Herding Cats on Ice

Somewhere on Mt. Hood right now, a perfectly reasonable adult is standing in a lift line holding ten pairs of gloves, a clipboard, a fistful of lift-ticket vouchers, and a phone buzzing with a group chat that has not stopped since 6 a.m. That person is a PACRAT team captain. That person is about to have the best winter of their life.

If you have ever watched a race at the mountain and wondered what it is actually like to point your skis through a set of gates with a real clock running, this book is the inside answer. And if you have somehow ended up agreeing to captain one of those teams - whether you raised your hand, lost a bet, or got volunteered while you were in the bathroom - then this book is the friend who has done it before, pulling up a chair, handing you a beverage, and saying, "Okay, here is everything I wish someone had told me."

PACRAT stands for Pacific Northwest Area Clubs Recreational Alpine Teams, and the organization has been providing recreational racing for Pacific NW ski clubs since 1984. The whole thing runs on a beautifully simple idea: get a group of skiers and snowboarders together, give them a fun and safe course to race, time them with a serious timing system, and then feed everyone and hand out door prizes at a party afterward. You ski with your team, you race with your team, and you party with your team at the end of the day. It is, quite possibly, the most fun you can have on a mountain while still being handed a bib number.

Who this book is for

This is a book for the captain. Not the elite ski racer, not the coach with a lanyard full of certifications - the captain. The person whose actual job is part recruiter, part travel agent, part cheerleader, part accountant, part group-therapist, and part professional cat-herder. You do not need to be the fastest skier on your team. In fact, you almost certainly will not be, and we are going to explain why that is completely fine and sometimes even an advantage.

Maybe you are a brand-new captain staring down your first season. Maybe you have captained before and your team keeps quietly falling apart by mid-January. Maybe you are simply a racer who suspects you will be asked to captain soon and you would like to walk in with a plan instead of a panic. Wherever you are on that spectrum, you are in the right place.

The problem this book solves

Here is the dirty little secret of recreational ski racing: the skiing is the easy part. Nobody fails at captaining because they could not figure out how to make a left turn around a gate. They struggle because herding ten busy, opinionated, weather-dependent humans through a multi-race season is genuinely hard, and almost nobody tells you how to do it. You get handed a roster and a schedule and a cheerful "good luck!" and then you are on your own.

So you end up learning everything the slow, expensive way - by forgetting to confirm the lift-ticket discount, by losing a racer because nobody made them feel welcome, by showing up to the wrong lodge, by misunderstanding how the scoring rewards improvement, by letting one intense personality suck the fun out of the whole group. Every one of those mistakes is avoidable. This book is the shortcut.

What you are holding

This is a practical field guide, not a rulebook. PACRAT publishes its own official Bylaws, Operations Manual, Scoring System Summary, Timing and Rules, and Pacesetter Explanation, and those documents are the final word on anything official. What you will get here is the human operating manual that lives in the gap between the rules and reality - the stuff that makes a captain great instead of merely organized.

The transformation

By the time you finish this book, you will know how to recruit a team that actually shows up, run a race day without losing your mind, manage the wonderful zoo of personalities that every team contains, help your racers genuinely get faster, throw a party people talk about until next season, and - this is the real prize - build something people want to come back to year after year. You will go from "the person stuck doing the paperwork" to "the captain everyone wants to ski for."

That is the whole game. Fun in the snow, faster skiing, and a crew of nine teammates who would follow you up any chairlift on the mountain. Let's go round up the cats.