A Very Important Election

Obama and Romney got nothing on this. Earlier this month I got a blast email from the USSA informing me that the alpine athlete representative for their Board of Directors, and by extension the USSA's Athlete's Council, is up for election. After speaking with the current athlete rep, Scott Macartney, about the role in detail, I decided that this was an opportunity to directly communicate with my sport's national governing body I could not pass up.

I want to work with the USSA/USST to develop a more viable pathway for U.S. skiers who choose to ski at the collegiate level, not as an exit from our sport, but as a breeding ground towards a professional, World Cup-level ski racing career.

After submitting my application this afternoon I learned who would be voting for this nomination. It's a select voting pool – athletes/alumni as defined by the USOC having participated in an Olympic or World Championship competition within the last 10 years and they broadened the athlete definition to include the top 50% of the athletes who competed in the national championships within the last 24 months – making it fewer than 200 people in the sport of alpine.

As someone who spent a fair amount of time working in DC during summers to help fund my skiing, I learned a few things about elections. Chief among them, figure out who can vote for you before crafting a stance on an issue, not after. My DC employer would have flogged me for this. However, I am far less concerned about locking up the the undecided-single-female-Ohio vote than making sure I communicate why I believe this issue is so important to our sport. It felt good to write.

I have full confidence that there are plenty of capable candidates for this position, and each person will bring a different view of what changes would best benefit ski racers today (Scott indicated that he is actually running for re-election, and he couldn't have been more of a gentleman encouraging me to run). Competing full-time after college is something that I feel uniquely qualified to speak on, and is a growing trend in our sport; at least 14 athletes, men and women, competed in a World Cup in the last calendar year AND went to college before they got their first start. Many of these starts went to athletes from other countries. The USSA/USST needs to capitalize on this critical mass of skiers who are developing outside of the traditional European-based model of ski racer development, and use the multitude of college budgets and available training grounds of the 26 or so D-I programs to our advantage. Below is my nomination form which basically says the same in thing in a little greater detail. Elections are on November 12th, we'll see what happens!