Note that I started with “if” in the headline.

Personally, I think skiing would see a lot of good come from finding ways to get intermediate skiing (the kind the vast majority of skiers know and love) into mainstream media.

Unlike the X Games or Olympics, if we could get people excited about the idea of being an average skier, the gap between their first day and reaching the image that drew them in would be much smaller and satisfaction could be much higher.

Pieces of the Puzzle
So what can we use to make it worth watching? What can we throw in the mix to get people’s attention? Off the top of my head, I can think of a few add-ons:

• Humor (think Mental Floss or SciShow)
• Challenges (think Man v Food or Dude Perfect)
• Competition (think American Idol)
• Stories (think just about anything else)

So, with that list, it’s awesome to see the last three combined in the latest round of something I’ve written about before: Trails to Rails.

Round 3
In their third year (see year 1 and year 2), Trails to Rails is a video series documenting a cometition/challenge between a group of guys and a group of girls who try out for a fast-track training regimen to prep for a rail jam. Most have little to no experience on a board.

This year comes with a huge upgrade in the storytelling and video quality. Take a gander of Episode 2:

A well told, well filmed story of a well executed program.

More of This
I’d love to see more content like this. In one series Liberty has accomplish a long list of tough goals:

• Shown how quick, safe, and easy it is to learn
• Provided living proof of the quality of their instructors
• Turned 10 kids into snowboarders

Throw in a few of the ingredients mentioned above and you’ve got a sweet little web series. Nice job, guys.

PS: Here’s Episode 3 and Episode 4 from this year’s series.

About Gregg & SlopeFillers
I've had more first-time visitors lately, so adding a quick "about" section. I started SlopeFillers in 2010 with the simple goal of sharing great resort marketing strategies. Today I run marketing for resort ecommerce and CRM provider Inntopia, my home mountain is the lovely Nordic Valley, and my favorite marketing campaign remains the Ski Utah TV show that sold me on skiing as a kid in the 90s.