What an interesting winter this was! Great snow in all of our resorts with great participation in our events, and great cooperation between resorts when things fell apart for a week. Records were broken again in some resorts for visitations. It just seems to continue to climb. Amazing!

I want to send out a huge “Thank You” to Brighton Resort for hosting our annual Spring Clinic event. The event was moderately attended. The snow was phenomenal — eighteen inches on Sunday morning! I have heard nothing but great comments for the clinics and their leaders. Kirstie, Vicki, and Kathy pulled off the coordination of the event, taking care of all the small stuff and the big stuff. It is a lot of work and takes special dedication on their part. For that I am truly grateful.

We had some really NICE items in the silent auction. There was even a motorcycle from Joe Waggoner. Beverly Beasley did a fantastic job setting it all up and taking care of the business end of things.

I just had a PSIA-AASI President’s Council meeting with many of the presidents on Wednesday night. Council chair Tom Koto, Northern Intermountain Division, thanks all the presidents and their boards for their work to set in place a unified vision statement: “Create lifelong adventures through education.” All nine divisions now are unified in our vision statement. Outstanding! We are currently phone conferencing bimonthly. Our next meeting will be in July. We will be trying to set the agenda for the fall conference/workshop scheduled for Nov. 3-5, 2017. We are also looking at a committee for recognition efforts and member needs. This is something that we can do here in Intermountain as well. We will also continue the work started last fall on the three areas of strategic focus: (1) Enhance the relationship with schools to collaborate on opportunities for professional development and education of instructors, (2) Improve, increase and customize communication programs and resources between PSIA-AASI members, member schools, and industry partners, (3) Complete the transition in consolidation, consistency, and cooperation regarding education and certification.

No president’s report would be complete without congratulations to all the candidates that acquired cert levels this year. Great job! It takes a lot of work to receive those certs from Level 1 all the way to DECL.

I wish you prosperous futures. To all the new board members, Eric Rolls, Kim Prebish, PJ Jones, Sean Baker, and Carl Boyer: I hope that you find your experience on the board of directors as enlightening and as fun as I have. This is an exciting time for us, finding new ways to interact and re-engage with the membership to make their experiences just as fun and engaging as ours.

To my ExCom, Mike Thurgood, Kent Lundell, and Evan Ricks: thank you, so much, for your time and hard work. I could not have done this job without you all. Special thanks to Mark Nakada, and also to all the current board members as well. We did quite a bit of work this past year.

Moving ever forward in ways to engage our membership, we have more work to do in front of us. Let’s get to it!

Sincerely, Rich McLaughlin, PSIA/AASI Intermountain president.

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