Rick Kapala

Why do you enjoy being a ski coach? What part of being a ski coach don't
you enjoy?
This is a little hard because I can't really boil it down to any one thing. 
I think alot of it has to do with interacting with people in pursuit of shared
goals and seeing the growth; athletically and emotionally in kids. I definitely
feed off the energy of the endeavor of coaching and racing.  I also like
that there is alot of opportunity to be creative. I've been coaching long enough
now that I recognize that when I was younger, my style was very frenetic and
at times I thought my own personal willpower and energy could help raise
the level of the group. I still believe that as coaches, we are a really important
source of spirit or tone within the groups that we coach. But, now I think I'm
more reflective and hopefully better at understanding skiers as people. I think
Miles Minson, in his own special way, was really gifted with this. But,
getting back to being creative… its true that training and racing is simple
but that doesn't mean that as coaches we just repeat the same old workouts and
use the same old motivational tactics. I'm always doodling in notebooks just
trying to come up with good ways to teach the same important lessons or impart
the critical physical stimulus. I use my own time when training or fishing to think
a lot about things that kids will say at workouts or how they react to training
looking for clues to them as people and athletes.  Maybe this is because
when I was a young athlete, I had a coach named Tom Kroll who was way more than
someone who taught a sport. It was clear that he respected us as athletes
and people and was way into the journey of athletics. And, oh yeah, its
great when a kid blisters a race course and throws a result way up the board.
I like that too.
 
My job as program director also calls for me to organize and run ski racs. This
is really important to do and do well, but it takes away from my coaching and
really drains my energy, so yeah, I won't miss running races.

If you weren't a ski coach, what would you rather be doing?
Maybe a biology teacher or possibly running a greenhouse or All Star shortstop for the Detroit Tigers.

What are the five main philosophies you coach by?
1) Focus on the big things, fundamentals first and come back to them often
               
Technique,    Speed,    Aerobic Fitness,   
Mental Preparation
 
2) First Raise the Overall Fitness of the Group, then Assist Individuals in reaching
their goals.
               
We have a broad variety of kids in our local club program. Some have big capacities
and some not so big, but our overall team goal is to maintain a very high standard 
               
of fitness for everyone. So there is some basic work that everyone must be able
to do. Beyond that, I strongly believe that champions are mostly born,
that is to say, we all know it as coaches when we get a skier who has something
extra special.  When we get a skier who has the drive and motivation to
do extra, to suffer more, to learn more, then we need to be ready to give them
everything we have as a coach.
 
3) Be prepared everyday with an oragnaized practice plan
 
4) Be a stabilizing force within the team, not destabilizing. I think that at this level the biggest mistakes in coaching a team has to do more with not understanding the team chemistry and failing to motivate the group to achieve the highest collective group effort. XC skiing is an individual sport,but long term program success is built on developing a shared sense of commitment and a willingness to work hard and push each other. Some teams have strong leaders while other groups lack a clear unifying personality. I’ve goofed up in the past when I’ve challenged a skier to help lead the team and they were not ready. Or, maybe I misread how ready the group was to really bust ass, so I gave them too much too soon and discouraged them.  We did this workout last year called, Save the Baby King. The kids knew nothing about what we were going to do that day. They were only told that they had to be ready for 4 hours of “fun”. We broke them into teams of 3 and each team was given a 15lb weight representing the Baby Norwegian King saved by the Birkenbieners of Norwegian Lore. They raced as teams against each other and had to deliver the baby to the finish line at our team center.  We drove all the kids 25 miles away and had them classic ski, skate ski and mountain bike back to our team center and then finally carry big heavy logs to the top of a nearby mountain. They had to organize themselves, the stronger kids carried the weight more so the younger guys could keep up, then at the end they had this heinous test of carrying this big log up a mountain. For sure, this isn’t traditional training and I’m sure other coaches do this kind of stuff, but the idea is to get people to work together, to be flexible and to get lost mentally in the task of pushing yourself in a tough physical effort. They still talk about that workout or others like that one.

 
5) Learn from your skiers. Too often, coaches fail to really listen to what their athletes are saying.  We come from aUScoching model that puts the coach out front as the “Big Boss”.

Sometimes we need to be in front and be making firm decisions and help direct athletes, but we also need to know how to step back a little a times and get out of our own set of perspectives and see it from the eyes of the athlete.

What do you spend most time with when you are on the road at races or training
camps?
When at races, we work on tactics, lots of ski prep instruction and things like
proper warm-up, pacing etc.
At camps, we stress aerobic fitness, nutrition, stretching(because we have more
time) and team building
Most of the technique work we do is in smaller group coaching at our daily training
sessions here at home

What were your best or most memorable races (for your athletes) – last season
or earlier?
Last season, Matt DeCarufel leading the scramble leg of the JN Relay into
the stadium. I thought back to when he was a little guy finishing 20th as a
J2. We have had a number of kids earn national junior titles and all those days
are great because it doesn't happen all the time.  Way back in the day
when Lars Flora needed to win the 30km at WJ Trials in Placid to make the team.
The day was just a typical Eastern mud slinger with rain, grabby. mushy snow
and branches and crap blowing all over the trails from a bone chilling
Noreaster wind and Lars just takes it out hard and lays 2 minutes on the field.
He really wanted that race and was not going to stopped by anyone or anything. 
I thought that was okay.How do you deal with bad races? Give skiers space when
they finish if that's what they need or support them if that's what they want.
Try to let the emotions happen then move on to the question of why it happened once
we get calm. If its something like me pooching the wax, then I try to take full
responsibility right away and take the bad feelings of the race away from the
kids so its more on us as coaches so they can be ready to race well sooner and
not dwell on the event.  We really try to teach to the idea that the race
is just a part of the whole experience of skiing and that we have lot's of races in
our career and that most races are average results, some are really good and
yes, a few will be really bad. Our true measure as athletes is how we respond
when things are tough. Everyone looks and feels great when they win, but big
lessons come from tough times too.  Sometimes, it can be really hard for
kids to learn how to win, that you have to let it come to you.  

What are your coaching goals for the upcoming season?
We are trying to develop a formal U23 program as part of our Sun Valley Team.
The goal is funding and coaching for 4-6 guys and 4-6 women with year round
coaching. We have another wave of good older juniors and young
seniors coming from our program so its time to committ to this next step. We
are also expanding our elementary aged development team into other communities
to attract more young skiers. This is really big for us. Personally,  I'm
trying to teach more and not get as caught up in administration of the program,
trying to keep my own fitness up so I can continue to run and rollerski
along(not race with) in some training to better see the kids and how they are
doing.
 
How do you feel about the changes in the international race formats over
the past few years (sprint racing, mass starts, skiathalon/duathalon)?
By and large they are good, although some of the formats are very difficult to apply at events lik JNs(the sprint relay). The mass start in the marathon is great and the sprint relays will be a blastat the world level!!But,  I also believe that it is important to keep lot of interval start racing in junior events. Racing is a workout too and interval start races are the race of truth, just like the time trial in cycling. If we let skiing develop into alot of head to head races, we may lose focus on building the biggest engines.  Mass start tactics are important for sure, but these can be easily taught. And, for the most part tactics are usually beat by bigger motors. I love classic skiing, but I think that classic sprinting is boring and that sprinting should be about going as fast as you can on skis. I am also dissappointed that the women's individual 5km is gone from the Olympic and World Championship programs. 

 What changes will you be making to your athletes’ training plan
for this year?
We are going to work on our  speed. We are behind from the gun in the sprint
events and it might be that living at altitude, we are not able to generate
as much power on the skis. We have good engines over 5-15km, typical junior
distances, but we need to stress better body position in skating, better overall
strength and core strength.  Classic will still have alot of double poling
work, both endurance and power, but we are going to do ski imitation alot more
to try and develop a more effective high gear for diagonal stride. We are
still overstriding somewhat and killing tempo in the transitions.  We are
also continuing to stress how important it is or the skiers to train on the
own as well as with the team. We have a saying on the team that goes “Its what you do when the coach isn’t watching that matters the most”.

Do you have a favorite interval or hard workout?
We have a three step bounding uphill on our ski trails that we use for a very
hard bounding interval session.  The lengths of  the steps are 30
sec, 1 min and 1:30. We do ladders of 1st step, then 1st and 2nd, then 1st,
2nd  and 3rd.  Sometimes, workouts have to be really hardto build physical and mental strength The older junior build up to doing 6 sets or 24 minutes of on time. We can really tell who has done their training and its an important confience builder for the skiers.  If they can handle this session, the races will seem easy. I learned this lesson from Beth Heiden, former Olympic medalist and World Champ in speed skating and World Cycling Champ. She married a friend, Russell  Reid from Michigan Tech o that’s how I met her. Her coach was Dianne Holum who is recognized as a  innovator and a great coach. Beth basically described workouts that she built up to doing that were incredibly hard. She said that it got to the point that race days were almost easy days. Now, we have to be careful about getting too carried away with this concept with juniors, but the idea can still be valuable.

Can you give us a single piece of advice for aspiring Junior skiers?
Not any single thing, but I will say that technique and fitness are equally important so work
on both.  And learn to listen to you train more and more and finally,
enjoy the ride.
 
Any questions we didn't ask, but should have?
 Yeah – greatest xc ski race of all time?? 1980 15km at Lake Placid OWG 
Thomas Wassberg and Juha Mieto finish 1/100th apart