![The men's SuperTour field leaves the starting line in Bozeman, Mont., December 2012.](http://fasterskier.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2013/05/Bozeman.jpg")
The annual U.S. Ski & Snowboard Association Congress concluded in Park City, Utah, last weekend, bringing a few changes to the American race calendar and rulebook for the 2013-2014 season. USSA Nordic Manager Joey Caterinichio called the outcomes from the meetings the result of a productive three days — “one of our better congresses” — with country-wide participation from coaches of all competitive levels.
“I had a lot of compliments from coaches,” Caterinichio said. “They said there’s been times they wanted to be gone after the second day, but they felt it was so productive that every single one of them stayed the whole meeting. It was just a really productive meeting, which is hard to do sometimes.”
One of the coaches in attendance was Brian Tate, director of the Steamboat Springs Winter Sports Club in Steamboat Springs, Colo. Tate sits on the Junior National Oversight Committee and he agreed that it was a constructive Congress.
“As a club director I make the effort to attend the USSA Congress to hear the plans and strategy our sport’s governing body and national team have in store for the next year and beyond,” Tate said.
“As a club coach, I do not have a ton of contact with the U.S. Ski Team coaching staff, so the Congress is an opportunity to hear the state of affairs, so to speak. They do a good job highlighting the past season and shed light onto the coming season.”
Revamped National Race Calendar
The biggest item on the agenda last week was the SuperTour calendar, which has been reworked to make more sense “athletically and developmentally.” The schedule now breaks down into two-week racing blocks that alternate with breaks to allow athletes to go home and recover or race regionally.
The geographic distribution of races is also designed to be more even amongst regions, so that athletes within each have equal opportunity to compete against higher caliber skiers. The calendar is arranged two years out to allow coaches more time to prepare their travel schedules.
“We spent a long time going over the philosophy of what we want the calendar to look like in the future,” Caterinichio said. “The whole nation had input on this calendar. It seems small, but it’s huge.”
Before this year, Caterinichio says the SuperTour was designed from the venue backwards; the shape of the calendar depended on who wanted to host a race at a given time. Now that coaches have agreed on a basic schedule that makes sense for them and there are more race organizers willing to host events around the country, the process has been allowed to reverse; Caterinichio approached venues to fill in specific dates on the SuperTour and build a domestic race calendar that makes sense for the athletes competing in it.
“For athletes and professional teams using the SuperTour schedule as our domestic racing series to get to the World Cup to continue racing, the current calendar does not make sense, athletically, to go with timing rest and getting our top athletes together in one spot,” Caterinichio said. “So we needed to build in some breaks.”
The rest periods were designed to both allow top athletes a travel break and to strengthen regional races by giving local junior skiers the chance to face tougher competition against the top athletes that will not be able to return home.
“Now we’ve got a good plan for the national calendar down to the regional calendars,” Caterinichio said. “Top skiers can race regionally and I think it will help everybody. It will help college and junior racers and not only keep their regions strong but also…strengthen the nation as a whole.”
Practically speaking, this means that several mainstays of the SuperTour had to either change their dates to fit the new design or be left off completely. The Madison, Wisc., sprints now fall a week later, for example, while Aspen, Colo., and the Tour de Twin Cities are no longer part of the tour.