Mark Fawcett in the NEWS - Nov.18th, 2010

[yyzcanuck]

From the news article posted HERE:

Mark Fawcett hadn't heard that he had won the 2010 Petro-Canada Coaching Excellence Award when reached. He'd been in the backcountry carving waist-deep powder all day and had just got off Copper Mountain in Colorado Wednesday.

More than 30 centimetres of powder had fallen overnight. For Fawcett, heaven on earth.

"It was unbelievable," Fawcett said of the conditions.

"Didn't I win it again?" he said with a hearty laugh. "That's funny, this is the first news."

The Coaching Association of Canada gave out the awards to 43 of the country's top coaches. Fawcett, a Rothesay native, won for his coaching work on the national team with Jasey-Jay Anderson, 2010 Olympic champion in parallel giant slalom.

Now 38, Fawcett also won the award in 2009 for his work with Michael Lambert. The notoriety, said Fawcett, is nice but he's happiest for the sport.

"It's been pretty honourable for the sport more than anything," he said of winning for the last two years.

"Snowboarding wins the popularity contest every time, but sometimes it's not known to be a high-performance sport or that some individuals at the top level (don't) take it as seriously as say hockey or football or anything along those lines - and we (are)."

And, he said, considering the Olympic medals the team captured in Vancouver it's surprising some still question the professionalism of the sport. Along with Anderson's gold in Vancouver, Malle Ricker took gold in the ladies' snowboard cross and Mike Robertson took silver in the men's snowboard cross.

"We have a bunch of hardware from Vancouver to prove we are doing things in a professional manner. So it's come around in the last decade, the last 12 years it's come around pretty big in that respect. We have respect and we've earned some respect from the supporters of sport."

Snowboarding, he said, is still in its infancy.

"But it's progressed really quick and it's tough to keep up with sometimes."

At Copper Mountain with the national development team, Fawcett was getting his 10 boarders ready for a NorAm event today and Friday.

"We've always identified, as with a lot of sports, you can never have enough people at that base level and those base levels feed into the top-tier system."

The A-supported national team has already competed in the Netherlands at an indoor World Cup event.

"It's like a big hockey rink on a slant," he said with a chuckle.

The team returns to Europe Dec. 10 for a World Cup race in Italy, but Fawcett won't be there. He's changed hats from head coach of the national squad to alpine director. After a recent chat with his family, he was told he was away from his B.C. home far too much. Now he will only attend North American events, slashing his travel days considerably from the usual 200.

"I can tell you this, a lot of the ski coaches in the world are either divorced or single or they're short term (relationships)," said Fawcett, who along with his wife Shelly has a 16-year-old stepson and four-year-old daughter.

Calling himself part of the old guard, he said it's been fun to be part of the sport's meteoric rise.

"We knew it would be something that would stay, but we didn't know it would progress to this level and that's the technical level of the sport and that's the popularity of the sport and the contests and national teams, Olympics. There's so many things that 20 years ago weren't even a gleam in our eye."

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