BOOST athletes — alpine, snowboard or freestyle — join the school
for two-week sessions. They are integrated immediately with the nine-month and winter-term athletes, but are tutored to follow their home
school academic program seamlessly in groups of one to three.
KMS coaches also work with home-program coaches to augment the
athletes’ season-long training and goals. If it’s competition season,
athletes can even compete in local VARA races by special arrangement. Most BOOST athletes hail from northeastern ski programs.
“Every camp starts with fundamentals,” says Hadley. “We like to focus on balance, stance and agility; nutrition; and an introduction to
proper gym and lifting techniques. We work with the home program
coaches, and provide complete evaluations of strengths and areas of
improvement that athletes can take back to their home program.”
It’s the second year of the BOOST program; last year KMS brought
12 to 15 athletes into each two-week session, which included their
Copper Mountain camp, KMS winter camps, Mount Hood, Saas Fee
and KMS dryland training sessions ( killingtonmountainschool.org).
The KMS BOOST program, in its eighth year, and others like it give
parents and athletes the ability to experience the lifestyle, hard work
and benefits of the academy lifestyle in a short burst. This creates
solid athlete skill development, and just might pave the way to becoming a winter-term or full-year ski academy student.
Boost campers take a break earlier this month in Vermont; 2010-2011 K2 Nationals
overall champion and KMS athlete Wyatt Quierolo took part in the BOOST program.
