Stephanie Cox stepped into a mess two years ago.
“I like cleaning up messes. I like the challenge. They used to call me the sweeper,” says the chief executive of the Lakewood-based National Ski Patrol.
The former executive director of the nonprofit World Child Cancer heath organization arrived at the National Ski Patrol two years ago, becoming the fourth director of the organization in only five years. The former bosses reported conflicts with the group’s member-elected board of directors. An online petition was calling for an overhaul of the venerable organization that formed in 1938. Staff were bailing after years of turmoil that included board members twice suing their own organization. The group was losing its relevance in a quickly shifting ski resort industry.
Cox landed with a plan. She started visiting ski patrols across the country. She shepherded an overhaul of the organization’s training programs. She enlisted staff and kept them onboard. She mended fences with her board. She’s now got 32,000 members across 630 patrols, including more than 5,000 professional ski patrollers.
“I invested in my team. I invested in board relationships. I traveled all over the country. This year I went to Alaska and met with patrollers. I was just listening. I had no magic bullet. I was not on a white horse to save this organization. I got in the trenches and did the hard work,” she says, decked in ski gear after meeting with ski patrollers at Copper Mountain. “You know what I learned? Patrol is about family. We recruit patrollers that are stoked to ski and they love the industry and they love the sport. But then they stay because they become part of a family. I knew I had to join that family and that’s what I did. I went to work on relationships.”
Here’s a few questions with Cox, exploring new directions, a renewed mission and how Old Spice helped spark a revival of the 85-year-old NSP brand.
The Colorado Sun: In Colorado we hear a lot about ski patrollers forming unions to push for better pay and benefits for their careers. A majority of your members are volunteer ski patrollers. In Colorado, we don’t necessarily recognize the important role that volunteer patrollers play in the resort industry.
Stephanie Cox: “So volunteer patrollers not only started the National Ski Patrol in 1938, they also started the 10th Mountain Division, (the U.S. Army’s first military mountaineering unit.) Volunteers also created every education course that has guided training for patrollers for decades, including a brand-new course on outdoor risk management and we’re in the middle of creating leadership development courses. All done by volunteers. These are doctors, nurses, lawyers and medical professionals who are in all our communities and they donate all this time and professional knowledge to create new opportunities for ski patrollers everywhere.”
Sun: And you’ve moved a lot of that training online, right? So patrollers can access these programs on their own time?
Cox: And we’ve just started online patrol forums to get patrol directors to talk to each other from across the country. We bring in guest speakers to the forums. We just did an incident investigation seminar. This is something we have been investing in for two years, trying to reach pro patrollers engaged in our education programs. My brother-in-law was a professional patroller for 28 years at Aspen Highlands. It’s hard work and long days. I just watched the Copper patrol do their sweep last night and it was dark and they have to be back at dawn and it’s a hard ask to get them to get on a call at 6 p.m. for two hours.
Sun: I wonder if skiers know that there are many, many ski areas in the U.S. where the patrols are entirely volunteer.
Cox: It’s bonkers. I didn’t fully grasp the importance of volunteers until I came to the NSP. These are people who pay for their own courses. They pay for their membership. They pay for their own uniforms. They even pay for their own equipment. The all-in cost for being a volunteer ski patroller is more than two grand, and that’s without any of your ski stuff. So why do they do it? I ask them that every time. And they tell me it’s because this is their family. They love to be outside. They love to ski. They love to mountain bike. And they love to help people. And these guys and gals, they don’t take off their jackets at the end of the day and hang up their knowledge and role in their community. They are there at the Whole Foods in Frisco when someone is having a heart attack. They are your community’s first responders. We have these awards at the end of the season in all our divisions and … yes there are stories of patrollers saving skiers on the mountain, but there’s also stories about gnarly car accidents and other emergencies where our volunteers stepped up and made a difference.”
Sun: The National Ski Patrol is a bit OG …
Cox: What’s OG?
Sun: Old guard. Old guy. Dudes with caterpillar mustaches and skinny skis.
Cox: I think about 60% of our members are over the age of 55. So we are aging out a little bit.
Sun: So as you prepare for that next generation of ski patrollers, you’ve created a first-ever athlete program … you have a 16-year-old on that team. What was the impetus for that?
Cox: So last April, I was having a meeting with my leadership team and we were talking about NSP as this iconic, 85-year-old legacy brand. I love brands. I love marketing and I love brands. And we were talking about the question of relevancy. How do we acknowledge the past and then look to the future? And I thought of Old Spice. Old Spice was founded the exact same time as NSP and around the year 2000, they were having a real problem in the market because everybody thought about it as your grandfather’s fragrance. And there were all these new competitors like Axe. So they were losing tons of market share and they needed a refresh and they hired some million-dollar brand agency and they decided to be irreverent and kind of laugh at themselves. And they came up with an idea to market to women with this “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” commercial that they aired during the Super Bowl in 2010. And Old Spice became the No. 1 selling brand again. I walked my leadership team through the Old Spice commercials. I showed my division directors, my board members. I showed them how to take an 85-year-old brand and make it relevant again. And the first step was finding young people who are dynamic athletes on TikTok and Instagram. They have gone through a hundred hours of training to be patrollers and they are also competitors. We are going to give them money and give them kits and they are going to be our new ambassadors. We’ve got seven patrollers, including four women and three men, from patrols all over the country. They go out and talk to skiers and other patrollers about safety and service. We are excited. We are the new Old Spice.
Sun: So a couple years ago, we were hearing complaints that the NSP was not working as hard as it could to be more inclusive and diverse. The group commissioned a report in 2021 – by The Equity Project – that showed only 52% of members agreed that diversity, equity and inclusion should be important principles for the NSP. That kind of jibes with recent moves in the corporate world to roll back DEI initiatives as we see political winds changing.
Cox: So politically it went one way and now it’s tacking another way. Well, we are not followers. We are going to do what’s right and we don’t need to tell the world about it. We had that Equity Project that gave us a blueprint, but it didn’t have any teeth. So first and foremost, I told my board we were going to create a safe culture for all. We drafted a mission statement and it’s right on our website. Then we create three courses around diversity, equity and inclusion and the first one is mandatory for all our members. We are hearing from patrol directors who are rejoining NSP that they want their patrollers to take these courses. We redid our code of conduct to include inclusivity and equity. We are baking all this into our culture. And we are holding patrollers accountable to these new standards. We live our values and then we hold people accountable.”
