Chad is head ski coach for the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth, Minnesota.
Coaches Around the Country: Chad Salmela
FasterSkier · March 5, 2008
The FIS has clearly tried to follow biathlon down the format road with running pursuits, mass starts, and sprints, but still struggle for the kind of presence biathlon has. Regardless of how you feel about those events, they are quite critical to the cultural, and by proxy, the financial success of the sport in the marketplace. Unfortunately for skiing, it is just not by nature as dramatic on television as biathlon inherently is. Biathlon is a stadium sport, in reality, and the centralized shooting range within the story line makes it extremely spectator-friendly while creating a non-linear storyline that keeps you on the edge of your seat. It is quite literally the equivalent of NASCAR because of NASCAR’s unpredictable nature. If you look at the fan base of biathlon, it is not a particularly active or Nordic skiing crowd. These are sports fans getting into biathlon, not skiers. I think the draw to cross country is simply harder to make for the sports fan. What the FIS has to do for equal footing? I don’t know. It may not be able to. But from my experience I feel the IBU is better organized and more forward thinking than FIS on the whole. They are much more media savvy. Just compare their websites and you can see the difference. I think FIS can improve on how it packages and markets the sport for the masses.
3. You are in your 2nd year as head coach of College of St. Scholastica. Can you bring us up to speed with the new program?
My program has incredible support from the college and we’re in a town that simply SHOULD have a collegiate ski program. Duluth is a great place to live if your active in the outdoors, and it is a huge Nordic skiing center in numbers of skiers and ski trails. The school is really going for it in trying to become a nationally viable NCAA Division III intercollegiate athletics program. We have a strong budget and a great group of kids. Our program is a place where kids who want to ski race in college can ski race in college, while our focus is still to be nationally competitive. I have an incredible staff with Brad Nelson, an NCSA standout in the early ‘90s at Northern Michigan, and Scott and Sara Kylander-Johnson. Sara went to junior worlds in cross country in 1992 and was an NCAA All-American for NMU that same year, while Scott is an outstanding mountain biker with a decade of coaching high school kids at both running and skiing. We also get some volunteer help from Andre Watt from the CXC team. We have a varsity travelling team that is fully funded for CCSA competitions, and a development team for those beyond the varsity spots. We’ve been really competitive in our second year, and Bjorn Bakken will be representing us at the NCAA Championships in Bozeman. We also narrowly missed a second qualifier in Tyler Kjorstad. Both are Duluth boys, and it’s really fun to be mixing it up with guys from right here in Northern Minnesota. Bjorn, who is trying to buff out his classic coming from biathlon, is skiing really fast in freestyle and it’s fun to see him skiing faster than he ever has. I’m continuing to talk to more kids around the Midwest and across the country about the program, and I think we’ve got a great head of steam going into next season. Anyone interested in researching our program can go to www.csssaints.com
4. Announcing! Your voice is pretty common at big skis races, the Mora, olympics ski races, etc. Why not make a career out of announcing?
Yeah, that’s a good one! I like announcing. I think it is critical to bringing excitement to the sport, but you really can’t make a living at it. I think ski races need announcing to make them more exciting—especially sprint races in cities. But between doing PA announcing at events and TV on cable, I simply can’t scratch enough of a living out of it. I think if I was a native German speaker living in Germany, I could for sure. I have been encouraged by the producer of most of our domestic biathlon broadcasts to seek more off-season employment in other sports to cross over, and with WCSN now broadcasting a lot of the sports I know and follow, that’s a possibility, but it’s also a really tough lifestyle. Lots of travel. I announced with Bob Papa for 3 seasons on OLN, and he is the New York Giants radio voice and did a lot of work with ESPN and now more and more with NBC, makes a very good living, but he has worked for many years to get there, and he is GOOD! But he has been known to be on the road 40+ weekends a year. I just don’t know if I’m cut out for that. I’ve also always seen myself as a coach for some reason. I like my current job and my boss has been very flexible in allowing me to do some announcing when it doesn’t affect my teams, so it’ a nice balance right now.
. What's been digging at you this recent ski season? Or, any wild ideas?</I></p><p>Well, the block intensity training that is going on is interesting. I don’t think there is any doubt it is working…for some very talented, tough athletes. I look at Kalla, Bjoergen, Scott, Demong, Burke—they’ve all raised their level, reportedly from the block intensity programs. I know Pete and Matt are doing this at the USST, or at least working towards it. The one thing that seems consistent to me is that it is working to varied degrees on individuals within teams trying to make it work. One thing I wonder, however, is the longevity of it, and if it works, is longevity beyond age 25 even something to worry about? From what I can piece together 2nd and 3rd hand is that Becky Scott cranked on it at the twilight of her career, and I doubt she’d ever reconsider what she did. Bjoergen is an interesting case. You have to wonder about the bouts of sickness after several years of this type of training. I know it’s working for Tim Burke. No doubt. He’s in his second year and had an exhaustion phase in December and January, but when he rested and came back, he was still at the same level in Oestersund. </p><p>What these skiers are doing now makes the training from my day look like child’s play. But what has been digging at me as a coach is the when, the how, and the how much, especially at different levels of athletes. Hard training is nothing new, and I think you can look at a lot of successful high school or college distance running programs and see some seriously hard training regimens. But the aftermath of them clearly something we tend not to address enough. I think of Adam Goucher (talented US runner) post Univ. Colorado for example. He has struggled. There’s no doubt what he did as a college athlete was massively intense, and it probably worked for those college years, but was it the right thing at 20, 21, 22 for international success post-college? Was it structured and monitored enough to ensure world class competitiveness after college? I think these are interesting things to ponder for which I have no concrete answers, but I have thought a lot about and have some hunches. </p><p>I believe the block training is the future for world class skiers, because it is so clearly working, and it is working in the current fashion because of scientific study, greater experiences of coaches, and more means to monitoring training adaptations. It is not gut feel training anymore. It is planned; WELL-planned, well-executed, and well-monitored training. As a coach of college skiers with college schedules and stresses, the spinning going on in my mind is how to effectively use these Max VO2-increasing techniques without destroying the overall physical health of young athletes, developing them into healthy post-collegiate ski racers. I think it can be done, but for someone with world class talent, I don’t know if you can keep up with what non-college skiers are doing across the pond. It really doesn’t affect me right now at St. Scholastica and it may never, but I think it is a question burning a hole in the role of college skiing as an international development tool for the United States. Winning internationally—can we keep up in college? I think it is a burning hole that affects very few, highly talented individuals though. Overall, I think college skiing is awesome and one of the best circuits of supported ski racing for this age group in the world, and I love coaching at this level. I’m just trying to get a handle on what I can do with this block intensity training model with my athletes. I’m spinning on it…</p><p>Regardless, many of us in the coaching community need to be having more conversations with the coaches who are doing the training and having success, or who hare having problems so we can learn from their experiences. We will likely never get a scientific breakdown of long-term training effect over the course of athletes’ careers, so it’s all experience and hunches anyway peppered with studies done in a flash of what is reality. Regardless, I think I could use more coaches education, probably like many of us out there working with athletes.</p></div><div class=)
I think I have a handle on my role as a college coach, and I like it, but I still think about it on a greater scale beyond my job. Other than that and block training, I don’t have a lot of wild ideas beyond starting a rock band at the end of the season.
6. Predictions for nordic overall World Cup champion, men and women.
Honestly, I wish I was tighter on the data on this question, but I like Lukas Bauer, and I think he’ll do it on the men’s side. I think Petter Northug is cool and good for the sport. I like his brash style and the way he races with abandon. I think he’ll be the next big star. I also like Anders Soedergren. Skis kind of funny-looking with his head cocked back, but I think he’s fun to watch ski. Newell is good for the sport, not just the US. I like how he is skiing classic sprints so technically sound and looking towards the future. I watched the classic sprint from Otepaa while in Oestersund, and while it wasn’t Andy’s best race, you could see that the USST is on the cutting edge of sprint training, so I predict more success for the US in sprinting.
On the women’s side, I sincerely hope Kalla takes down Kuitunen. My wife is Finnish and we spent Christmas in Finland, and I can tell you the nation is embarrassed by their cross country skiers, yet Kuitunen still was Finnish Sportswoman of the Year last year. Go figure? Whether clean or not, Kuitunen hasn’t been before, and that’s enough to have me rooting for Kalla.
7. You just recently were married! Congrats!
Yeah, it’s been a long time coming! Happened quickly. We have lived semi parallel lives but in different sports. She’s a hockey player, but skis really pretty well because she spent time on skis as a kid in Finland. I’m trying to get her to ski the Korteloppet this weekend and truly indoctrinate her with the “Birkie Fever†(I like to say it with a deadpan, monotone Finnish accent that really drives her crazy).
8. How 'bout this recent surge in biathlon results in the last few years? (especially men's results?..burke, lowell, teela, jay, etc….)
I think the US men’s team is very strong with talent. Burke has really come on and I think it’s the training. My brother coached both Tim and Lowell as juniors, and he always saw these guys eventually at the top. Jay and Jeremy have both had solid international results, and we have a team that I think has the potential to go toe-to-toe with the best in the world, and they’ve been showing it already. They are a bit of a buzz over on the scene in Europe, which is really fun to see. I think they will be dialed for Vancouver.
9. Anything else you'd like to add?
I think we are all experiencing a true Renaissance in Nordic skiing in this country. Kikkan won this year. Newell number one last year on the FIS sprint points. Demong is one of the best in the world. Burke and Hakkinen have both been in the top ten multiple times this season in biathlon. This stuff doesn’t just happen. It’s too hard for it to just happen. It comes from planning, serious, professional approaches to success on the international level that bleeds across the community with each effort each of us makes. Looking at the results from US Nationals, the women’s field is incredibly stronger than just a few years ago, and regardless of some views, the USST quite simply is performing consistently better than almost any time in its history. I’m excited to be a part of this community. I think it is a great group of people and there is no reason for us to be divided. It’s good to be competitive with our programs within the US community, but not to the detriment of the national good. I think we are as close to that spirit as we’ve ever been in my lifetime, and I hope cynics will get on board and be part of the excitement rather than try to punch holes in it.
