MARCH 4, 2010 ISSUE
A Fulfilling Life
French-Swiss Ski College and Jim Cottrell Celebrate Forty Years of Service
French-Swiss founders Jim Cottrell (right) and Jack Lester (left) arranged celebrity visits, such as by astronaut Charles Duke (middle), to draw attention to the ski school in its early days.
Forty-one years and more than one million students later, French-Swiss Ski College President Jim Cottrell still loves what he does and wouldn’t change it for the world. Cottrell said, “…I’m going to hang in there doing more of the same. I made the absolute right choice of careers in my life.”
The fashion of French-Swiss ski instructors rivaled their ability to teach—it wasn’t hard to spot the bright green jackets carving down a slope as they taught hordes of newcomers the short-ski direct-parallel training system, which enfranchised thousands of Southerners to the sport.
It all started in 1968 with next-door neighbors dreaming together and becoming partners on a tennis court in Charlotte. Forty-one years and more than one million students later, one partner, Jim Cottrell—known across the High Country as a fun-loving, dedicated and caring man—is still going strong as he celebrates the 40th Anniversary of his French-Swiss Ski College (FSSC), located at Appalachian Ski Mountain in Blowing Rock.
Cottrell, president of FSSC and native of Boone, is as upbeat and vivacious about his snowsports school now as he was at age 24. Having lunch in the downtown drugstore, meeting for this story, it took Cottrell about 10 minutes to travel the short distance from the door to the counter booths. He talked to everybody, rejoicing in seeing each and every friend. “I don’t get out much,” he told the regular table of six on the left as you enter.
“My friend and neighbor in Charlotte, Jack Lester, was an experienced promoter. He had clients in Hollywood. He was a skier and had tried and liked Cliff Taylor’s short-ski direct-parallel training system,” Cottrell said. “But when he went skiing at Beech Mountain and shared his enthusiasm for the short skis, the Austrians who were here in North Carolina teaching ridiculed Jack and the notion of the short-ski method. That aggravated him and helped get our conversations started.
“I was head of the ski patrol at Appalachian and teaching a credit physical education ski program for the students of Central Piedmont Community College.
“Jack and I talked a lot about his frustration with ski training on the tennis court and came up with the idea of beginning a ski college that would teach Southerners how to ski.” Cottrell continued. “We knew in the beginning that credibility was what we needed, the problem to overcome. We had to demonstrate that skiing was viable in the South and develop a school, a method of teaching that worked and was credible.”
Jean-Claude Killy of France dominated the sport of skiing in the late 1960s. He was a triple Olympic ski champion, winning all three events at the 1968 Winter Olympics. He also won the first two World Cup titles, in 1967 and 1968.
Lester used his promotion skills and persuaded First Union National Bank to underwrite the expense of bringing Killy to Blowing Rock. He came in 1970 and for the next two years. “I got to spend all this time with Killy, learning from him,” Cottrell excitedly said. “He was the best in the world and his teaching was very similar to George Joubert’s system I was already familiar with. His knowledge complimented Jouberts’s.
“The dry-land exercises we developed then and still use now evolved around Killy’s training. Jack became Killy’s agent for International Merchandising Corporation and I traveled around with Killy doing promotional things and picking his brains and leaning more and more.”
Cottrell and Lester set up a card table in Appalachian’s lodge for the first three years, worked hard and watched their business grow. They had 43 colleges participating at the end of three years and were successful enough for Cottrell to work full-time.
Cottrell trained his early staff. They were students at Appalachian State Teachers College and members of the mountain’s ski patrol. Progressing logically, Cottrell took over the mountain’s ski school in his company’s fourth year.
“I’m not convinced that we didn’t do a better job teaching then with patches of snow to work on,” Cottrell reflected. “All the snow would be in patches in front of the snow guns on the slopes and we would rotate students from inside to outside.”
In 1973, Cottrell built a ski ramp and traveled across the Southeast giving demonstrations at shopping malls. “We had to get people’s attention. Southerners weren’t skiers and we had to convince them that skiing was easy to learn, affordable and a fun thing to do,” Cottrell added, smiling reminiscently. “The exhibits, demonstrations drew big crowds.”
Killy was also on hand to dedicate the new synthetic slope they had constructed on Appalachian’s main slope, Big Apple. “It didn’t work that well,” Cottrell remembered, “It lasted two years. That’s the way you learn.”
Lester brought other personalities to Blowing Rock during the early years. The astronaut Charles Duke came and the French-Swiss Ski College concentrated upon expanding its horizons by beginning military training programs. Green Berets and Navy Seals set up tent cities in the parking lot and learned how to ski.
The college also taught West Point Military Academy’s ski instructors how to teach skiing and Harvard’s ski team.
Within five years, French-Swiss was teaching more than 100 college physical education programs, church and Boy Scout groups and according to Cottrell, they were the only ski school active in the group business in the industry.
“Our three-lesson concept was working then just as it works now,” Cottrell said. “Today, we are teaching the grandchildren of our early students.”
In 1977, an opportunity that would become Cottrell’s crowning achievement to date presented itself. North Carolina was sending seven special athletes to the National Special Olympics. He met the state’s directors, talked with them and volunteered to train the seven. The community helped out giving the special athletes a three-day expense-paid trip to Blowing Rock.
The following year Cottrell founded the Southeastern Regional Special Olympics in skiing. “This was new to everyone,” Cottrell said.
He and his team created all the needed systems: how to classify the athletes; handle the equipment and so on. They wrote the first manual. Their work garnered the founder of Special Olympics, Eunice Shriver, President John F. Kennedy’s sister’s attention and she came down from Washington, D.C. to investigate. Cottrell’s model was adopted by Shriver and used nationally. Later, Shriver offered Cottrell a leadership position in D.C. “I turned the job down,” Cottrell said. “You couldn’t pry me out of here. This is God’s Country.”
Over the years, thousands of special Olympian’s have trained at French Swiss. In 2000, Cottrell was honored for his work by receiving ASU’s Distinguished Alumni Award.
In answering what he had learned in the past 40 years and what he was going to do next, Cottrell responded that, “Everybody’s different, you can’t take people for granted. And I’m going to hang in there doing more of the same. I made the absolute right choice of careers in my life.”
Happy Anniversary Jim and French Swiss Ski College.
For more information about FSSC, click to www.skifrench-swiss.com or call 828-963-9311.
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