The Park City Ski and Snowboard Team is looking for a new CEO after John Kanarowski announced his resignation last month. The club consists of over 800 junior athletes and 126 coaches. With more than a thousand volunteers the organization is one of the largest winter sports clubs in North America.
Christie Hind is the interim leader of the Park City Ski and Snowboard Team. As a member of the Board, she is familiar with the operations of the organization and says they’ll start to define the search process during the next board meeting.
Two years ago, the PCSS brought together seven teams under one umbrella. They selected Jesse Hunt to lead the newly combined club of Park City’s junior snow sports teams. Hunt returned to USSA, about a year ago to take on the role of Alpine Director.
“So, the job is actually big. It’s big in lots of ways. Jesse Hunt came in and really gave us our name and our initial branding. Integrating any sort of organization with that many different cultural teams was going to be a challenge. Jesse really got us on the road to that.”
Hind says John Kanarowski brought financial and operational support to the organization in the nine months he led the club. She says they need a leader who can do both of those things as well as build the team’s endowment.
We also need somebody who’s going to come in and do some cultural integration and some significant fundraising. I mean our programs need to pay for themselves. But we should be as many other clubs are in the country, a really, well supported, well- endowed club.”
Hind says over the years the teams have all operated independently with their own leadership. But, she feels the programs offered through PCSS are solid and she acknowledges that change is hard, but the opportunity is tremendous.
“I think integrating these clubs, which is already happening, is a challenge. But, if we do this right, we will be the best in class club in the country.”
Over the years, elite athletes have emerged from the Park City based clubs. Hind says there is more to their mission than securing a World Cup win on the US Teams.
“But we need to train kids to be healthy for life. The opportunity to bring so many of the young athletes in Park City into a winter Sports Club and to think of it as a place where kids are educated through sport, around some of those intangible things like you know, life-long love of sport and where they learn things like character and grit and discipline and where they make life-long friends.”
Christie Hind stepped in as the interim director for the Children’s Justice Center last year. She’ll be leading the PCSS until a permanent CEO is hired.
