Freestyle Central

Park City is unrivaled today as “Freestyle Central.” If it happens in freestyle, it happens in Park City. Olympics? Deer Valley Resort in 2002. World Championships? Deer Valley in 2003 (and upcoming again in 2011 as Resort President Bob Wheaton aggressively seeks to continue setting the standard in freestyle worldwide). World Cup? Every January. Regional competitions? Count on it. Club programs? Oh yeah. There are more freestyle clubs per capita in Utah than anywhere else in the world. Athletes? By the dozens. And each summer, Park City also draws national teams from elsewhere to train at our Utah Olympic Park (UOP), because — bottom line — there is no freestyle center like Park City.

“It helps, I think, that the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association (USSA) and the U.S. Ski Team are here, but it’s not just the Ski Team being located in Park City. We’re not driving this bus,” says U.S. Freestyle Program Director Polly-Jo Clark. “We’re certainly happy freestyle is growing this way, and growing here ... but this isn’t something we’re organizing. The community itself — the kids and families, the clubs, the resorts — are setting the tone.”

And “setting the tone” doesn’t mean aggressive, over-eager stage Moms and Little League Dads with zealots’ agendas. Rather, they’re creating a support structure, which enables clubs to hire the appropriate number of coaches, conduct training and implement travel plans for competitions, which become part of the fire-and-anvil process that produces top-level competitors, from regional stars to national and then international performers, to Olympic medalists.

It all starts at the club level. The roster of freestyle clubs in our area includes Freestyle Live Year-round (FLY), an aerials-oriented program at Utah Olympic Park, which was named the 2005 USSA Freestyle Club of the Year; Wasatch Freestyle, which runs moguls at Deer Valley and Snowbird, and is adding aerials under former U.S. coach and FLY chief Chris Haslock, and which succeeded FLY as USSA Freestyle Club of the Year for 2006; Park City Freestyle, which leans heavily toward moguls and free-ride; and Deer Valley Freestyle, geared for younger skiers and heavily oriented toward moguls, training primarily on Champion, Deer Valley’s Olympic bumps run. No one program promotes an “all things to all skiers” approach. Skiers have an unparalleled buffet of top-level programs to sample as they try to follow their dreams.

Fifteen years ago, Park City was, if anything in freestyle skiing, a moguls town alone. A few Park City boys — locals like Craig Rodman, Sean Smith, the Berry brothers, Todd Sherman and a few strays like ex-Vermonters Jason and Aaron Racicot or Salt Lake City’s Beau Brinkerhoff, ruled the bumps. Some made their way to the U.S. Ski Team and the Olympics, some flamed out and headed home. “We pretty much had a rat pack where we’d cruise around the mountain and see where the bumps were,” said Craig Rodman, who competed in the 1992 and 1994 Olympic Winter Games. “The resorts have changed dramatically over the years in the psychology of catching air. At that time, they frowned on us building jumps, but Deer Valley really stepped up when Salt Lake City got the Olympic bid. They’d close off a run and let us train. It’s such a sweet venue. We were lucky in the sense that we had two stellar mountains to choose from — Park City and Deer Valley.”

There were no aerialists in Park City for a long time because there was no place to train. Everything changed for potential aerialists when the Utah Olympic Park opened in Park City in January of 1993. “We trained in Lake Placid, at that Kodak Sports Park by the ski jumps,” says Trace Worthington, who helped establish the freestyle beachhead when he moved to Park City after the UOP opened (and who would become aerials and combined champion at the 1995 World Championships — still the only athlete to earn gold in two events at one freestyle Worlds). “Once they built [the UOP], we came out from Placid and tested things. I said, ‘This is where I want to live.’ I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life after skiing, but I knew all the resources beyond an athletic career were here — the proximity to the airport, a big city nearby, the university, and, of course, the great lifestyle. I was hooked.”

Worthington, from Minnesota, and Coach Wayne Hilterbrand, an Oregonian, moved here. Joe Pack, then a “born again” aerialist after leaving a promising ski jumping career in his teens growing up in New Hampshire, was also among the early converts. The aerialist migration to Park City was on. Boyhood buddies Brian Currutt and Mariano Ferrario from Cleveland, Chicago’s Jerry Grossi, Nikki Stone from outside Boston, Eric Bergoust from Montana, upstate New Yorker Tracy Evans ... they all started showing up in town.

“After I tested the jumps at UOP, I started looking for a house and ended up buying in the Silver Springs neighborhood in 1993. I paid $160,000,” Worthington says, adding with a laugh, “and today that might get me a storage shed.” (In addition to TV gigs commentating at freestyle events, Worthington and ex-teammate Kris Feddersen now run the Flying Ace All-Stars splash pool show each weekend and for corporate outings at the UOP.)

Joe Pack, who spent this past summer as interim director of FLY after Chris Haslock moved on to Wasatch Freestyle, says the splash pool and the tramps at UOP aren’t the only reason so many kids have become enamored with aerials, “but to have this kind of a facility certainly helps the appeal ...”

“The reality is, though, we’re enthusiasts,” continues Pack. “Park City Ski Team ran things in alpine the way things should be run and that was the model as freestyle and snowboard programs came in. Utah Winter Sports Alliance came along and is the consensus board, if you want, among all the sports.”

It’s the splash pool; it’s the terrain; and it’s supportive parents and friends and community and resorts. Nothing gets done without all of those elements in place. “We’ve got a lot of parts to this freestyle puzzle,” Pack says, “and they all fit together.”

There’s no one individual face for Park City’s freestyle bazaar, either. We have so many aspiring kids in so many places, and so many Olympians in one town. Bobby Carroll is one of the kids who wants to play a bigger role in this drama. At 16, he’s penciled-in a goal: to be the Olympic moguls gold medalist in Vancouver in 2010. “I’d ski on weekends with my dad when I was 5, going down Widowmaker, Nail Driver and all the mogul runs [at Park City Mountain Resort]. I loved every minute of it. Dad was happy, I was happy. At 7 or 8,” he says, “I went to moguls camps and when I was 9, I went to the Park City Freestyle Team. Beau [Brinkerhoff] and Todd [Sherman] were starting it, and I had a blast. It’s still a blast.”

Having Dad (Andy, head of Icon Sports Group) represent two-time Olympian and World Cup champion, and 2003 Worlds dual moguls champ Jeremy Bloom didn’t hurt either. Carroll shifted over to the moguls program at Wasatch Freestyle a year ago, training at Snowbird and Deer Valley.

“I never even did NASTAR. It’s always been moguls,” Carroll says. “They had an event at Park City Mountain Resort and that fueled the flame a little more. I definitely wanted to be doing it. When the Olympics rolled around, and I was at Deer Valley watching Jonny Moseley [1998 Olympic champ and moguls icon who finished fourth in 2002] live, I was flipping out. Next time in Vancouver, that’s my goal. I want to be the moguls champion.”