SKI FORWARD
European Skills and Dual Career Programme for Young Competitive Skiers and Coaches
Intensive training, travel and competition schedules leave young skiers limited time to develop practical skills for education, employment and life beyond competitive sport. As only a minority will pursue a long-term professional sporting career, this creates a significant dual-career gap, particularly for athletes from lower-income backgrounds and smaller or regional clubs.
Young coaches often have strong sporting and technical expertise but lack the leadership, financial, entrepreneurial and project-management capabilities required to support athletes’ dual careers or establish such programmes in their clubs. Existing coaching education generally does not address these needs, and clubs lack an accessible, reusable model that connects athlete development, coach capacity and formal education.
SKI FORWARD will adapt nine pillars of the five-day, non-formal Pot do uspeha youth programme to the realities of competitive skiing. The skier pathway will cover career development, employability, entrepreneurship, learning techniques, communication, personal finance, personal growth, health and technology, complemented by content on green-sector careers, sustainable mountain tourism, inclusion and values in sport.
A connected young-coach pathway will develop mentoring, leadership, budgeting, fundraising, project-management and communication skills so coaches can integrate dual-career support into everyday training and sustain it within their clubs. The University of Vienna will embed a five-day intensive camp as an elective for sport-science students, qualifying successive cohorts as near-peer facilitators who can deliver the skier pathway. The model will combine residential learning and train-the-trainer methods, enabling later replication through European ski networks.
The consortium will assess the specific dual-career and business-skills needs of young skiers and coaches, then adapt the Pot do uspeha content into two connected pathways, delivery guidance and facilitator materials. The University of Vienna will develop the evaluation methodology and integrate the young-coach training camp into its sport-science curriculum.
Sport-science students and other young coaches will be trained as near-peer facilitators. They will deliver the adapted programme to competitive skiers through a pilot in Poland, with deliberate outreach to participants from smaller or regional clubs and lower-income backgrounds.
The partners will evaluate participant learning, accessibility, delivery feasibility and the capacity of coaches and clubs to continue the programme. Based on the pilot evidence, they will refine the curriculum and implementation model and disseminate the resulting resources to ski clubs, federations and FESA’s network of 19 member federations.
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