Happy Birthday!
Art: Robert Nuebecker
As the 2004/2005 ski season begins, two landmark anniversaries in U.S. skiing take place, one on each side of the calendar. 2004 marks the 30th year the United States Ski and Snowboard Association (USSA) has called Park City home. And as the calendar flips to 2005, the association itself turns 100. Quite a pair of auspicious anniversaries for the organization that administers the nation’s ski and snowboard competitions and fields America’s best winter athletes for ski and snowboard events from the junior racing circuits to the Olympics.
USSA’s beginnings were as humble as the sport was small a century ago. In 1904, hearty souls, more frequently than not of Scandinavian descent, were ski jumping, mostly in the Upper Midwest and New England. They got together that winter for a ski jumping meet in the village of Ishpeming, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Ishpeming Ski Club President Carl Tellefsen suggested that the next time they got together for the Ishpeming tournament, all the ski club officers should organize themselves into a national group to set rules and regulations to standardize their competitions. Club leaders from Minnesota and Wisconsin joined with Ishpeming’s Tellefsen, and on February 21, 1905, established the National Ski Association, with Tellefsen as its first president.
For some time, the association was based in Ishpeming and attended to competition matters. In the early years, the only competitive sports were cross-country ski racing and especially ski jumping, which brought out the crowds in the 1920s and ‘30s. It was the Europeans who embraced ski racing first, organizing the International Ski Commission in 1910, and holding the first World Nordic Ski Championships in 1925 in Czechoslovakia.
Alpine World Championships followed in 1931, and Americans got their first taste of the emerging sport of alpine ski racing at Lake Placid’s 1932 Olympics. But at the time, few Americans skied, and half the nation lived south of snow country entirely. Ski racing, and the work of governing the sport, was a low-profile, low-budget work of love by the volunteers who renamed their organization the U.S. Ski Association and moved it to Colorado Springs in 1962.
Today we’re a $20-million-dollar company, with 30,000 members, 450 affiliated local ski clubs, and 4,000 competitions each year,” USSA vice president Tom Kelly says in his Park City office. Revenue comes from corporate sponsorships and licensing, the sale of TV rights to NBC and the Outdoor Life Network, member dues, public fund raising, and stipends from the U.S. Olympic Committee. “We’ve had nine straight years of budget surplus and we’re now looked at as the most streamlined of the national governing bodies for the various sports,” Kelly recites with pride.
But it wasn’t always like that. When Pinedale, Wyoming ski racer Karen Korfanta and German ski racer-turned coach Harald Schoenhaar packed up a U-Haul in Denver in 1974 and took off for Park City, the organization was in trouble. The volunteer board of USSA was composed of hard charging corporate leaders who were also skiers. Some wanted preferential treatment for their ski racing children. Others wanted to divorce the club level duties of USSA and focus only on elite athletes capable of winning Olympic medals and World Cup races. The organization split, with the U.S. Ski Team moving to Denver, while USSA stayed in Colorado Springs.
In the early 1970s, Park City Ski (now Mountain) Resort was looking for ways to get skiers to pay attention to Utah when the whole country seemed to think Colorado was the only place to ski in the Rockies. At the same time, the Ski Team’s head coach, Willy Schaeffler, was looking to improve the U.S.’s spotty Olympic record. He dreamed of a year-round training center, where promising ski racers could live and train together. Park City Ski Area’s new owner in the early ‘70s, Edgar Stern, listened, and made a bold offer.
Stern knew there would be bragging rights in calling his resort “The home of the U.S. Ski Team’s Training Center,” so he offered abandoned miners’ bunk houses located on resort property, and the money to fix them up. All was ready by the summer of 1974, and Korfanta and Schoenhaar hit the road.
The first time Schoenhaar stayed in Park City he walked across from his $5-Claimjumper Hotel room to the miner’s favorite watering hole, The Cozy Saloon. “I’m German — I like to drink beer!” he said. The beer was delivered cold, but Schoenhaar wanted it room temperature. The bartender scrounged around and found a warmer brew. The next time the German coach went back to The Cozy, a regular spotted him and said, “I’ll have another round here — and a hot beer for the goddamn Kraut!” “I never forgot that,” Schoenhaar remembers with a laugh. “I loved it.”
The Ski Team offices were in a rickety, leaky old grocery store on Main Street, while team members settled into the mountainside dorms. But the concept never worked. The resort cut training runs, but there was no chairlift access to them. The team acquired a lift, but not the money to install it. Plus, what good were training runs that were only snow-covered when the racers had to be elsewhere on the racing circuit?
In 1975, Stern sold the resort to Nick Badami, who inherited the Team’s problems. “In those days, you wondered how they would survive. When I got here, they owed the resort $445,000 and had a chairlift lying in crates at the bottom of the mountain. They owed a lot of money to creditors, using non-existent assets as security.”
Still, ski entrepreneur Badami, and his son Craig, realized the Ski Team was a promotional asset for the resort. Badami wiped the debt off the books and moved headquarters to a newer resort-owned building on upper Main Street. Both he and Craig threw themselves behind the Team. When international rules changed to allow paid sponsorships, Craig signed up the U.S. Women’s Team to wear “Park City” headbands, which often found their way to sports pages worldwide as American women then were frequently atop World Cup podiums.
The younger Badami worked to get the Park City name out in the ski world through the association with the Ski Team and by luring a World Cup event to the resort in 1985. Meanwhile, the senior Badami and other ski businessmen worked to get the Team on solid financial footing.
Still, one piece of the puzzle remained. The Park City-based Ski Team and the Colorado Springs-based U.S. Ski Association were still divorced, and would-be sponsors were confused. “At one time each organization had a different airline as a sponsor,” remembers the Ski Team’s CEO, Howard Peterson. USSA coached and developed young athletes at the local level, while the U.S. Ski Team focused on elite athletes. Peterson says, “It was no way for a sports organization to run.”
Peterson and the USSA began talking, and in 1988, agreed to reconciliation. “We weren’t wedded to Park City,” Peterson reports. “We bid out [to Park City and Colorado Springs] who would provide the most incentives to locate our consolidated offices. It wasn’t even close.” Park City and Utah, then in the early stages of bidding for the Olympic Winter Games, did not want to lose the mantle of “Home of the U.S. Ski Team,” and made it financially worthwhile for the team to stay.
And when the Games came to Park City in 2002, within sight of USSA offices on Kearns Boulevard, the hometown team didn’t disappoint, with a record haul of 10 medals. Park City’s original U.S. Ski Team employee Karen Korfanta, now race director at Park City Mountain Resort, was there to witness the team’s glory, as chief of race for the giant slalom. Schoenhaar, now retired and living part time in Park City, was watching too.
What began in Ishpeming a century ago, and moved to Park City 30 years ago, is now solidly a Park City institution. “Park City is our home,” current USSA President and CEO Bill Marolt says with pride. “The people of Park City have followed their dreams and made Park City a unique winter playground.”
But with all its success in its 30 years, one goal still eludes Marolt and the Team. “We still really need a training center. It would bring all the pieces together — a place to bring our elite athletes together, a place to bring in coaches from the club levels — a complete facility with sports science and medicine, weight rooms and classrooms.”
Sounds like a great idea. Sounds like the same sort of idea that brought the Team to town in the first place!
Larry Warren is a Park City-based freelance writer who writes frequently about skiing and the history of the sport. He consistently finishes out of the medals when he races in charity events.
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