach is building self-confidence and trust in themselves first. And then you can get a lot more done,” she said. “I think you have to be a lot more direct and instructive (with younger kids) in how to practice that — and let them know that it’s a learned skill.” 

As Perricone has moved farther from her own competitive career, she’s had to lean on different strengths.

“As a young coach, I could really rely on my recent experience of being an athlete — still having that muscle memory that I could describe,” she said. “You lose that over time, and so I’ve had to develop more my experience of ‘what works for kids.'”

In shepherding speedy skiers, however, development pipeline pragmatism often lacks a clear standard.

“You might spend four years with an athlete and four years down the road you might see if that was effective,” Perricone said. “You don’t really get to see the product of your efforts right away in sport.”

SSCV athletes are already deep into preparations for the 2024-25 season.

“The training right now is really exciting,” Wall said.

After wrapping up an on-snow camp at Vail Mountain on May 16, the team transitioned over to Copper Mountain, where they’ll continue to train into mid-June. Four days a week, buses pick up student-athletes at Dowds Junction at 5:15 a.m. to head over the pass, where they drill fundamentals, test equipment and welcome new age-groupers into the fold. Eastern programs are at Copper Mountain, too, but those student-athletes obviously aren’t making it back for second period social studies classes.

After pointing that out, Perricone simply said: “We’re fortunate in where we live.”


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