Yellow - the Ski Tigers program is pretty structured. It was started maybe 15-20 years ago by a few skiers/parents, and it has evolved a lot. There are probably 100 or so kids in it this year, and it is divided up by age & ability. I think there are about 8 groups. There aren't any paid coaches - we're all volunteers. Mostly parents who ski and local racers. The higher level groups have the more serious skiers as coaches. Some years I do it, and some years I don't. This year I'm an assistant coach in the Yellow group (that way I can skip out easier for races). Anyway, there are little kids (I think the youngest I ever knew of was 4, but she was mostly supervised by her mom, since she couldn't really go very far). All the way up through high school. Each level has goals to work on (I think the one I'm in is things like being able to ski 5k, both striding and skating, hockey stops, tucking downhills, etc).

I guess the main thing we do is try to keep it fun. So we play some games with the younger ones sometimes. The group I'm with this year is about 12 kids (including identical triplets with identical long hair and identical clothes) who are all probably about 10 or 11. Last week we skied without poles, and tried to work on poling with the V1. It is really hard to even tell if they are listening to you. A lot of it ends up just being about getting them out there, and trying to give them pointers. All the groups up to this point are primarily about striding, and then in Yellow they start skating. The organization firmly believes that striding is the basis for so many aspects of skiing that it is better to focus solely on that for a long time. Skating is one of those things that is hard to teach at that age (either they "get it" like the girl you mentioned, or they don't).

Here is a link to the program, which could help: http://www.keweenawtrails.com/skitigers/index.html

It doesn't go over specific drills, but it will give you an idea of how the program works. The newsletters have a lot of explanatory information, and some of the other links are helpful. The Groups/Classes link explains the groups.

We did play a game last week where we split the group in half, and the head coach and I each skied off a few yards with a bell. The kids took turns being blindfolded and skiing out to find us (& ski around us) by the ringing of the bells (without poles). This was at the end, after skiing without poles to work on weight transfer, V1ing up a long gradual hill, then turning around and trying to glide as long as possible on each ski, coming back down (several times), and then skiing a short hill with a moderate uphill. Maybe 4 or 5k. With a brief chocolate candy break. Oh, and the head coach had told them to keep track of their distance during the week, and if they skied more total ks than we did, they could bomb us with snowballs for 20 seconds. If we had skied more, we could throw the snowballs at them for 10 seconds. 11 kids, and they had only skied 44k total in a whole week! So we coaches won.

Tonight I saw one of the coaches working with a big group of younger kids. She had put little flags in the tracks on a big downhill, and was having them go down in the tracks, lifting their skis over the obstacles as they went. The little kids seem to frequently do little drills using plastic snakes and bugs in the snow.

I hope I've been a least somewhat helpful. There is so much information that the organizers could address better than I can. We have a large group now, so things are split up pretty effectively. Parent involvement is key. We have enough structure so the coaches know what skills to work on, but not so much that they feel compelled to work on specific techniques in a certain way on certain days.

Feel free to pm me if you want. Wow - this is long! Sorry.

Jan