Ski and Snowboard Club Vail is looking for a new leader

Ski and Snowboard Club Vail is employing a third-party talent sourcing agency to help in its search for a new executive director after parting ways with former executive director John Hale in February.

Hale’s removal, according to a statement from the club’s board of directors, stemmed from a disagreement over his residency.

“For the past three years, John Hale divided his time between the Front Range, where his family lives, and Vail, where he served as Executive Director of Ski and Snowboard Club Vail,” according to the statement. “In February 2025, John and the board decided to mutually and amicably part ways after he informed the trustees that he was not able to return to the Vail Valley as a permanent resident.”

Hale said he and his family moved from Eagle to the Front Range in 2021 so his daughters could attend high school and pursue competitive golf.

“We initially planned to return to Vail once they graduated,” he said. “However, as the years went by, we realized that we enjoyed living here, and last fall we made the difficult decision to stay in the Front Range instead of moving back to the Vail Valley.”

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Following that decision, Hale said he informed the Ski and Snowboard Club Vail board that he would not be selling his home in the Front Range to move back to Vail.

“I had no intentions of returning for a ninth year, and the board also wanted to head in a different direction,” he said. “This past winter, we mutually and amicably agreed to part ways, and I have no negative feelings toward anyone involved. It was an enjoyable and fruitful eight years, and I wish everyone at SSCV all the best.”

Club employees had expressed frustration that Hale, when he was in Vail, was living in a Ski and Snowboard Club Vail employee housing unit at the base of Golden Peak. The Ski and Snowboard Club Vail clubhouse has two employee housing units which, according to deed restrictions on the units, can be rented to employees who are working at least 30 hours per week for the club. Those renters are allowed to own property in other areas.

While Hale technically complied with the employee housing law by working 30 hours per week for Ski and Snowboard Club Vail, compensation information available via ProPublica shows he was earning over $250,000 annually — leading many to believe the club was violating the spirit of the law by housing its highest-paid employee in a unit intended for workers in need.

The employee housing units, ideally, would be used to attract coaches or other hard-to-fill vacancies within the club, as affordable housing scarcity in the Vail area poses a challenge when it comes to attracting and retaining top coaches.

Ski and Snowboard Club Vail board president Kaia Moritz said the club has been hamstrung in its efforts to attract more kids by the challenges associated with hiring high-level coaches.

“I think the potential is limited by the number of quality coaches that we can hire, and that can live on a wage here in the valley,” she said.

Other coaching challenges have hindered the club, as well, including a shakeup during the fall of 2024, which resulted in the removal of coaches in the ski club’s FIS-level program.

That shakeup was the result of a culture at the club in which “parents, athletes, and even staff within Women’s FIS have felt uncomfortable expressing their true feelings,” according to an email Hale sent out in September, which led to numerous dismissals of coaches and the hiring of an outside human resources firm to avoid similar situations in the future.

New board chair incoming

Moritz plans to vacate the board chair position in the coming months, and incoming chair Jeffrey Martz said there will be a board-led initiative in the coming years to raise more money for local kids who want to join the club but might not be able to afford the cost of entry. An entry-level Ski and Snowboard Club Vail membership costs $6,000 to $8,000 and escalates into the five-figure range as kids become more advanced.

“We’ve launched an SSCV opportunity fund, which is a vehicle that the club is using to attract new funding to use specifically for needs-based support in our community, in order to increase participation and membership in the club,” Martz said.

Amid the coaching challenges, Hale was nevertheless able to oversee an increase in the amount of financial aid awarded to families during his four years as executive director, according to a statement from the club.

“John was instrumental in finding a way to offer early-season training on Golden Peak and to our Alpine and mogul teams in the face of many challenges,” according to the statement. “SSCV is one of the most successful ski clubs in the United States, if not the world, thanks to the work John did to attract talented coaches for SSCV kids.”

One of the club’s major challenges resulted from changes to the way Vail Resorts uses its early-season water for snowmaking after the resort expanded its snowmaking operations in 2019, moving its focus from Lionshead closer to Golden Peak at MidVail. That, in addition to changes in the amount of water allocated to the club by the Eagle River Water and Sanitation District, have made the club’s goal of offering early season training on upper Golden Peak unattainable in recent years.

When Vail Mountain took on its newest expansion in 2019, adding a new surface lift to Golden Peak and offering access to higher-elevation terrain, the development was touted as a way to get ski racers on the slopes several weeks earlier.

Hale, while working under former executive director Kirk Dwyer in 2019, said the club was planning on taking over operations of the Golden Peak expansion, hiring its own team of in-house snowmakers and cat operators, but those plans were abandoned following the announcement.

Ski and Snowboard Club Vail suggested the venue could be open as early as October, but in the years that followed, the Golden Peak expansion was not able to open in November or even December. During the 2022-23 season, the Golden Peak expansion did not open until January.

Moritz said the club was not aware, in building the expansion, that temperature inversions exist on Golden Peak, causing snowmaking challenges.

“It is colder at the bottom of the mountain,” she said.

Financial challenges

A key responsibility for the incoming executive director will be restoring the club’s financial health and eliminating its budget deficit. The club is Vail’s oldest nonprofit organization.

During the 2023 fiscal year, the club took in $8,634,679 in total revenue with expenses totaling $9,227,786, and the 2024 fiscal year was worse, with $9,376,230 in expenses against a total revenue package of $8,519,170, according to financial statements available from ProPublica.

While the new director will need to be an avid skier or snowboarder, that person’s experience will not necessarily need to come from within the ski industry, Moritz said.

“We’re at a point now where we have strong sport directors who really know the athletic side of running an operation,” Moritz said. “We’re at a position now where we can hire somebody who’s got some really strong people management skills, some excellent fundraising skills, the ability to interface strategically with our partners here in the valley, those are skills that we think are really important, moving forward.”

The club closed its application period on April 15 and is now in the process of reviewing all the applications.

“People view the club as the premier winter sports club in the country, one of the premier youth development programs in the country, and I think that has attracted a lot of interest, and we’re really happy about that,” Martz said.

Between the new Ski and Snowboard Club Vail clubhouse, which opened in 2019, and the expansion of Golden Peak, the club’s expenses have multiplied in recent years, creating a new set of challenges for the incoming director, Moritz said.

“We don’t want to be operating at a loss, obviously, but we are a nonprofit, so the idea is to spend every dime that we raise and collect in revenue on kids,” she said. “That is the ultimate goal, but we’re looking for our next leader to have some financial creativity around how to make this sport accessible and available to everybody while still being able to pay for top-notch coaching.”