Guiding light: How coach Chip Cochrane kept the USST's biggest rebel on track

By Published On: October 15th, 2004Comments Off on Guiding light: How coach Chip Cochrane kept the USST's biggest rebel on track

Guiding light: How coach Chip Cochrane kept the USST’s biggest rebel on trackWhen people hear Chip Cochrane’s name, they assume that he’s one of those “skiing Cochrans” out of Vermont. He’s not. Cochrane — like Carrabassett Valley Academy alums Kirsten Clark, Forest Carey and Bode Miller — is from a little town in northern New England, where gloomy winters breed stoic toughness and fierce independence.

Cochrane’s hometown of Greenville, Maine, is remote and impoverished. Its few lean businesses reflect a frontier spirit: chainsaw repairmen, paper-company branch offices, gun shops and sporting guide services. One of the latter — Allagash Canoe Trips — has been the Cochrane family business for three generations.

Growing up, Cochrane spent summers canoeing the Allagash and winters skiing at tiny Squaw Mountain. He made his way into competitive racing by compensating for unpolished technique with natural gliding skills. After qualifying for a few development camps, Cochrane became a member of the U.S. Ski Team in 1978. He was a part of the team at a time when the Canadians could crush the American downhillers and Ingemar Stenmark could sweep a season of giant slaloms.

He remembers the American coaches, bitter and desperate, making athletes do up-downs, wind sprints and tuck runs. After his first Europa Cup, one frustrated coach told Cochrane to his face that he’d never make it as a racer. “I had a lot of terrible coaches,” says Cochrane, “but that made me more independent and self-reliant.”

Cochrane managed to qualify for the 1982 world championships in Schladming, Austria, where he crashed in a training run and blew out his knee. The next year he raced nearly every World Cup downhill, but never made the first page. “I was thrown in a little over my head before I was ready for it,” says Cochrane, who retired in 1983 at age 22. After his injury-plagued racing career was up, Cochrane coached around the country, but eventually made his way home to Maine, where he found his niche guiding fishing trips and coaching junior athletes at Carrabassett Valley Academy (CVA).

Now 43, Cochrane is the head development coach at CVA. For years, he’s spent long, grim winters screwing gates into blue ice at Sugarloaf and watching J IIIs over-rotate as they reach out to cross-block them. It’s a tough job, but Cochrane, soft-spoken and patient, is well suited for it. He’s friendly and curious, has a heavy Maine accent and, like many people from his state, breaks into bemused laughter while telling stories about hardship (usually his own). He doesn’t self-promote, doesn’t get political and doesn’t get tons of recognition.

But when Bode Miller wins a World Cup, goes to the post-race press conference and is asked which coaches have had the biggest effect on him, Miller — who is not known for celebrating the coaching profession — goes out of his way to credit Cochrane for guiding him through his uncertain CVA years.

As much as Cochrane doesn’t like to talk about himself, he’s animated when talking about the athletes he coaches. His voice lights up with relief when he’s invited to speak about what Miller was like at 15 — with bad points and untuned skis. “He was quite typical of a young, skinny J II: fairly impressionable. He didn’t have a lot of strength to back up his talent. As he got stronger, he got better,” recalls Cochrane.

Cochrane is big on weight training, but Miller, who has always been more into alternative workouts, resisted that. Cochrane says he wasn’t worried, because Miller made up for it with intensity during soccer games. “We were always playing football and soccer and ice hockey,” says Cochrane. “We’d play till we could barely stand up.”

Miller’s teachers weren’t as lenient with him in the classroom as Cochrane was in the weightroom. But Cochrane stood up for Miller. “He recognized Bode’s genius,” says Headmaster John Ritzo, who thinks Cochrane’s background was the lens through which he could see Miller’s promise.

“When he made breakthroughs,” remembers Cochrane, “he was there. He’d never step back. It would take awhile, and it would take a lot of crashing — he’d go months without getting down the course — but he’d be working on something and [then] … he’d get it, and he’d ski down to us coaches at the bottom of the hill and say ‘I figured it out,’ and it would be something we’d told him a month ago. All that crashing, but he’d never let failure hurt his ego. He always stayed on track. Not much gets to him mentally. He’s had that from the beginning. It’s hard to pull any psyches on him. He can do it to himself, I suppose, but there were a lot of times where I thought he should be nervous but he wasn’t.”

Cochrane’s voice emphasizes his respect for Miller. The respect is mutual. “Chip was just really understanding,” says Miller. “He never tried to force anything on anyone, he was one of those coaches who tries to inspire you to figure it out on your own rather than tell you what to do or boss you around. Plus, he’d had some experience on the World Cup level and that’s invaluable when you’re teaching young kids, because you know what it takes to get there, the commitment and effort. He was really supportive in a really healthy way for me.”

People at CVA say Cochrane gives the same measured attention to every athlete, no matter how fast or committed that athlete appears. Ritzo believes that Cochrane’s experience on the World Cup wrung the glamour out of U.S. Ski Team uniforms and that as a result, Cochrane never gets “star struck.” Forest Carey agrees. Carey, a CVA alum who spent time on the U.S. Ski Team and then at Middlebury College before returning, last year, to coach alongside Cochrane, says Cochrane will never play the Bode Miller card to win an athlete’s respect. “When he does tell kids about Bode, he tells them about all the stuff we did — the big air and skiing fast,” says Carey. “But he never, ever tells the kids, ‘I told Bode this and look at him now.’ It’s never put before them in that way. Never.”

Cochrane is a Registered Maine Guide (a prestigious accreditation in the North Woods), which means that in summer he’s qualified to take hundreds of wide-eyed neophytes down the state’s wild and remote rivers. Guests rave about his irrepressible desire to teach canoeing to anyone willing to learn. Perhaps that natural gift partly explains why Cochrane hasn’t sought out coaching certification through USSA. Other coaches with his same successes at the junior level try to ascend the coaching hierarchy. Cochrane appears to coach just for the thrill of introducing someone to new territory. “Teaching kids to race,” he says, “that’s enough for me.”

Thousands of students have passed through Cochrane’s life on the river and slopes, but he still vividly remembers the day that Miller made the U.S. Ski Team on objective criteria — by placing at Nationals (held at Sugarloaf that year). “He had so much confidence on his home hill,” says Cochrane. “During the warm-up he was on fire, and he came to me and said, ‘Chip, I feel good today. I think I’ll make the ski team today.’ And he was starting, I don’t know, 57th or something like that.”

Cochrane was happy to see Miller make it, but had some reservations. “I was on the ski team myself, and I saw how that worked. I told Bode that there were coaches there that want to ride the athletes to the top, and Bode doesn’t like that. But I think Bode knew all of that, could see it for himself.”

Cochrane was worried that Miller’s independent thinking wouldn’t synchronize with the USST’s highly managed schedule, obligatory goals and expectations. And he was worried that people in the sport would try to “puppet Bode around.” So he wrote a long letter to the coaches who were about to receive Miller, Aldo Radamus (now program director at Ski Club Vail) and Jesse Hunt (now the alpine director, a front-office job at USSA headquarters).

“I sent a long letter
to Jesse and Aldo, discussing how I thought Bode saw the sport. I didn’t want to tell them how to do their jobs, but I said if they were thinking they’d be able to re-write and re-program Bode, it wouldn’t work, because Bode doesn’t learn that way.”

It surely ran against Cochrane’s low-key style to write such a letter, but the action was in keeping with what athletes and co-workers appreciate most about Cochrane. He’s genuine and has his athletes’ best interest in mind. Always. “He [coaches] for all the right reasons,” explains Carey. “There’s a political game that comes into play in any job, and Chip ignores it.”

He’s also humble. “I passed on my two cents’ worth, and they took it,” says Cochrane, downplaying the importance of the prescient advice. “I think they had some of those ideas already. I think Jesse and Aldo had seen Bode around.”

He doesn’t talk much, but Cochrane, like Miller, isn’t afraid to let his opinions be known. If an idea touches him off, the audience is in for a thoughtful, well-articulated theory. So it is when you broach the subject of Bode Miller with him.

“What I learned from Bode was that when a kid is thinking for himself, you don’t want to shut that down,” says Cochrane, pointing out how self-reliant a skier has to be to make a career of the sport. “Ultimately the athlete has to drive himself down the hill. All kids want some guidance, but a lot think someone’s going to pass the magic wand. I tell them it doesn’t work that way. My job is just to try to boost their confidence in themselves.”

CHIP COCHRANE TIMELINE

> 1962-1978 Growing up in Greenville, Maine, Cochrane skis with his brothers Tris and Bucky at Squaw Mountain. “My father was the high school coach. We were terrible skiers, technically. There wasn’t a lot of gate training, but we pushed each other. We just tucked a lot.”

> 1977 While racing in local races, Cochrane gets noticed by Robbie Anderson (the younger brother of Maine-bred downhiller Karl Anderson), who is coaching the Penobscot Valley Ski Club while attending medical school. Anderson puts Cochrane onto the right circuits and races at the time: CanAms, Eastern Junior Championships and
U.S. Ski Team training camps in Europe.

> 1978 Cochrane makes the U.S. Ski Team’s development team, training alongside that era’s bigshots, Andy Mill and Pete Patterson. “The Europa Cup courses were ill-prepared, with choppy crud and powder all over them. You’d follow tracks into the fog, lost, with some coach yelling at you for not tucking.”

> 1980 Cochrane races Kitzbühel, Val d’Isère and
St. Anton (all the big World Cup downhills except for Garmisch). “They seemed like super-highways to me after the Europa Cup.” At the end of the season, he blows both knees out in a crash at Nationals in Squaw Valley.

> 1982 Cochrane qualifies for the world championships in Schladming, Austria, and blows out his knee in the first training run for the downhill.

> 1983-1984 In his first year off the team, Cochrane coaches at Whiteface, New York, where AJ Kitt was “not one of the most talented J II’s, but was by far the most hard-working.”

> 1984-1991 Cochrane coaches at Squaw Valley, alongside Mark Sullivan and Ernst Hager. He remembers Daron Rahlves as an “up-and-comer” J III. He also spent a year heading the Dodge Ridge program, on the other side of Sonora Pass, California.

> 1991-present He works at Carrabassett Valley Academy, where headmaster John Ritzo says Cochrane is a larger-than-life figure. “The worst thing a kid can do here is disappoint Chip,” says Ritzo. “He does that without ever lecturing them.”

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About the Author: Pete Rugh