Towards a Philosophy of Course Setting

INTRODUCTION

Many disagreements between ski coaches boil down to disagreements about course setting. Course-setting is viewed by many coaches as a central aspect of the practice. Jean Leduc recently told me that he wishes his daughter’s coaches lost their capacity for speech, and gained the ability to set magnificent courses. This is perhaps too extreme but I agree with the general idea. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a course set is worth a thousand verbal cues, drills, demos, explanations, pre-race pep-talks, and videos. The art of ski coaching comes to a point in course-setting. To some extent, everything else is secondary.

There are a minority of coaches that view course-setting as much less important than other skills, such as giving well-timed feedback, verbal instruction, understanding ski technique, demonstrating skills, and “getting in the athlete’s head.” A course is a course is a course, they say. I suspect that coaches who downplay the importance of setting haven’t had the opportunity to develop the craft. Or, they are still holding onto the false belief that coaches are more like witch-doctors priests psychiatrists than game-room designers. Pace John Wooden.

Either way, I hope this blog post shows how course-setting is both crucially important and highly complex. I want to inspire coaches to be excited about course-setting. If you are presently content to let a more experienced coach set, I encourage you to start demanding access to the drill. As a friend of mine always says, “everybody ropes, everybody rides.”

WHAT IS A PHILOSOPHY OF COURSE SETTING (a POCS); WHY DO WE NEED ONE

The coaching community needs a “philosophy of course setting” (POCS) because I don’t think we have adequate understanding of its importance. That is, we know that course-setting is important but we don’t really understand why or how. The purpose of a POCS, then, is to flush-out this understanding. To specify why course setting is paramount in ski coaching, and how coaches are coaching when they simply set a course.

A good POCS should also provide a lexicon, or a point of reference, to understand the mechanics of course setting. It should help settle disputes related to course-setting. And it should give coaches a sense of what they are doing when they set a course, and provide a way to evaluate their own course-setting practices, and improve upon them. A good POCS should not be overly prescriptive, and should be open to interpretation.

A good POCS should also be relevant in both training and competition contexts. A POCS is probably more consequential for training because it’s not necessary to follow course-setting regulations, which are presently acting as a quasi (or surrogate) POCS. What is a good training course, if not a legal one? I think that knee-jerk responses to this question will be a circular response. Something like, “a good training course is one that helps the athletes meet their training objectives.” Or, “it depends on the goals of the training session.” These are inadequate responses; we need a POCS so we can understand the function of course setting in and of its self, regardless of a training session’s focus.

KEY TERMS

Before I describe my proposed POCS, I need to define two key ters: "movement" and "technique". My understanding of movement is similar to the dictionary definition but my usage is almost synonymous with “body.” The brilliance of many movement practices (such as skiing) is that the body is always understood as a verb (a body that bodies). That is, coaches and (even more so) trainers speak about bodily form or position in terms of movement or muscular cues. For a trainer, standing straight is not a geometrical quality but a bio-mechanical one. Standing straight is a series of movement cues (usually, “squeeze your shoulder-blades together,” “tuck in your chin," "clench your butt," "spread the floor with your feet”). For ski coaches, body position is also about movement. For example, I have stopped talking about upper body position and started talking about upper body discipline. Since skiers are standing on a moving platform, they have to be continuously moving their hands in order maintain balance, but they appear to keep their hands in one place.

Second, the term technique refers to movements that have been consciously or unconsciously habituated, identified, learned, patterned and repeated. Techniques are movements imbued with meaning, purpose, history and consequence. Standing is a technique that for many of us has unconsciously been learned. As more of us are standing less, and sitting more, a number of very detailed manuals about “How to Stand” have attempted to articulate a technique for standing (my favourites are Chapter 6 of Katie Bowman’s Move Your DNA, Chapter 1 of Kelly Starett’s Becoming a Supple Leopard, and almost all of Maxine Sheets-Johnstone's Putting Movement into Your Life). If you practice the techniques for standing outlined in these books, you can begin crafting an art of standing (WARNING, if you read these books, you may cultivate a passion for standing with discipline, poise and grace. You might even begin standing more often, just for the pleasure of standing. Its weird.).

Techniques can both enable and limit movement. Once a skier learns the snow plow, it’s easy for them to learn wedge turns; but, once they know wedge turns, its more difficult for them to learn carving. Or, put another way, good carving is partly a consequence of unlearning the wedge turn.

THIS IS MY POCS:

My philosophy of course setting is this: The purpose of a course is to enable skiers to ski outside of themselves. In other words, the goal of the course setter is to allow skiing movements to dictate ski techniques, rather than the other way around. The skier’s own movement becomes their coach, showing them techniques that they are not otherwise able to perform.

EXAMPLES THAT EXPLAIN MY POCS:

1. The reason we like rhythmical courses is because rhythmic ski movements enable good technique. The athletes ski better when they are moving with tempo, cadence, pulse, or fluidity because these types of movements are conducive to good ski technique.
2. Rhythm is just one example. In DH and SG, where there is less metronomic rhythm than in GS or SL, doubles or triples also tend to be conducive of good speed technique. They slow the skier down, enabling them to “free-fall”.
3. Free-skiing (or skiing without a course) also provides a good example. Terrain and snow conditions call upon skiers to move in particular ways, and that movement precipitates techniques. Everyone skis differently in powder than they do on bullet-proof corduroy, or hard-packed moguls. In powder, skiers move on the backs of their skis, and push-pull against the snow, like a surfer on a wave. After a heavy snowfall, a ski hill is like a music hall filled with the sound of Piano Sonata No. 2. Bullet-proof corduroy, in contrast, calls upon experienced skiers to test the limits of lean angle and play with the inertia of tight radius turns. For me, carving on corduroy is like dancing to funk music. Moguls turn skiers into human shock absorbers. I’m not sure how to describe mogul skiing in terms of music. Techno? Metal? Course setting is about drawing out particular styles of movement, in the same way as snow conditions, terrain features and music.
4. Race care drivers that say, "I'm controlling what is out of control" are actually talking about the feeling of control coming from the trajectory of their car, rather than from their own decision making. This is the feeling you are tyring to create with course-setting.

COURSE SETTING LEXICON

Its not enough to say that a course can be hard or easy, tight or open, off-set or straight. Course sets can vary infinitely, which is one reason why the practice is so important. Before we discuss the implications of my proposed POCS (which is when things might get controversial), let’s review some basic aspects of course setting. A course set can vary along the following dimension:

Off-set and distance:

The radius of a turn is determined by off-set and distance. Off-set refers to the distance from turning pole to turning pole along the horizontal axis, where “distance” refers to the distance from turning pole to turning pole on the vertical axis. A course setter can adjust both these dimensions of the course.

Terrain:

Terrain can be steep or flat, undulating or consistent. It can follow the fall-line or the fall-line can be “falling-away” from the direction of the hill. Sometimes, consistently steep pitches are easier than moderate pitches with lots of variation.

Flow:

Generally, a course with good flow is a course that gets progressively straighter. A course without flow will interrupt the speed of the skier and force them to decelerate. In some ways, the art of good course setting is about finding innovative ways to create flow. A very experienced course setter can bring skiers from a very straight course into an offset course without interrupting flow.

Cues:

Cues are crucially important for creating flow. The purpose of cues is to help skiers adapt with changes in the course and the terrain. Its important not to think about cues as visual markers only, they are also kinetic markers. Although cues are often perceived visually, they are also often felt. This is how courses help skiers ski outside of themselves.

There are at least four different types of cues: combination gates, terrain changes, direction changes and training aids. The first two are self-explanatory. By direction changes, I mean overall direction of travel. If the skiers are slaloming towards the north-east, and you change their direction to the north, you are creating a cue. On our race hill at Camp Fortune, there are two very important cues at the transition from Upper Canadian into The Chute. Not only does the terrain get steeper (cue #1) but the hill changes direction (cue #2). Training aids refer to all the different tools that coaches use to create cues on training courses, such as brushies, dye, hand signals, verbal cues, etc.

Variation:

Variation means changes in offset and terrain. Variation can both interrupt or create flow. In GS, SG and DH, variation helps to create flow. In SL, variation more often interrupts flow. The way to use variation to create flow is to cue the changes appropriately.

IMPLICATIONS (or time for some controversy)

If we take my POCS seriously, than a number of implications will follow. This is where my POCS gets more controversial.

1. Courses are not only tests; instead, they play an important role in the skiers development. A ski racer becomes a ski racer in a course. There are ways to set that enable this transformation to happen more easily. If you always set courses as tests, you are slowing down the development of your skiers.
2. Generally, courses should be a little easier. If you set a course, and the skiing in that course hurts your eyes, you should reset that course. A course is only too easy if it’s boring. And if the course is border-line too easy, than setup timing and enjoy the show. Timing on a fast/fun course is a fast-track to Creative Variation. For development level athletes, its almost impossible to set too easy because everyone needs to work on just going faster.
3. Don’t set on a hill that your skiers would not be comfortable to tuck, from top to bottom. This is particularly important for younger ages. If the kids are not comfortable skiing as fast as they can outside of the course, you cannot expect them to perform in the course.
4. Introduce variation incrementally. I was once a huge proponent of variation for the sake of variation. Now, I still think that variation is ultimately the goal but it needs to be added very deliberately and incrementally. Here are some example:
   
   Example #1: Once the skiers are comfortable in a slalom that is 10m from every turning pole to turning pole, switch to 8m, 11m, 8m, 11m, 8m, 11m, and so on (tock, tock-tock, tock, tock-tock, tock, tock-tock…).
   
   Example #2: Set simple rhythm patters, such as three turns of metronomic , then a hairpin, three turns, hairpin, three turns, hairpin… (tock, tock, tock, tock-tock, tock, tock, tock, tock-tock…).
5. Teach your athletes about nasty surprise gates (variation without cues) by setting a rhythmical, easy, flowing course into a flow stopper. Tell them about it in advance, have them inspect, let them solve the problem.
6. Set easy courses (less variation) on challenging terrain and more challenging courses (more variation) on easier terrain. Don’t combine easy and challenging terrain in one set until far along in their progression. As I said, introduce variation incrementally.
7. Set courses to match your technical objectives. This is crucially important. We don't expect students to learn geography while they are writing their geography tests. Don’t spend the morning working on cadence only to set a course in the afternoon that has none. The purpose, again, of course setting to let the movements teach technique. More than anything, this takes time, consistency and sustained focus. Ask yourself if your setting practices are more disruptive than they are helpful for your athletes’ technical progression.
8. Training sessions should centre on one type of variation at a time. Its ok to use the “hard instruction first” principle but don’t start with race regulation slalom. Start with very specific types of variation and move towards the kind of variation the athletes will see in competition settings.

MAYBE THIS IDEA IS OLD

In closing, I’ll insert a section from the ICR that gives qualitative descriptions of slalom courses and best-practices for setting. In my opinion, this reads like a coaching job description. Enjoy:

SLALOM:
802.1 General Characteristics of the Course
802.1.2 The ideal slalom course, taking into consideration the drop and the gradient specified above, must include a series of turns designed to allow the competitors to combine speed with neat execution and precision of turns.
802.1.3 The Slalom should permit the rapid completion of all turns. The course should not require acrobatics incompatible with normal ski technique. It should be a technically clever composition of figures suited to the terrain, linked by single and multiple gates, allowing a fluent run, but testing the widest variety of ski technique, including changes of direction with very different radii. Gates should never be set only down the fall-line, but so that some full turns are required, interspersed with traverses.
803.4 Setting
In setting Slalom the following principles should be observed:
803.4.1 Avoidance of monotonous series of standardised combinations of gates.
803.4.2 Gates, which impose too sudden sharp braking on competitors, should be avoided, as they spoil the fluency of the run without increasing the difficulties a modern Slalom should have.
803.4.3 It is advisable before difficult combinations of gates to set at least one gate which allows the competitor to ski through the difficult combination under control.
803.4.4 It is not advisable to set difficult gate passages either right at the beginning or end of the course. The last gates should be rather fast, so that the competitor passes the finish at a good speed.
803.4.5 Where possible the last gate should not be too close to the finish. It should direct competitors towards the middle part of the finish. If the width of the slope necessitates it, the last gate can be common to both courses, provided the prescribed alternation of blue and red gates is maintained.