Sprongo is the premium video service among skiers. Oddly, pro and competitive snowboarders have been slow to adopt Sprongo to improve their performance, with some exceptions. In Canada, these include Canada Snowboard and Ontario Escarpment from Beaver Valley Ski Club.
Canada Snowboard
The national team is overseen by the Canadian Snowboard Federation. It competes in freestyle, snowboard cross, alpine snowboarding and para-snowboarding. It’s very competitive in World Cup, World Championship and Olympic Winter Games. It was an early adopter of Sprongo and continues to use it as a core part of their training.
The Federation’s mission is to provide sports programmes and support services to focus to snowboarders throughout Canada. It focusses on long term athlete development and improvement, including the Women’s Snowboard Federation, the Canada Snowboard Coaching Program and Canada Para-Snowboarding. Its Para-Snowboarding adaptive snowboarding program is particularly innovative. It is for athletes who become disabled but intend to keep going downhill, fast.
The national team have regularly performed at world podiums. At the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014 Mark McMorris won the men’s slopestyle bronze and Dominique Mailtais took silver in women’s snowboard cross. Para-athlete Michelle Salt led the Canadian medal charge at the para-snowboard World Cup with two bronze and a silver. Alex Massie and Andrew Genge also took bronze medals.
Overall, the team ranks forth on the all time Olympic snowboarding medal table since it was added to the Winter Olympics in 1998.
Ontario Escarpment Snowboard Team
The Ontario Escarpment Snowboard team is based in the Beaver Valley Ski and Snowboard School in Ontario, Canada. The club offers an amazing family oriented atmosphere for all snow sport athletes. This includes a very strong snowboard program from as young as 3 through age grades to adult. Parks and racing are all part of the experiences on offer. They range from beginner and development to high performance competitive athletes.
The speed program is designed to get riders confident on blue runs then progresses to the Escarpment Speed HP program. This prepares athletes to take on the best riders in the country in both race and snowboarder cross courses. The programs start out by encouraging the development of a wide skill base with lots of free riding and freestyle. As riders progress, the programs focus more on race or cross training, while still including multi discipline training as the core element. The goal is to make sure Ontario riders can ride it all, while retaining the fun factor that snowboarding has always had.
At the top end athletes train with other Escarpment clubs. This allows them to experience different training facilities and more effectively prepare for competition on the Provincial Snowboard Ontario circuit. A key stepping stone to the National Development team.