Eric de Nys is looking forward to staying a lot closer to home.
Having given up his duties as coach of Canada's senior national women's cross-country ski team, he won't be a world traveler like he was last year. He can forget about off-season training camps in New Zealand and winter trips to Europe to be with his athletes for Olympic and World Cup events.
That's just fine for the 39-year-old native of Prince George. Having just accepted a new position as head coach of the newly-formed WinSport junior program, de Nys is going to be seeing a lot more of his wife Sarah and their 10-year-old daughter Kindrey and eight-year-old son Ryder. As head coach of the new WinSport junior team he will be based in Canmore, where he's lived for the last 11 years as a member of the national team coaching staff.
"I spent 145 days away from home [last ski year] and I think with this team it will be more like 50-70 days on the road -- the competitions are shorter and the training camps are closer," de Nys said.
The WinSport team is a full-year program for junior athletes aged 17-20, designed to fill in the gap for graduating high school skiers leaving club programs while they prepare to make the jump to one of the four national training centre teams or the national development squad.
For a maximum of three years, WinSport skiers will live and train in Canmore, where they will enroll in Bow Valley College's Hub of Learning program, which will supply tutors and other means of educational support while they are enrolled in postsecondary schools in Calgary or taking distance education postsecondary courses offered by Athabasca University.
"This is brand-new for WinSport and I'm really stoked about it," said de Nys, who signed a four-year contract.
"For top-level juniors to make a training centre is a really big step and this bridges the gap. There are a lot of good athletes who come from smaller communities but their clubs only support them until Grade 12 and after that it's kind of a dead end. There's no viable way for them to do it. The idea is to make a program for athletes that's as cheap as possible."
The cost to each athlete will be $8,500 per year, which covers the cost of coaching, training, waxing, transport and the Hub of Learning school. De Nys has already met with three skiers and hopes to have at least eight involved in the program the first year. The team will have access to a strength and conditioning coach, a doctor, and a sport psychologist. De Nys envisions the program's capacity could expand to 20 skiers with an additional coach and he hopes to eventually broaden the scope of the program to include biathlon.
Cross-County Canada disbanded its Canmore-based junior program in 2006. With the exception of Russian-born Ivan Babikov and Len Valjas, who was too young, all of the 2013-14 senior team skiers were products of the now-defunct program.
"They all came to the junior team program when it existed and I don't think it was ironic that happened," said de Nys. "It means the program was doing something right for those athletes so they could make the next step."
He's hoping Prince George athletes will benefit from WinSport and is encouraging higher-level teenaged skiers and their coaches in northern B.C. to join the team at their May training camp at Sovereign Lakes near Vernon.
"The beauty of this program is there's no criteria I have to adhere to, I can invite any athlete or coach and they can go back and maybe that will inspire them to come back to the WinSport team next year," said de Nys. "I want to try to include them so they raise their level and hopefully it will snowball. My goal is to raise the level of skiing in Canada, I don't care where it comes from."
WinSport is a non-profit group, formerly known as the Canadian Olympic Development Association, originally established as a legacy project from the 1988 Calgary Olympics. Now funded by the Canada Olympic Park ski hill in Calgary, WinSport has already established similar programs geared to junior athletes in alpine, sliding and skating sports.
While de Nys was head coach of Canada's women's team at his third Olympics in Sochi, during the World Cup season he coached only one of the three female skiers, Perianne Jones, because Chandra Crawford and Dasha Gaiazova decided to hire their own coaches.
While the men's Olympic team had legitimate medal threats in Alex Harvey and Devon Kershaw, both of whom have placed in the top-three in the overall World Cup standings, de Nys said none of the women went into Sochi expecting to make the podium, and none of them came close.
Crawford is now retired and neither Gaiazowa nor Jones posted a top-six finish or two top-12 results last season, which means they don't meet World Cup qualifying team requirements. With the team budget expected to be reduced and fewer athletes to coach, that meant there wasn't going to be enough of a budget to justify a three-member staff that included de Nys, head coach Justin Wadsworth and assistant men's team coach Louis Bouchard.
