New Skills Assessment manuals support young athletes development

Strong fundamental skills are key to building performance in snow sports and three new Skills Assessment manuals for alpine skiing, moguls and snowboard will provide a framework to assist clubs, coaches and athletes as they build towards future success in the sport.

The original Snow Australia Alpine skills assessment framework was developed a few years ago, based on the American SkillsQuest program - a cornerstone of the ski and snowboard development programs in the U.S. The framework has now been updated and served as the foundation for the moguls and snowboard manuals.

National Freestyle Committee member and Team Buller Riders Head Coach Hamish Cox said that although it has long been acknowledged that fundamental skill development at a young age is crucial in developing mogul skiers, the process had not been formally assessed until recent years. In fact, where other successful sport pathways have long been known to monitor emerging athletes’ data to support development, winter sports have been in some ways late to the party on formal athlete profiling. This is now changing, as Cox explained.

“Australia is now becoming a leader in this area for winter sports. 

“All skiing and snowboarding disciplines are highly skill-based activities for which developing high skill competency at a young age is crucial for an athlete's chances of future success in the sport.

“Not only is data useful in tracking athletes’ skill progress, it also assists with delivering higher quality reports to athletes and parents and can be used as an upskilling tool for coaches, to hone in on priority skill areas they should be targeting,” he said.

NSWIS Snowboard Cross coach Jason Clauscen agreed that one of the critical aspects for long-term success as snowboarding or freestyle athletes is the need to develop into great snowboarders or skiers first. 

“Strong fundamental skills are key to building performance,” Clauscen said. 

“We hope that this framework will help develop strong fundamentals and drive engagement from athletes, coaches and clubs around Australia. As this is new for snowboarding, we also expect the framework to develop in seasons to come,” he said.

Cox added that snow sports are becoming more and more competitive at the elite level, which puts additional pressure on young athletes’ skills development. 

“Ultimately this means we need ‘great skiers’ at an even younger age, so that they can start learning specialised skills, somewhat specific to the discipline, earlier than they may have needed to once upon a time,” he said.

One of the key elements of the manuals is their common language, a feature that according to Clauscen will facilitate skills assessment across disciplines and provide a national, common protocol for assessing skill.

“There are very similar terminologies and tasks between skiing and snowboarding that target improving fundamental skill and knowledge. This really does aid in skills assessments with disciplines being able to use the same terrain and coaches having similar dialogues when working with one another within the clubs,” Clauscen said.

Coaches, support staff and athletes from Interschools level up to FIS level are the primary audience for the assessment manuals, with a number of tasks included in the publications being commonly used throughout clubs and and programs within Australia and around the world. 

Cox and Clauscen said it is valuable to have manuals publicly available to parents as well, as they will be able to learn more about the overall assessment process and understand why programs and coaches operate in a certain way. This is particularly important as there are other factors, besides skills, that play a crucial role in a young athlete’s development and need to be carefully considered by coaches.

“Skill is a big part of an athlete’s potential to progress in high performance sport, however the  ‘athlete profile’ also encompasses other important elements such as confidence, resilience, family support and other external or environmental influences. 

“These aspects always need to be seriously considered, but aren’t best assessed through a scoring protocol like skill,” Cox said.

Cox and Hamish’s views were strongly supported by Snow Australia Alpine Director Shawn Fleming, who said it’s great to see all disciplines adopt and share the common message around the importance of skill development at younger ages.

“As coaches, our role is to provide opportunities for young athletes. A strong foundation, based on fundamental skills, will give those athletes the opportunity to progress in their sport as they continue to develop through the athlete pathway,” he said.

The new Skills Assessment manuals can be found in the Pathway section of Snow Australia website.