Grant Rutherglen—55 years a Red Mountain Racer and one of the world's best ski coaches

By Andrew Bennett

Grant Rutherglen has memorialized all of his Red Mountain season's passes since 1957 on a plaque, and this year will be no exception: every Saturday morning he's on the hill mentoring Red Mountain Racer (RMR) coaches, and every Sunday he's out with "Grant's Group" of young keeners, lighting their way to tomorrow's championships.

Rutherglen is well known for his achievements as a national ski team member in the late 1960s and early 1970s, winning the Pontiac Cup in 1973, but perhaps he is even better known for his great success as a ski coach. "That's where my passion is," he said.

"For me, the biggest highlight of all of skiing was when we would win everything with the Red Army, as we called it. We went away to the races and came back with all the hardware!" he laughed. The "Red Army's" peak was between 1978 and 1981, towards the end of Rutherglen's six years as RMR's head coach.

"I get pretty competitive with my kids winning at the races," he said. "One year I remember taking a team up to Jasper to race for the Pontiac Cups. We had a strong contingent that year and I told them all, 'We're going to have six of you in the top five, and I don't care who ties."

He laughed, "They all looked up at me like puppies: 'What the hell does that mean?'" But his confidence paid off, then as always. "We did actually get about five in the top seven," he said.

Of the seventeen racers with Rutherglen in the photograph above, seven went on to ski for Canada’s team—Felix Belcyk, Dee Dee Haight, Brian Fry, Derek Trussler, Don Stevens, Chris McIver, and Stan Hanson. Kelly Lee went on to the BC Ski Team. Four other racers Rutherglen coached later went on to the National Ski Team as well: Hans Edblad, Peter Bosinger, Kerrin Lee, and Rob Bosinger.

Having helped 12 racers onto the BC and national teams, it's no wonder Rutherglen glows with pride as he calls RMR "one of the most successful, most productive, best little racing clubs in North America."

"The reward of those kids going up to the BC team and then the national team, that was my biggest reward," he said.

He paused. "They've all done very well," he said about all his racers. "They've all been very successful adults. That's the biggest reward, how successful these kids turned out to be. They're skilled individuals, but also great people, with good manners, ethics, and a work ethic."

The mark he left on the sport was recognized in November, in Banff, where he was the ninth coach ever inducted into the Canadian Ski Coaches Hall of Fame. He joins Rossland's Butch Boutry, inducted in 2002, and seven other of Canada's greatest ski coaches: Don Lyon, Guy Christie, Luc Duboi, Larry Nelles, Bob Griffin, Kim Rawley, and Jean-Pierre Picher.

"It was like a dream come true," he said. "I had a tear in my eye up in Banff last month. Forty years of camaraderie: it was always fun to do coaches courses, and to be rewarded like that, it was just terrific."

Like Boutry, who started coaching in the mid-1960s and whose career took him all over the map with skiers at the highest levels, Rutherglen also has a place of honour on the Home of Champions monument in Trail. Rutherglen was one of the Canadian Ski Coach Federation's (CSCF's) first coach trainers in the early 1970s, and has not stopped coaching or training other coaches in the 40 years since.

Born in the Rossland Hospital in 1951, Rutherglen started skiing at six, and when he was eight he won his season's pass after being chosen "Trail Times' most improved skier" in the Red Mountain Ski Club.

"There were 200 to 250  kids at the lessons in those days! Can you imagine, all those kids," he laughed.

When Rutherglen turned ten, the RMR came into being as the "Red Mountain Ski Racing Club," and he joined right away. These were exciting days on Red Mountain, he recalled, building on the success of George Merry and Bill Stevens.

"Suddenly, with the Red Mountain Racers, there was a whole pile of them on the ski team from Rossland," he said. Nancy Greene stands out, of course, but there was also John Platt, Verne Anderson, Liz Greene, Don Brunkeski, Sandra Osborne, Ginger Edwards, Pat Nora, Butch Boutry, Monica Barrett, Barbara Deane, Doug Wellcock, Mickie Johnson, and Guy Christie, among many great RMR skiers.

"In 1965 the Granite lift was built and we started racing on Main, and the Canadian Downhill Championships came here," he said. These days, he added, it's so much more expensive to host those races, and there's "so much liability." "And yet, if we could put on races, our ski club could make tons of money," he mused. The next step is to get snow blowers, but that's another story.

By 1968, Rutherglen was also one of Canada's top skiers, skiing with "Les Espoir" and on and off the national team depending on funding, he said. He skied with Les Espoir until 1974, alongside Teresa Delich from Rossland and Pam and Gary Aiken from Warfield. Delich (now Delich-Adair) won the Pontiac Cup, and Gary Aiken won the NorAm, then the "CanAm."

Rutherglen's highlight, of course, was taking the Pontiac Cup in 1973 at the finals in Jasper. "After all my years of skiing and training, I was pretty happy with that," he said. He described the Pontiac Cup as a series "like a Canada Cup on a World Cup point system for all the kids not quite on the ski team, east and west." Typically, if you won the Pontiac Cup, the next step was the National Team, but he said he had already been on the national team and by now the winds of fate were shifting again.

The Canadian Ski Coaches Federation formed in 1969 and ran their first coaching courses in 1970, starting with "Level One" and adding courses up to "Level Four" to match the Canadian Ski Instructor Association (CSIA) system that had developed over the previous two decades. The CSIA and CSCF soon partnered and cross-referenced their courses. The CSCF also developed in the early 1970s to give training to "Club," "Alpine," and "Division" coach levels.

The CSCF needed course instructors and they scooped Rutherglen in 1973. It made for a busy time with "everything happening at once" as he continued for another year on the national ski team.

"I didn't even take a course," he laughed. "They just said, 'We need you to examine.' They didn't need me to rookie for a year or anything, they just put me out there: learn as you go!"

Rutherglen didn't lack experience, however. He had Level Three CSIA certification and earned Level Four in 1976 at a time when very few people had achieved this level. "Since they'd just started the system, I didn't have to go through the whole rigamarole. Once I got Level Four they just made me a senior instructor," he said.

From 1975 to 1981, Rutherglen was head coach for RMR. In earlier years, Rutherglen had been coached by Bill Stevens, and now he was coaching Stevens' son Don, who recently stepped down from many years of great work as the RMR president.

In the late 1970s, Rutherglen was also coaching Brian Fry—who Rutherglen fondly refers to as "one of my boys"—who would later lead the charge to get Rutherglen back to coaching for RMR in 2001, not least to coach Fry's nine year old son Steven, along with Una Trivonivic, Neil Hilts, and many others.

"I'm now coaching the children of the children that I used to coach," Rutherglen said. "Now those kids are 19 and 20 and I'm still coaching! If those kids in a couple years have kids, in five years I could be coaching grandkids!"

Between 1981 and 2001, although Rutherglen stepped to the periphery of RMR, he remained deeply involved with ski coaching, teaching courses every year all over Canada, including summer dryland training camps in Whistler. From 1982 to 1990 he worked as the assistant coach under head coach Butch Boutry for the Canadian Association of Disabled Skiers, going to Olympics in 1984 and 1988, and World Championships in 1982 and 1986.

"That kept us pretty busy, with training camps in Kimberley and Rossland which took us away for ten days at a time,” he said. “We were paid, but it was an experimental and a developing thing, so we had to take time off work."

"I did have a normal job," he laughed, "I had to go to work. I jumped around: I worked for real estate for a while, and a trucking outfit in Rossland, excavating, odd jobs, the fire department in summers, peeling poles for Don Bryden in Paterson. You had to have something to help you get through it when you were coaching: it's not a very lucrative position!"

From 1980 to 1990 he and his wife ran the Rossland Winter Sport House in a 2500 square foot shop now occupied by Legacy Gifts.

In 1990, he started with West Kootenay Power "when I got serious about a real job." He continues to work for FortisBC to this day, spending his weekends coaching.

The real secret to his success, he said, is his wife Brenda. "She works for Wood Gundy now and she's been 35 years a financial adviser. To tell you the truth, that's the only reason I stayed in skiing as long as I did: Brenda looked after us. I owe lots to Brenda; she's a great gal who looks after us."

"Us," of course, includes their son Brodie, born in 1982, and Cohen who came along in 1985.

"I'm a lucky guy that I continued coaching all these years," he said. "That's where my passion is. It's great therapy."

It's not just skiing for Rutherglen. "These kids have to learn manners and life skills as well," he said. "That's something I've always maintained. Just because you're ski racers doesn't mean you don't take your tray back and clean up your table."

Back in the 1970s, he recalled, "It was cool to be a Red Mountain Racer. Those kids were good at school, good athletes, they did their homework." Rutherglen remembered keeping tabs on the kids through the school counsellors and teachers, so he'd "know where they were coming from," whether it might be slipping in a subject or chasing a girlfriend.

In the last 11 years with RMR, Rutherglen has also solidified his reputation for training the kids hard, including "Grant's Gruelling Sandhill Training" that he instituted in the area of McBride Street in Trail. More accurately, his son Brodie got it going, finding the hills and working himself up and down the slopes when he played NCAA hockey a decade ago.

"Now the kids come and we run up and down. We'll put out plastic poles and they'll run slalom. We'll get two slalom courses together for dual racing, side by side. We'll time them going down, and then time them going back up. It's hard work," he laughed, “25 to 30 seconds to run down, and at least one or two minutes to get back up, sinking all the way."

"No pain, no gain!" he said. "And it's the same as ski technique, with a balanced position and you have to pick your feet up too as they sink in."

Every Saturday morning, Rutherglen's out at 9 a.m. on Red Mountain with the other coaches before they head out with their kids. "Sometimes we set courses, some days we talk about technique, and sometimes we ski together and have a little fun. Everyone gets to contribute."

While that may be what the other coaches want from Rutherglen, what he always wants is "to have my own group." And not just any group: "I want them keen, on time, and committed," he said. "It is about winning. They have to train and work hard, and the keener ones, we want to move them forward."

That's what Sundays are all about for Rutherglen. "We really motor on Sundays," he said. Grant's Group is mixed ages, he said. "Everybody's really skilled and keen. It's fun and it's really worked out well. I don't have any favourites, I like them all, but the keener you are and the better skilled you are, the better it is for me. I'm selfish, I like to have my winners. The more they win, the more I like it!"

It's hard for him too, he said, when the kids get older and move up the ranks. "Then I have to let them go. It's like a parent seeing his kid go to university."

Times are changing these days, and Rutherglen is no stranger to the expense of racing and the many distractions that draw kids away from ski racing. But while RMR isn't the be-all-and-end-all it may have been a couple decades ago, there's no doubt that today’s racers still benefit from Rutherglen's tough love.

"Everyone comes back and helps, and that's what I've done," he said. "With my kids, I'm either hugging them or kicking their butts."