Mark Baxendale
GHKAT
We have 65 registered athletes joined for this season which matches registration numbers for the last two years.
We have nine coaches and three mentor coaches.
Logan Kardash, who has been in the club for several years, asked if he could assist as a mentor coach this year, and then we have two international students, Ramon Arnold from Switzerland and Soren Hasselberg from Germany, who are also helping out .
These volunteers will be taking their E1 Coaching course with us later this month so they will be fully qualified coaches.
In December the team purchased $9,000 of new gates, safety netting, training aids and other ancillary items needed to improve our training systems within the club.
With this now in place the operations deptartment at Kicking Horse Mountain Resort has agreed that we could start weekly gate training sessions on the Wolverine run, which is right under the Catamount chairlift.
It’s far easier for us to access, and easy for the coaches to set training gates up. It is intended that this terrain will be used for our home race on Feb. 24 as well.
After this, the first weekend of the gate training, there were a lot of smiling faces in the clubhouse at lunchtime and lots of excited chatter.
We will be attending the Revelestoke race on Jan. 20 and will be interested to see how the team’s performance improves with the extra gate training we will be conducting this year.
