A journey of 1000 miles starts with a single SaaS Solution
Rookie Academy
Rookie Academy is where I trained to be a snowboard instructor, really great fun and great place! www.rookieacademy.com for more info!
Exams start tommorow!
Sep 13th
ok just a quick update to say my exams start tommorow! ARGH!! … and the “moon man” (a guy go predicts the weather from the moon in Wanaka) says its going to snow over the next couple of days! yupiee… ok I admit all other weather forcasts say its going to be hot with maybe some rain but I live in hope!
well off to bed so I am ready for the swimming pool… I mean slopes at TC…
wish me luck… I think I may need it!
Interesting Week in Wanaka
Sep 9th
Things are getting a bit dodgy, the mountain is suffering a quite a bit, main street (one of the main runs) is very earthy at the bottom with only a metre gap of snow to get down on. The mountain has been closed for 3 days in the past week and we’ve just been doing more MA and lessons ready for our exam next week. Good news tho its been confirmed that were doing the exam at Treble Cone and not another mountain and we also have 3 extra days training next week which will be good (I need it).
All the skiers passed there exams last week (except one person who didn’t make it, another dropped out before the exams started) so its been a bit of a party atmosphere… they are now starting to concentrate on their BASI exams.
The mountain was closed today so I took the chance to dive over to Queenstown to finish off my medical which I need to do to get my Ozzy visa. Thats been sent off so should get something soon.
Today we got asked to stand by the trainers we wanted to teach us and infact it was quite evenly spread. I choose fatty because he hadn’t trained me for quite a while and he is one of the NZ examiners which is always useful before the NZ level 1 exam 
anyway i’m off to sleep… up the mountain tommorow teaching some friends of Mikals.
Closed…
Sep 1st
Well we all got up this morning ready to get picked up at our usual 7.30am, as we got picked up our driver said the mountain was on HOLD. So we all headed down to town for a coffee until we find out if it is going to open or not. Then at 8am we got word, the mountain is going to be closed:
But hey look on the bright side its snowing in the saddle! Anyway we’re all heading down to Muzzies at noon to do some video MA, so at least we are doing something.
Level 1 .. ARGH!
Sep 1st
ok i’m supposed to teach people to do 180s, 360s, olies, nolies, nose rolls and tail rolls… oh and whats nolie anyway?! ok so i’m feeling the pressure, also my last part of my Australia visa came through which means I have to go have a medical (within a month), which also means i’ve had to take a day off snowboarding because the Doc has a day off on Wednesday… the rookie day off!! grrr… anyway I had mon & tue to practise my freestyle elements then I had to mess around in town finding passport photos, photo copies of things etc… There is one pain with having a mountain which is 40mins away, there is only one lift up in the morning and one lift down in the afternoon. If you want to go up or down at any other time you have to hitch which is not too bad, lots of people do it.
Anyway today I headed off to the Doc for my medical in queenstown. It was a lot more basic than I thought… blood test, urine test, answer a couple of questions… open your mouth etc.. oh and a chest x-ray, unfortunatly I have to go back for the results so thats another day off!!!! oh well.. got MA (movement analysis) tommorow and a practise teach. Gonna run through some lesson plans tonight with Mike before I hit the hay…
Mike was telling me about the conditions on the mountain today, he was basically wakeboarding on the beginners slope… hope the snow holds out for the exams! it was a nice 20oC today down in town, I was sun bathing in queenstown.
I Passed! (well 1st exam of 3)
Aug 29th
yupieee… I passed and just to prove it heres my certificate (and yes it is my certificate they just spelt my surname wrong!)
Overall its been a good week, it was good to get out of TC for a bit and try a different mountain at Cadrona. Its also quite good to see the examiner teaching in a slightly different way… quite good in that respect. The only thing that was a bit anoying was that most of the information we had been told before, so it was just re-doing the same things, but Rookie said they were going to put the CSI earlier next year which makes better sense.
We were introduced to how the board moves (as if we didn’t know them already), and we had exercises on each of the planes of movement. We then had to run a lesson that had nothing to do with snowboarding but fitted the lesson structure (Introduction, Analyse Students, Student Goals, Plan lesson, Present Information, Check understanding, guided practise, feedback & summary). So we did … “how to juggle with snowballs”, which was ok… and then we were given demos on the Level 1 progression (introduction, one foot orientation, skating, straight running and j-turns). We were doing so well we didn’t end up doing the evening session as we did it during the day instead.
The rest of the week we were doing rider improvement and the level 2 progessions. We were being assessed throughout the whole week on our riding and then on friday we had a mock test. There were 9 people in our group of which 2 failed their mock exam and I got a boarderline pass… Only one person got a really good pass.
The actual exam on saturday we were split into two groups and we won the stone, sissors, rock game so we got to choose if we went first or second. We wanted to get it out the way so we went first (it had dumped 12cms during the night so it was powder day!). We were expecting -19oC including wind chill but it ended up being a very nice +2oC. The examiner then picked decided what level the group had got too (ie “They have just completed J-Turns”) and we in turn had to continue the lesson for about 15mins.
… anyway… during this one of the other group turned up looking a bit shocked and he had just fallen off one of the rails and puncherd his leg which was a bit messy… five stitches! and before he had a chance to do his exam!!! anyway luckily the examiner had already seen him ride during the week so another member of the group did the demo for him and he just talked through the lesson… he passed Then Chloe from my group hit her knee on the boardercross track while we were waiting for our results… Dillon our examiner just thinks he’s cursed… every exam he does someone manages to break themselves…
Anyway here are my exam results… Dillon asked if we wanted to be marked as “Level 1″ rather than “CSI” so that we could get some meaningful feedback so i’m ok in the lesson side, just need to work on my riding. Two weeks to go before my Level 1 exam… ARGH!!!
