Because ski racing isn’t a team sport in the usual sense of the word, less attention is given in our sport, compared to traditional team sports such as soccer or hockey, to the role of team culture on how individual racers perform. The simple reality of ski racing is that how you ski on race [...]
Being a ski coach is a tough job. There is everything you need to know about conditioning, technique, tactics, equipment, and, of course, the mind. There are the logistics of organizing training, travel, and races for a group of athletes, and adapting to the ever-changing conditions inherent in ski racing. There are also the not-very-fun [...]
As the winter approaches, I’ve been working with a number of racers, from U16s up to World Cuppers. Of course, I’ve introduced them to the immense value of traditional mental training tools such as self-talk, imagery, and routines. At the same time, a real emphasis in my work this summer and fall has been on [...]
It’s that time of year again. Winter is approaching (or already started) and if you’re the parent of one more ski racers, or a ski racer yourself, you can expect to spend many hours over the coming months in a tuning room or garage filing, waxing, and scraping ski after ski after ski after ski [...]
The ski racing season (and the start of other sport seasons) appear on the horizon and we all have our fingers crossed that Covid-19 won't derail all of the amazing efforts of sports organizations, from local to international. Now is a great time to offer your club's or academy's community workshops that will provide deep [...]
This article is my fourth (and, I think, final) in a series exploring Fear of Failure in ski racing. If you missed the first three articles, you may want to catch up before reading this article (Part I, II, III). In those first three articles, I examined my evolving perspective on fear of failure and [...]
In addition to my work in the sports world, I have also consulted extensively in the corporate setting over the years. This work has focused on exploring ways to maximize both individual and organizational performance. Because I’m based in the San Francisco Bay Area, the heart of the tech world, a lot of my focus [...]
In Part I in my series, Fear of Failure, I introduced you to the epidemic presence of fear of failure in ski racing. The article describes what fear of failure is and its causes. I also describe three ways that racers attempt to avoid failure: they quit racing, they cause themselves to fail, but have [...]
This article, the third in a four-part series that is part of the conversation about development in U.S. ski racing initiated by Dan Leever and Ski Racing Media, will focus on how, based on my 35+ years of specializing in the psychology of ski racing, our sport can best leverage mental training as part of [...]
In my last post, Fear of Failure: Part I, I discussed the sad epidemic of fear of failure that I find to be rampant in America and that I see frequently in the young ski racers with whom I work. I have discovered a new wrinkle to the fear-of-failure phenomenon that brings greater clarity to the [...]
