Moguls master

This is what Team Summit freestyle ski coach John Dowling calls his "little kingdom." Kids ranging in size from whippersnapper to baby bull are shooting down a Copper Mountain moguls course. They make it look easy, too easy, showing off their impossibly loose knees and flowing grace through burly bumps that seem ready to gobble them up at any second.

When they reach the bottom, they pause. Their work is done for the moment. Now it's the teacher's turn.

Dowling feeds their hungry eyes and ears with his mental notes. "Sometimes when you hit the bump, you're a little flat," he explains to one. "You're gonna end up getting stuck <i>in it.</i> So give it that knee." The skier nods, then disappears toward the lift as another appears on course.

When the second one reaches the bottom, Dowling advises him, "Let that bump ride you out a little bit more, and you keep your cool and ride with it. A little more like water, y'know?"

Almost before he finishes this sentence, Dowling bellows, "HEIGHT!" at the next of his rippers, imploring the skier to stay higher on the bumps while in mid-run.

It goes on like this one after another. The kids - many wearing "Go Huck Yourself" stickers on their helmets - bomb down the course, absorb their coach's wisdom like sponges, then hurry off to the lift so they can do it all again. Soon enough Jordan Poyfair, a 15-year-old natural who is one of America's hottest female moguls skiers not currently on the U.S. Ski Team, has had it. She stops halfway down the run, obviously frustrated.

Dowling, standing at the bottom, calmly waits until she skis down to him. Then he reassures her: "You've done the technical part, you know what you're doing, just go with it. Relax a little more. Progressively relax more and more." At ease, she smiles.

A few minutes later it's Colin McDonald's turn. McDonald, 20, is a hulking 230 pounds, one of the sport's biggest boys. But he, like the others, has a soft, smooth touch that makes the hard-packed bumps look like pillows.

Suddenly, something goes wrong. McDonald loses control and starts skidding through his efforts to stop, heading directly at Dowling. He's moving in a blur, and he's leading with razor-sharp edges. When he finally comes to rest, visibly shaken, he is straddling his coach's legs.

Dowling never flinches. Instead, he launches into his evaluation of McDonald's run as if nothing happened.



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Moguls experts who know Dowling say he is as knowledgeable of the sport as anyone in the world. The numbers say it too. Between his eight years at Team Breckenridge and five at Team Summit, Dowling has coached 16 members of the U.S. Ski Team, fine-tuning their skills and preparing them for international competition before they became big. He has coached Olympians, world champions, national champions, World Cup event winners and World Cup overall winners.

Five members of the current U.S. team - easily the strongest freestyle program in the world - skied under Dowling before they were named to the national team: Jeremy Bloom, Luke Westerlund, Toby Dawson, David Babic and Heather McPhie. Dowling's name dots the freestyle section of the U.S. Ski Team's media guide with no explanation of who he is. It is assumed that the reader will already know.

As coaches go, Dowling maintains there are two kinds: democratic and authoritarian. Asked which type he is, the Breckenridge resident replies, "Not very democratic."

Dowling grew up a hard worker, devoted to his interests. He demands the same from the kids he coaches now. Punctuality, maximum effort at all times, a nitpicker's attention to detail - it's no accident his freestyle coaching peers within the Rocky Mountain Division (RMD) sometimes wish they could get as much out of their athletes as Dowling does.

But his reputation doesn't stop there. Aspiring freestyle skiers across the country have been bringing their talents to Dowling for nearly two decades, hoping he can work his magic on them like he's done so many times before.

Alex Wilson is one who did just that. Before he spent seven years on the national team, before he finished 10th in moguls at the 1998 Olympics, before he was the World Cup Rookie of the Year (one of three Dowling has coached), Wilson was a talented nobody.

The young ripper traveled throughout Colorado seeking a coach who might elevate him to the next level. Team Breckenridge, where Dowling served as head coach, was one of a number of moguls teams included in Wilson's tour. It didn't take long for the teenager to realize he'd found his man.

"John reminds me of the guy in the Kung Fu movies," Wilson says. "If you watch those movies, there's always the fighter who goes up in the mountains to train with the old guy with the long white beard who's the guru. That's John. He's the master. He kind of has the solitary existence, and he'll pretty much just show you the way. Ultimately it's up to you, but he'll give you the skills to be successful.

"Sometimes people don't even know they're seeking him out," Wilson adds. "It's more like, if you just show up for a day and listen to him coach and hear his knowledge behind coaching, it's pretty much game over."

Still, attracting athletes like Wilson, and 2005 World Cup overall champ Bloom, and two-time Olympian Evan Dybvig, is only half the battle. This country has plenty of talented skiers, plenty who "want it bad." Dowling takes the shiny yellow lemons he is given and makes the best lemonade anyone could possibly make with the same ingredients.

He does it by combining a rare technical understanding of moguls skiing with innovative ideas such as studying neuro linguistic programming and hypnosis to better himself as a coach. Throw in an uncle's willingness to listen and a dash of personal puzzle, and you've got Team Summit's freestyle program director.

Dowling goes to work in a hooded sweatshirt and wears a grin that is strikingly similar to Jack Nicholson's - but the smile takes a back seat to the serious, even intimidating edge that defines his coaching style.

During the winters he estimates he works about 60 hours a week and takes two days off per month. Most of his time is spent on the mountain or traveling to competitions throughout North America, but Dowling also breaks down film like a professional football coach. If he's not evaluating his own athletes, frame by frame, he's watching the top skiers on the World Cup, trying to pick up nuances that others might miss.

"He's one of the only guys I've ever worked with that is probably more into the sport than I am," says Babic, who once spent three days with a shovel outside his home in the Vermont hills creating a moguls course in the dirt so he could train. He dug 44 turns, each 2 1/2 feet deep, to simulate a bump run when the snow fell.



<b>The family business</b>

Freestyle ski coach is the only full-time job Dowling, 41, has ever had, which is not surprising considering his pedigree. His mother was the East Coast Division's freestyle chairperson; his dad was an American freestyle delegate for the International Ski Federation (FIS), and served as the U.S. Ski Team's doctor for a number of years; and two of his siblings spent time on the freestyle national team.

As a competitor, Dowling represented the U.S. at the junior world championships before turning to coaching. He got his first full-time gig at his hometown Sugarloaf Ski Area in Maine when he was 19, and since then he's crafted a lengthy coaching timeline highlighted by the two years he spent as the World Cup head coach for the Canadian national moguls team.

Some wonder why Dowling hasn't made the jump to the U.S. Ski Team; he says the reason is simple. In 1998 he expressed interest in the job after running a camp for the national team for free. But he was met with "frosty reception," he says with an indifferent smirk of recollection, and hasn't put his name in the hat since.

Dowling, who majored in Latin at Dartmouth (a popular topic of jest among his skiers) and has what many call "his own vocabulary," is far from bitter that he coaches a regional team. In fact, he prefers it that way.

"He believes the future of freestyle skiing is at the club level," says Katherine Lynch, who spent seven years skiing under Dowling and now runs the freestyle development program for Team Summit. "That's where people figure out who they are as a skier. And this is where the sport's going to change. You don't throw a 720 (for the first time) in a World Cup, you throw it on the regional level."

Wilson, who coached with Dowling at Team Summit after retiring from the U.S. team, puts it this way: "Basically, what John does, which I think a lot of coaches miss: He doesn't train a kid to win a regional event. He trains him to do well on the World Cup."

Or her. In a single year under Dowling, McPhie - who made the U.S. Ski Team after enduring heartbreaking results the previous two seasons, when she finished one spot short - improved her speed by nearly five seconds (runs last around 30 seconds) and, more importantly, she says, "He instilled a confidence in me that I never had before."

Dowling's sister, Anne, enjoyed a similar catapult in mental capability. After doing so poorly one year that she was kicked off the national team altogether, Anne enlisted John's training for the following fall. The result: At her first competition of the season, a World Cup event in Canada, she finished third. It was the only podium finish of Anne Dowling's six-year World Cup career.



<b>The coach connects</b>

One of the reasons Dowling is such a respected and successful coach is that his open mind works two ways. He's constantly coming up with his own methods to improve his skiers' performance, but he's also on the lookout for outside ideas he can adapt to maximize the effect on himself as a coach or his athletes as competitors.

In the early 1990s Dowling began a practice of studying the anatomical movements made by the top World Cup skiers during a run in competition. Then he used his sketching skills to illustrate what he saw and compare it to the way his kids moved.

"At that time, it was really progressive," Wilson says. "Nobody in the sport of moguls skiing had thought of it that way, not to the point John did."

It goes the other direction, too. Dowling once used a 7-year-old girl's technique in the bumps to help Babic, the budding World Cup skier, break a habit of staying too low in the ruts between moguls.

Between the lines of words like "avalement" (French for absorbing while turning), "dorsal flexion" (ankle and shin elasticity) and "quadrennium" (a four-year span), Dowling teaches his kids more than how to elevate their skiing.

Sarah Ruckriegle, 17, is one of a few Team Summit athletes who despises Dowling's demanding ways. So much so, in fact, that she admits, "I pretty much threaten to quit on a daily basis."

Still, she says of Dowling, "He's told me before, 'I don't care if you hate me or not, as long as you're learning what you need to learn about skiing and about life.'

"The way John coaches makes you learn something about yourself," she says.

While his coaching reach often seems boundless, it's not. Consciously, Dowling has drawn a line over the years that guarantees at least some (though not much) of his life will remain separate from his profession. He maintains "friendships that work," which he explains are most often friendships that don't involve skiing.

His skiers themselves - many of whom have spent weeks on the road with Dowling - use terms like "loner," "enigma" and "mystery" to describe this part of their coach's identity.

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When Dowling speaks of the freestyle tradition he has built at Team Summit (and, before that, Team Breck), he likens it to a club gymnastics program with a similar goal: developing the athletes <i>completely.</i> "They're little kingdoms," he says, using the world-renowned coach Bela Karolyi's Olympic gymnast factory as an example.

It's a sunny fall day outside and Dowling is sitting in his favorite local coffee shop, explaining why he doesn't think he will leave his kingdom.

"It's bigger than moguls skiing," he says. "It's sport. Sport is ultimately working with kids and developing them over whatever the time frame. Moguls skiing is the milieu."

Dowling smiles his Joker smile when asked to define the word (it means, "the environment"). Then his face tightens.

Although hard to believe, he means it. Moguls skiing really is just the milieu.



<i>Devon O'Neil can be contacted at (970) 668-3998, ext. 13630, or at doneil@summitdaily.com.</i>