Coaching Video

Transcript:

[Rossland Museum & Discovery Centre logo on a white screen]

Butch Boutry: I think what you have to do is see inside each of your athletes. You gotta know exactly how to treat them because they’re all different. Some you’re gonna have to really nail down and some you have to be a little gentler to and to get through to them.

Patricia Stevens: Well he and George set up the coaching, they did it for free. And he and George were really good skiers and they had learned in Europe too, all the new techniques that’s usually is just go up there and do your run.

Butch Boutry: I would have to say Billy Stevens was one from Rossland, Verne Anderson was another, but we just skied with them, we just followed them.

Nancy Greene Raine: And I’ll never forget when Billy Stevens came back. He all of a sudden skied down Red Mountain doing what we called the ‘Billy Steven wig wags.’ They were short radius turns down the cliff and everybody until then would ski in big wide turns, skidding as you went to slow down, well he came down the cliff like this. And all of us kids, we tried to do that so hard and we didn’t know how to do it, but it was amazing the impact. Having racers from Red Mountain go off to the Olympics and come back, what that did for the kids. It was great. 

Butch Boutry: As we got older they started to talk to us a little more and helped us along the line.

Nancy Greene Raine: Nobody really said “shift your weight like this, plant your pole like that.” We weren’t told any of those things. They set a course, they would show how to go around the gates and then you’d try to go as fast as you could.

Butch Boutry: But a lot of it was self earned, you know. 

Nancy Greene Raine: In a race they timed you and the rest of the time they’d say “That looks pretty good” or “I don’t know, maybe see if you can faster” or “so and so is going faster than you” but you had no idea.

Butch Boutry: We had to learn why these ski’s did this and how it did this, and we got pretty good at it.

Nancy Greene Raine: My first real coach was when I went to the Olympic tryouts. He was a guy from Ottawa, Andy Tommy. We had skied a little bit and he was watching us and then he lined us up and he said “you all ski differently cause you all come from different parts of the country, so I’m just going to review the basic techniques” and I’m listening. He said “First of all you’ve gotta keep your weight on the downhill ski, do you understand?” I said “uh not really” and he takes his ski pole and he bangs my ski “this is your downhill ski.” So all day I skied with my weight on that ski. And then at the end everybody went in and I went up for one more run and then I come flying down the hill not thinking about anything, and there he is watching me “you skied pretty well, what were you doing today?” And I said “well you told me to keep my weight on that one ski, it’s really hard.” “Oh, this is your downhill ski, this is your uphill ski, this is your inside edge, this is your outside edge.” I had never heard those terms.

Nancy Greene Raine: So coaching was pretty much just getting started, but I was so lucky because as I came to my top, Verne Anderson [Picture of Verne Anderson in skiing equipment from the shoulder up looking at the camera] who had been on the team from Rossland became my coach and he was great. [picture of Verne Anderson, skiing slalom with one arm in the air]

Don Stevens: I guess the first coach we had actually, cause Nancy Greene League back then was as mom was saying went up and went in a two run race and then went and skied with your parents. 

[Picture of 12 children and 2 adults sitting in a class photo formation for the 1977 state mite championship. Mike Delich is in the front row, far left side].

And then Mike Delich was a guy, a local guy that used to race and he formed a group that were sorta before you got into more competitive racing but after Nancy Greene and he would take us out skiing all the time and  had a good group of us, he was a great guy. So we- we all got along well and that’s sorta where our team started from, our group of people.

[Picture of Jack Wood wearing a white turtleneck with a sweater over it.]

One of the first coaches we had was Jack Wood he was also a fellow off the National Team that was a local guy and really was a good person to have as a first time going to races with a guy who had a fair amount of experience and knew everyone around.

[Picture of Grant Rutherglen in a white toque, white gloves, and a grey and red coat holding white downhill skis].

We went through a lot of people, eventually Grant Rutherglen  who was another local person that was on the National ski team, was our coach for quite a while and- and Grant was a very good technical coach with us. So we had a lot of local coaches that had done well in their own time.

[Black and white picture of a man, Ches Edwards, with poles out skiing down a hill wearing a cap].

Ginger’s father, Ches, was the the guy that coached my dad. He’s also one of the guys who used to win the Grey Mountain Grind all the time. He’d coach my dad, my dad would coach Nancy and then the Grant Rutherglen’s, Gary Aiken’s, and all that group, and then they coached us. [Black and white picture of two men staring in opposite directions in winter attire] So there’s a lot of sort of people before you, carried the heritage along.

Robin Valentine: Coaching changed, we began over a period of hiring European coaches. We brought in probably half a dozen or seven over the period of time. Well Europeans were always the best on the World Cup and uh they were winning races, right so then the thought was that if they’re doing that well then there must be something that we can do to make our kids better and I’m not sure that it helped, but I believe it was a good idea.

Sean Valentine: Right when I was 10 years old they brought in a coach from Austria, his name was Helmut Spiegel.

[Picture of coach Helmut Spiegel with the BC Ski Team wearing blue ski attire holding downhill skis].

Fiona Martin: He was an Austrian guy who came to coach us and he just was an amazing person who gave everything that he had to us.  

Sean Valentine: (Laughs) Yeah he was very soothing, he still is to this day he’s, you know, I think he’s just retired. Always a great level head, positive, never a negative comment from him.

Fiona Martin: He just was full of vim and vigour and he was so encouraging and a really, really lovely guy. Just somebody that you really want to be around and was I think instrumental in keeping me going in the sport. 

Libby Martin: He also really encouraged you to free-ski.

Fiona Martin: He did, yeah.

Libby Martin: He would say “training is over, but I want you to stay on the mountain till the lift closes.”

Fiona Martin: Yeah.

Libby Martin: Off you go.

Fiona Martin: Yeah.

Libby Martin: Which was a really good coach, who does that.

[Text which reads, “Supported by” followed with a blue logo for the Trail and District Arts Council]