4 minute read
Glee Club
Ski & Snowboard Club’s winning formula mixes fun with practice
BY MARTINIQUE DAVIS
“When you have fun in a sport, you want to do it more. When you do it more, you get better. And when you get better, you have more fun,” says Telluride Ski and Snowboard Club Executive Director Justin Chandler.
Those three interconnected strands of fun, practice and success are the essence of the club. The popular youth program has been a Telluride institution for 35-plus years and in that time has nurtured a love of sport for innumerable skiers, snowboarders, Nordic athletes and ice skaters. The winter of 2020-21 marked the largest enrollment ever, with more than 465 kids participating in the various TSSC disciplines. Chandler says this winter is shaping up to be another big season and notes that the program’s enduring popularity owes much to its focus on fun.
“You really have to make it all about the kids and for them the first priority is to have fun,” he says, noting that safety is at the forefront as well. That spirit of fun is evidenced in the buzz of excited chatter that envelopes the groups of kids gathered at the base of the slopes most weekends in winter. Coaches lead these sessions with a goal of providing “miles of smiles”, while adeptly incorporating training drills too.
Chandler says, “When you talk to the best skiers in the world, that’s what they say — it’s all about fun. It may become work as they get older, but because they love doing it, it doesn’t feel like work.” He adds that skill acquisition also plays a role, especially for the older age groups. As TSSC athletes get older, their training volume increases, from one day a week for the youngest participants to multiple weekly sessions for the oldest. The club’s model has reaped rewards, with some TSSC-trained skiers and riders successfully competing in the uppermost echelons of
Justin Chandler
Telluride’s Olympic hopefuls
HAGAN KEARNEY
Snowboardcross
A visit to Telluride at the age of 9, piqued Kearney’s love of snowboarding. He joined TSSC after his family moved to the area. As a student at the Telluride Mountain School, Kearney trained and competed at progressively higher levels, with a first breakout performance at the Aspen XGames in 2014. Kearney won his first World Cup in 2016, brought home a World Championship medal in 2017 and made his first Olympic team in 2018. Kearney has garnered a whopping 21 top-10 World Cup finishes and most recently won silver and bronze in World Cup SBX events in Europe.
LUCAS FOSTER
Snowboard Halfpipe At just 22 years old, TSSC-trained snowboarder Foster was named to the U.S. Ski Team in 2019 and has since landed top-10 finishes at the World Cup event in Calgary in 2020 and the Aspen US Grand Prix in 2021. This is ever-the-more impressive considering Foster grew up riding slopestyle, not halfpipe. “It took me a really long time to find my groove competing with no halfpipe where I grew up. It required patience and resilience to finally make things click,” he says.
GUS KENWORTHY
Skiing Slopestyle, Halfpipe, Big Air After winning silver in Sochi, Kenworthy, who came out in 2015, became prominent as a champion of LGBTQ+ rights. Following a successful career competing for the United States that included his Olympic silver, AFP World Championship titles, World Cup wins and an X Games medal, Kenworthy opted in 2019 to compete for Great Britain, his birthplace and home country of his mother. In February 2020, Gus won his first World Cup gold medal as a GB Snowsport athlete in the halfpipe and will compete in his third and final Olympics for Team GB this winter in Beijing.
Justin Chandler
Beth Bailis
Beth Bailis
their disciplines in recent years, with three (and potentially a fourth in 2022) participating in the Olympics and a dozen or so named to U.S. national teams.
In 2014, freestyle skier Gus Kenworthy made his hometown proud as the first Telluride-bred Olympic medalist, thanks to an impeccable performance in the 2014 Sochi Games, where he won a silver medal as part of the first-ever U.S. Olympic slopestyle ski team.
Then, in 2018, tiny Telluride sent three Olympians to the games in South Korea: Kenworthy, snowboardcross athlete Hagen Kearney and freestyle skier Keaton McCargo. This winter, there are three TSSC alumni potentially heading to the Olympics: Kenworthy, Kearney and snowboarder Lucas Foster, with U.S. Ski and Snowboard’s squad announcement scheduled for mid-November.
Chandler deflects credit away from the club and toward the athletes, but acknowledges that “having three Olympians, and now possibly a fourth, from such a small town is quite unique. Creating an environment for these athletes to succeed is a testament to the town. In addition to these extraordinary athletes’ gifts, hard work and talents, it took the local school systems, their teachers, families and their coaches to make it happen.”
