GAP SKI INSTRUCTOR PROGRAM

2008 GAP Ski Instructor Course Review

Nick Mayor, 34 Ex-Investor/Full time dad, London Never ones to shirk a challenge, my wife and I decided to embrace the fact that we had had a son only eleven weeks earlier, and head out to Verbier so that I could join the Warren Smith Ski Academy GAP Ski Instructor course and she could study wine (and Teddy could study how many ways he could spit milk onto the increasingly toxic carpet in our rented flat).

I had done a couple of Academy weeks with Warren and the team before, and when watching them ski I found myself thinking “I want to ski like that”.  So the choice of where to sign up for a BASI course was an easy one.: if I’m going to spend nine weeks getting my skiing ripped apart, I want to come out the other side looking like Warren’s coaches.  (Well, like their skiing anyway). 

The course itself only reaffirmed this.  I had done instructor training before, to a lower level, in New Zealand with a fantastic organization.  But the way these guys ski is, well, different.  Awesome to watch, and awesome to feel when the one thing they’ve been vainly shouting at you for three weeks finally clicks, when muscles that only weeks before you’d never even heard of and still can’t spell start firing and it all…..just……works.   If you want to ski like you’re in charge and the mountain’s just there to bring you coffee, this is the course for you. 

Make no mistake though, there’s more to the instructor qualification than working on your own skiing.  There’s the whole “instructor” thing for a start – learning the theory, learning to communicate it, learning to demonstrate it.  If you just want to improve your skiing, I suspect a GAP course may not be for you.  There are times when you don’t want to stand in the rain practicing snowplough turns; times you don’t want to go home and plan a lesson after six hours’ skiing and two hours of video analysis; times when you don’t want to explain which end of a ski is the pointy one while your classmates pretend to be a group of nuns. 

But the good news is that Warren and the team have this nailed too.  They have light years of teaching and coaching experience between them. Each day they bring along huge vats of psychological help to get you through the tougher times.  And they create a fantastic learning environment where noone loses their sense of humour for long, and where completing even the most mundane trainee instructor task (thinking up a game for five-year-olds to familiarize themselves with skis, coming up with a strategy to allow a group of ten-year-olds to use the bathroom without having to file a missing persons report) feels like an achievement rather than a tick in the box.

In short, despite skiing 75 days this season, in all weathers and often in some slightly alarming neon ski pants, there hasn’t been a single day when I haven’t jumped out of bed just psyched to get up the mountain and get involved – whether fine-tuning short-radius turns or working on exercises for complete beginners.

I love skiing even more than I did when I arrived.  And with the backing of the guys – technical, psychological, emotional – I now have a piece of paper that allows me to share that love with others.  How awesome is that?!  So come on all you new parents.  Throw a bunch of baby formula in the back of the car, get the skis on the roof, crack open the BASI manuals, and head into a wonderful new world.  Call Warren, book onto the course, and relax comfortable in the knowledge that things will never be the same again.  Things certainly won’t be for the three of us – and we have Warren, Phil, Rob, Tom, Charlie and all the wonderful friends we made during the course to thank for that.

 

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