Winters in Alberta may feel awfully long for most of us, but they’re never long enough for the Tawatinaw Valley Freeriders.
The freestyle ski club crams a whirlwind of a season into the first three months of the year, and for the higher-level competitors, that’s supplemented with summers full of training as well.
Club president Todd Eastman said the profile of the sports — both skiing and snowboarding — continues to increase year over year, with a record number of participants for the 2014-2015 season.
“We’re growing once again,” he said. “We’ve increased from last year’s 60 athletes; we’re at 80 athletes this year.”
To help accommodate that growing number of kids taking part, the club has hired an additional four coaches — enough that nobody’s had to be turned away.
“As of right now, I can say everyone who’s wanted to participate in freestyle skiing at Tawatinaw, we’ve been able to take them on,” Eastman said.
Although the Tawatinaw Valley ski hill has not yet opened for the season, the Freeriders have already begun their season with a training trip to Banff Dec. 13-14 and another session at Misty Ridge in the County of Barrhead Dec. 20-21.
“We’re just evaluating some of the new skiers and some of the younger transition skiers to make sure everyone’s in the right grouping with the right coaches,” Eastman said.
Participants range from those as young as five and six in the Bumps and Jumps program, to high-school-aged kids with some serious chops — some of whom will be doing tricks this year that might make most people cringe.
“We have five athletes that have joined what we’ve developed as kind of a performance team training program; they’re actually training on Saturdays and Sundays,” Eastman said.
Many of those athletes have spent their summer at Evolution Freestyle Park, a new dryland training facility near Tawatinaw with a jump ending in a giant air pad — a lot closer to home than the water-based facilities in Red Deer and Grande Prairie the Freeriders have had to use in the past.
“Our athletes train there all summer to qualify inverted maneuvers, whether they’re flips or some kind of rotation where their head is below the horizon level,” Eastman said.
And once the New Year rolls around, they will have little time rest before a hectic competition schedule involving three provincial competitions and three club competitions, culminating in the March 6-8 competition they’ll be hosting at Tawatinaw Valley.
Eastman said all the members of the club are incredibly grateful for the hard work Westlock County administration has put into getting the hill ready for the season in light of the ongoing troubles with the new chalet.
“We’re grateful with the amount of work that Peter Kelly and Jessica Toews have been doing to get us 99 per cent of the way there,” he said. “They’re really working hard to have the public and our group on the hill just after Christmas.”
The Tawatinaw Valley Ski Hill is slated to open on Dec. 26 this year.
