With the feeder program offered by Park City Mountain Resort filling up every winter, Park City Ski and Snowboard Executive Director Christie Hind says they saw an opportunity to help develop young athletes in a variety of sports.
“As a pipeline, we need to be able to introduce kids across disciplines,” Hind explained. “So, we started a couple of years ago with our signature shredders program, which exposes kids across our disciplines to Alpine they do a couple of weeks of alpine of cross country and Nordic, freestyle, free ski, there's a snowboard add on, and the program was wildly successful. So, these are not for never-evers, but for kids who are in that seven- and nine-year-old range, who want to be multi-sport athletes and want to learn more about sport before committing to one thing.”
Leading the new program is coach Ryan Devine, who grew up as a competitive moguls skier. He says the new youth program will include several on-snow winter sports.
“We have our shredders program, which is our full multi-sport program. We're bringing back skills and drills which is you know, predominantly alpine focused. We have bumps and jumps, switches, moguls and parking pipe focused. We have our little rippers program, which is snowboard, which is taking place at Woodward. And then we have our learn to fly program, which is Nordic jumping.”
Each program will be held two days a week, and young athletes will be able to mix and match to try multiple disciplines.
“Most of them take place on different days so they have an opportunity to try every discipline if they want,” Devine explained. “And if they can't work that into their schedule, that's where the shredders program comes into play, because it's three weeks of alpine three weeks in Nordic jumping three weeks across country, and then three weeks of freestyle freeride.”
Registration for all of Park City Ski and Snowboard programs can be found here.