Prince George Citizen
Jason PETERS – January 18, 2017

A shortage of snow on local mountains hasn’t stopped the Prince George Alpine Ski Club from going full speed ahead with its season.

With yet another late start to winter in this part of the province, members of the local ski club went south in search of snow in November. They took two trips to Sun Peaks, near Kamloops, and trained for a total of 10 days on natural and man-made snow. Then, during the Christmas vacation, they gathered at Powder King, north of Prince George in the Pine Pass, for another 10 to 12 days of practice.

The travel – south and north – proved extremely beneficial.

“We had some excellent training (at Sun Peaks),” said club coach Kali Holahan. “There were quite a few clubs from all over the province that were training there as well to catch the snow.

“Then we were driving back and forth to Powder King through the Christmas break to get some training up there and it was fabulous, actually. For (Powder King), they even have less snow than normal but there was more than enough to get some gate training in. That mountain has always been very supportive of having an alpine team up there – they’re very accommodating.”

With a solid number of training sessions logged, PGASC athletes were back at Sun Peaks last weekend for the first meet of the season. All nine of the club’s under-14 skiers competed in slalom and giant slalom races, and a few of them – Melinda Kobasiuk, Charlotte Gibson and Jacob Hoskins – posted top-10 results. Kobasiuk had the best placing, a third in women’s slalom on Sunday.

“She’s not tentative,” said Phil Soicher, a new club coach with the PGASC this season. “When she starts, she’s a little bit more comfortable, I think, than some. So when she started, at least in the slalom, it was evident that she was willing to go.”
Kobasiuk’s podium finish came in a field of 31 skiers. She also placed ninth out of 32 in women’s giant slalom on Saturday.

Gibson, meanwhile, was sixth on Sunday and eighth on Saturday. As for Hoskins, he crossed the line 10th of 40 in Sunday’s men’s slalom and was 19th of 40 in Saturday’s giant slalom.

Other results were as follows: Sunday, women’s slalom – Amelie Brulotte, 11th; Ella Francis, 12th; Erica McCallum, 18th; Isabelle Lindsay, 19th; Saturday, women’s giant slalom – Brulotte, 17th; Francis, 18th; McCallum, 23rd; Lindsay, 24th; Sunday, men’s slalom – Jack Logan, 23rd; Ben Cook, 30th; Saturday, men’s giant slalom – Logan, 24th; Cook, 33rd.

Soicher, the new club coach, was at Sun Peaks with the team while Holahan remained in Prince George for the Nor-Am races at Tabor Mountain (see other stories). Soicher, 24, was hired out of Fredericton, N.B., where he had been instructing with the Crabbe Mountain Race Club. The PGASC also has a new head coach and program director, Dan Hadley, a former coach at Vancouver’s Grouse Mountain.

“Phil is on for one year – we’d love to keep him longer but we’ll see how he enjoys being out in B.C.,” Holahan said. “And Dan I believe is going to be up here for a few years. He has kind of wrapped up his coaching career down south and is, I think, enjoying the smaller team atmosphere up here.”

In regards to hiring staff, Holahan said the club is “pretty well set financially” because of its fundraising initiatives.

“The club does a major amount of sandbagging – we hand-make sandbags every single year, like a good 20 to 25,000 sandbags and we sell them to gas stations around town,” she said. “And then in October every year we also do wood chopping. We generally get donations from the mills in town and chop birch and also other wood and deliver it to families around town and sometimes even out of town.”

This coming weekend, the PGASC is hosting the Western Canada Ski Cross Series at Tabor. Club members will be racing in the event and a handful of the younger athletes will serve as forerunners.