Recreational cross-country skiers or aspiring Olympians?
The Caledonia Nordic Ski Club has made its choice, and it wants to develop the best of both worlds.
As the largest cross-country ski club in the province, the Caledonia Nordic Ski Club has long had an abundance of members who like to ski for fun, but its racing programs have largely flown under the radar.
The racing element that used be given back-seat emphasis in Caledonia club circles, dependent solely on volunteer coaches who inevitably suffered from burnout, is now being driven by Andrew Casey, hired in July as the first full-time coach in club history.
"Our membership is up around 1,600 or 1,700 members and we had to decide, are we going to be a YMCA or are we going to be an organization that provides programs, and if you do that, there's only so much you can do with volunteers," said Jim Burbee, the Caledonia club's director of competitions.
"When you start getting athletes that want to train 600 hours, 11 months of the year, unless it's your kid, that's a pretty big commitment. We found we couldn't run the organization without a manager [Gillian Recknell] and we can't run programs without a coach.
"We've done a lot of restructuring the club in the last couple years to have a more businesslike board, so it's not run by committee anymore and it's starting to show. The organization has got some structure and some longevity."
Since Otway Rotary Lodge was built in 2004-05, membership swelled, and the club has became more of a business, renting ski and snowshoeing equipment and running a concession. Burbee said that evolution continues with trail expansion, a new biathlon range in the works, and Casey taking on coaching roles that will appeal to the general membership as well as the top ski racers.
"We still have a full complement of volunteer coaches and he is coaching the coaches in key areas where they don't have the confidence in their skills or where we see a need," said Burbee. "If you look at the kids on the B.C. team, all the kids on those teams are in clubs that have paid coaches. Andrew is full of energy, he's well-qualified and has a super personality and I'm really excited about this."
Casey will be working with the club's cross-country racers as well as the biathletes.
Burbee was head coach of the club's cross-country racing program from 1990-98, helping Jacqui Benson make it to the national team, and was also around Otway Nordic Centre in the early 1990s when Prince George was home to the B.C. cross-country training team under coaches Dave Wood and Alain Parent, whose salaries were paid by Cross-Country B.C.
Volunteer coaches Leisbet Beaudry and John Hagen have kept the cross-country racing program alive, but the club never regained the momentum lost when the training centre folded in 1997.
Caledonia's biathlon program emerged over the past two decades as one of the best in B.C., first under the influence of club coaches Jeremy Campbell and Fiona Coy, and now with Pierre Beaudry at the helm. Its history of developing a talented base of young biathletes like 2010 Olympian Megan Tandy, Matt and Aaron Newmann and later, Sarah Beaudry, resulted in the provincial high-performance team being based at Otway. PacificSport and 2010 Legacies Now combined with Biathlon B.C. to cover the wages of coaches Knut Berland of Norway and his successor, Illmar Heinicke of Germany for three seasons in Prince George. That ended when the B.C. biathlon team moved to Callaghan Valley at Whistler in the fall of 2008.
