Career change: From Graphic Designer to Snowboard Instructor

In the latest of our instructor articles, Spike Lupton tells how he changed his career from a Graphic Designer to Snowboard Instructor at Cypress Mountain for the Olympic year.

It all started a few years ago, when I was an increasingly frustrated Graphic Designer. Frustrated with the day to day toil of sitting in front of a computer screen and the non-active lifestyle that goes with working long hours and frustrated with the company I was working for. Don’t get me wrong I still love design and the creativity that comes with that, I think I was just stuck in bit of a rut. I had a decision to make: should I have a fresh start in a new design job, or do something a little different. That’s when it hit me. The best part of the year was the usual week away in the mountains, so why not make it more than a week? After a little bit of Googling, I noticed a few companies offering courses and one quoting ‘Learn To Ride Like A Pro’ seemed to stand out from the rest. With a promise like that I had to investigate! To cut a long story short, after some intense saving, cashing in a bit of inheritance money and my Mum thinking I was barking, I found myself at Heathrow bound for Fernie for what I was hoping to be a life-changing 3 months. I wasn’t disappointed!

I decided to head out a week early to hopefully get over the jetlag and basically just to get settled. After the first week of riding I was getting to know the hill and my fellow course mates and soon the first day of the course quickly came. Having had only about 6 or 7 weeks snowboarding experience behind me, I was more than a little nervous how my riding would stack up against everyone else’s. I had no need to worry though as the groups had already been sorted out according to time on snow and soon found everyone in the group was of a pretty similar ability. Similarly the laid-back style of instruction soon had us all flying down runs we were taking a bit more gingerly before! In the first week our instructor was Steve and he had an awesome style of teaching. Really laid back and it felt more like a bunch of mates out riding giving pointers on how to improve technique and by the end of the week the improvement in everybody’s riding was huge. Steve would only get us to work on one thing at a time to improve our riding; something I now know is an essential part of the CASI philosophy. They make sure that as instructors we don’t bombard our students with loads of tactics and techniques which will just confuse them. Make sure everything is kept simple by using just one at a time and don’t move on until the student has mastered it.

As the next couple of weeks went on we got to experience the different teaching styles the instructors use. Sometimes they spoke a lot about technique and the reasons why we do certain things and why the solid stance we have had drilled into us is so important. Other times they would give us a tactic to improve a certain element of our riding and just let us ride and experience for ourselves what effect it was having on our riding. We were also experiencing the powder that Canada is famous for. It snowed a lot in January, so much so that at one point we had about 10 days of epic powder days in a row, where the snow was at least knee deep. On days like these the mornings were pretty much spent enjoying the powder and getting used to riding snow I don’t think any of us had experienced before. The first place most of us headed first thing on a powder day was Cedar Bowl. Getting off the Bear Chair and dropping into Cedar Ridge through the trees was just an amazing feeling and something I hadn’t experienced before.

Well into the third week we started working a lot more on our level 1 assessment, so lessons started getting serious. We had to show the instructors that our riding was strong enough to get us through and they started to show us the CASI progression and how to teach lessons from complete beginners through to showing people how to do their first turns. We also had the opportunity to have private lessons from any of the instructors. I had my first with Sean as I felt his teaching style really suited me and we worked mostly on my riding to make sure I made the grade. He took a look at my riding and gave me a couple of things to work on to smooth out my toe-side turn and I could feel the improvement straight away. During regular lessons we started giving mock lessons to the rest of the group with our instructor looking on and pointing out ways to improve. At first I found this pretty difficult, as I’m sure the others did, I hate giving talks and had never given a lesson before. It helped loads that we were all in the same boat and helped each other out as much as we could. The tips that the instructors gave us helped as well and after giving a few lessons we all started to feel a lot more comfortable with it. A couple of weeks later and we were ready! A very nervy, exciting and fun 3 days later and we were celebrating!

The CASI level 1 course is broken into two parts, riding standard and teaching. For the first 2 days Jay was assessing our riding constantly and showing us all the different lessons that make up the CASI progression. Starting with ‘Basic Mobility’ which is taking a class of complete beginners who have never snowboarded before and explaining to them what a snowboard is and what different parts of the board are called/for and putting a board on and doing up the bindings for the first time through ‘Side Slipping’ etc and finally beginner and novice turns. At the end of each day you get a quick one to one with Jay explaining what you’re doing well and, most importantly, what needs to be improved. In my case he wanted to see more up and down movement and at the end of the second day it was to be more aggressive. The third day is for the teaching assessment which, for me, was the day I had been dreading most. To say I was nervous when it was my turn would be the biggest understatement ever! Once the day was over though and we waited in the bar for our results the tension was almost unbearable. One by one the biggest smiles you’ve ever seen started appearing as people got their results and CASI badges!! The beer started flowing and didn’t stop until the early hours and there were some very sore heads the next day!

As the weeks rolled by we started working towards the level 2 assessment. The level 2 course is a lot more in depth, as it involves teaching intermediate riders. A lot of the early work involved watching peoples riding and figuring out what needs to be worked on and different tactics to use, the riding standard is also much higher. We worked really hard to get our riding to standard, especially the advanced sliding turns. I found it very difficult to move my pivot point from my front foot to the centre of the board. One day it just clicked and once I had those in the bag it was a case of doing as much mock teaching as possible to get confident with the huge amount of different lessons that had to be memorised for the exam.

The level 2 course is a 4 day course, 1 longer than the level 1 although it is structured in much the same way. The last day is the teaching assessment and the first three days are spent working on riding standard and watching the assessor show us all the possible lessons and a variety of tactics to use. The group I was in had Glenn as our assessor and we spent the first three days doing mock lessons and working on the riding standard. The one to ones at the end of each day were very helpful. Glenn said my teaching was excellent but still had to work on my riding. Once again, as in the level 1, I had to show more flexion and extension, up and down movement, as I was fairly static going in and out of the turns. At the end of the third day we finished our lessons and headed to the pro hut to meet with Glenn for our one to one. We waited. And waited! Glenn seemed to take an age to get down the hill and when he did arrive, wasn’t looking too clever. He’d had a fall on the way down and injured himself.

When we got to the hill for the last day Glenn turned up in jeans saying the fall the day before was worse than he’d thought and he couldn’t go out. Our group was split up and put into different groups; I was put into Jays, who had been my assessor for level 1. We were all a bit shocked and had to slightly rethink our lesson plans, as all the instructors look for different things and teach in different ways. It was quite a big obstacle to overcome, especially as it had snowed a fair bit overnight and all the level 2 lessons are best suited to groomed runs rather than at least a foot of fairly heavy fresh snow! There was a very nervous wait at the end of the day while Glenn and Jay got together and discussed my riding and teaching. Eventually Glenn called me over and with a big smile said I had passed, but just barely!! I think all the difficulties affected me and added to the nerves but in the real world these are the sorts of things that happen all the time.

I am so grateful to all the instructors and staff at Nonstop for a life changing 3 months. They work really hard to make sure everyone is happy and go the extra mile to ensure everyone is feeling at home. As well as all the great instruction there are all the extras that make Nonstop stand out from the crowd. There are the activities like cat-skiing, dog sledding etc. and the trips away are fantastic, a highlight being the trip to Montana which happened to be my birthday and everyone on the trip made sure it was one to remember, although I don’t remember much!! I’m pretty sure I didn’t buy many drinks as the bar served beer in huge 4 litre pitchers and there was a hell of a lot of Jager going round, and I certainly had my fair share! Another highlight was Hotdog day. This is where everyone on the mountain, and I mean EVERYBODY dresses in 80s gear! At the end of the course there was quite a few of us that headed to Lake Louise for an extra two weeks snow. It was a great time and gave us a chance to unwind after all the hard work of the previous few weeks. It was super warm and we spent a lot of the time, with varying degrees of success, in the terrain park. Lake Louise being an RCR resort, the same as Fernie, there were no kickers but a lot of rails and boxes and by the end were all starting to get pretty confident with our skills.

Since doing the 11 week course in Fernie I have spent the last 2 seasons working at Cypress Mountain in Vancouver. It is not the biggest of places but the terrain is fantastic and when the snow is good it can rival a lot of places. It has really good atmosphere and an awesome bunch of instructors. When it came to taking my first lesson I was nervous as hell but all the training from NONSTOP gave me everything I needed and once I started the nerves soon went and everything came back to me without me really having to think about what I was doing. In my first season we had some amazing snow, loads of lessons and a huge FIS World Cup Snowboard competition. We were lucky enough to see pretty much all of the event, which attracted some of the top riders from around the world, competing in what would become the Olympic halfpipe. At the end of the season we had a Snowschool party with some awards, some of which were given out by the Director of the Snowschool and others which were voted for by the instructors. I was in a state of shock when my name was called out as Snowboard Instructor of the season. This was voted for by the other instructors and to get something like that in my first ever season instructing was amazing and topped off an amazing year.

Last season saw the mountain preparing for the Winter Olympics, as we hosted all the snowboard and freestyle skiing events. As Cypress is only small, it closed down completely for 5 weeks and as full time staff we were taken on by Vanoc to work this period. As the snow wasn’t too great in Cypress this season, the mountain closed 3 weeks earlier to preserve the snowpack needed to build the courses. We were on paid leave for these 3 weeks so took the opportunity to see some other resorts. A group of us went to Whistler a couple of times to find some fresh snow and to Mount Baker in the States. We also went to Big White for a couple of days, which was awesome.

All in all I definitely feel like I made the right decision to head out to the mountains. I am now trying to decide what to do for next season and am researching as many resorts as I can in both Canada and the US. Bring on the winter!

NONSTOP Ski instructor courses

NONSTOP Snowboard instructor courses

More info about career breaks here

Read similar articles on our blog

More info about becoming a Snowboard instructor