Creative Contribution
2024-2027 APSI National Team - Initial Application
APSI
What sets the APSI apart from other training organisations?
The APSI is a members association with a tightly knit and passionate community of snowsports professionals.
Its relationships with the Australian resorts, both directly and through the ASAA, creates a strong connection with its members and provides it with a unique understanding of Australian guests.
Some Cool Facts
Numbers Speak For Themselves
Its
People
APSI Trainers are amongst the best and most experienced professionals in the world. Arguably, more of them work back-to-back winters in both hemispheres than in any other training training body. Their exposure to other organisations’ training brings a great deal of knowledge back to the association.
The association invests in its people, with an annual Trainers Coordination, including both staff training and time with those delivering in-house training for resorts. It has an established Trainer Development Pathway and remunerates its staff for shadowing peer delivery of the next level of courses and exams.
APSI sends a delegation to represent the association at Interski every four years, further ensuring its dynamism on a world stage. And its CARE Model, presented at Interski, Levi 2023, shows an ongoing and elevated commitment to people – through the guest experience.
Technical Philosophy
The ASPI’s Performance Model clearly links the goals of the guest with the desired performance of the skis needed to achieve them, and the movements or skier/rider inputs required to effect that performance. It puts the guest at the heart of the relationship between form and function in the way it teaches skiing and trains its instructors.
Whilst focusing on the practical relevance to the guests, the Performance Model also identifies a tangible method for identifying difference performances in a fairly objective way – through track width. The approach is unique to the ASPI amongst its peer organisations.
Teaching Philosophy
The ASPI uses a cyclical teaching model within its “9 Lesson Essentials”. There is little ambiguity, and its step by step approach is comprehensive enough to equip rookie instructors to structure successful lessons. Yet its flexibility allows for additional concepts and tools that expand on the Essentials to facilitate creative ski teaching and world-class learning experiences for guests.
Its
Environment
The ASPI’s home - the Australian Alps - is a unique environment: geographically, historically and culturally.
What it may lack in elevation and skiable/rideable vertical, it more than makes up for in biodiversity and beauty. Skiing amongst bright crimson rosella’s perched in white snow gums, alongside the odd wombat or echidna, is a truly special experience.
Immigrants form a central part of Australian skiing history and that of the ASPI. Australia is home to the oldest ski club in the world – Kiandra Ski Club spawned from immigrant workers during the gold rush. Through the 1950’s and 60’s, foreign workers involved with the NSW’s Snowy Mountains Hydro Electric Scheme helped shape the state’s resorts.
To this day, hundreds of immigrant workers still travel to teach snowsports in Australia each winter, many of whom become involved with the ASPI. Some schools have over 20 different nationalities represented in their teams, with their in-house training clinics often feeling like a mini-Interski!