Do You Need a Sports Consultant?

Longtime USSA director Lester Keller outlines the benefits of customized training programs

Quick — name the sharpest thing skiers should be bringing to the racecourse.

It’s not skis.

It’s your mind. More than ever, mental preparation is paramount to mastering the mountain. Few sport insiders understand this more than Lester Keller, who spent 25 years with the U.S. Ski Team, and has devoted more than four decades to competing, coaching and counseling on racecourses from coast to coast.

Now, Keller aims to steer clubs in the right direction with his new business, Journey Sports Consulting. SkiRacing.com recently caught up with Keller to find out if dialing in their mental dynamics could be the right calling for kids looking for the sharpest edge.

SR: Tell us a little bit about Journey Sports Consulting. What is it and how did it come to be?

LK: Well, as part of what I did with USSA from about 1995 on, I also worked in the high performance department, which grew out of the sports science department. I basically designed and ran the sport psychology program for the high performance department. During my time as Western Region Alpine Director, I finished my doctoral degree at the University of Utah in exercise and sports science, and this growth is taking all the experience that I’ve had from running ski clubs, coaching kids at a high level, and working on the mental aspects of performance specifically as a domain of sport. Basically, I’ve been really interested in mental skill acquisition and their impact on sport performance.

SR: What are some of the services you will be providing to clubs?

LK: When a ski club says, “We’re going to develop the athletes to the limits of their potential,” do you really understand what you just said? Do you understand the scope of what that means in modern sport? I try to help people put together training programs in all of the domains of sport that will actually do that. It’s an unbelievably exciting time to be in sports.

SR: What do you believe sets your program apart from other consulting services?

LK: How people learn and how you can best coach. The difficult part of it is that we haven’t been all that innovative. One of the things I always looked at when I was hiring coaches was: Are they a student of the sport? Do they innovate? Does this person really look for new ways to affect the performance and the learning of the kids?

SR: In what areas do you believe ski clubs are falling short in providing the best possible product for their athletes?

LK: I do a little show of hands. I’ve done it for the past four or five years at coaches academies, and I ask how many ski clubs have in-house conscious training. Unfortunately, it’s less than 50 percent. Every ski school in America has a training supervisor who teaches ski instructors how to teach and how to ski. Very, very few ski clubs have a similar position, and really only about half have a progression and methodology that they talk about and train amongst themselves. Everybody can improve what they’re doing, and I’m just trying to take 40 years of experience and a lifetime of study in sports and offer that as a service.

SR: Is Journey Sports Consulting skiing only, or do you have plans to branch out to other sports in the future?

LK: Certainly my whole background as an official and administrator is grounded in skiing, but there are massive similarities not only in the individualized sports, but in the team sports, as well. So, yeah, I’m open to branching out and doing those kinds of things.

For more information on Journey Sports Consulting, see the YouTube channel here, as well as this brochure.