Waterville Valley Black and Blue Trail Smashers Snowsports Education

Waterville Valley academy (wva) is a Snowsports academy located in Waterville Valley, new hampshire designed for full-time student-athletes in grades 6-12 who are dedicated to pursuing the highest level of performance in alpine racing, freestyle skiing, and freeskiing in parallel with a rigorous and highly individualized academic program. Students at wva are either enrolled in the full-term high school (academic calendar august-may; wva curricula); the winter term high school (november-march with academics following home-school curricula) or the wva middle school program (grades 6-8 with a hybrid approach of wva curricula for humanities and sciences, and sending school curricula for mathematics and world language).wva students reside at the wva dormitory or are day students in the local community. Since 2013, wva has enrolled students from over 20 states and several foreign countries, and our students have matriculated at the following universities and colleges: bates, boston college, colby, colby-sawyer, the cooper union, dartmouth, harvard, haverford, middlebury, northeastern, university of new hampshire, university of denver, university of Vermont, and williams college.

Snowsport camps - wvbbts offers a wide variety of snowsport camps throughout the spring, summer, and fall, providing our athletes with a multitude of opportunities to continue enhancing their skills. Our jumpstart, burdenko method dryland, experience the academy, and masters camps are run from our home base property in Waterville Valley, nh. In addition, our travel camps are held nationally in Oregon and Colorado, and our international summer and fall camps are held in switzerland, italy, and austria. Our phil's hill airbag training center is a 4-season training venue for freestylers and snowboarders. These camps enhance athletic skills in preparation for the competition season and are offered throughout the year to bbts members and non-members alike.

Alpine, freestyle & snowboard training - the bbts Snowsports club, with roots in one of the oldest ski clubs in the country, had over 300 athletes in the 2023-2024 season. Participants ranged from seven to over eighty years old. They are trained by a world-class group of coaches. This type of personalized, age, and skill-appropriate training enables all participants to reach their goals of snowsport excellence. They are trained by a group of world class coaches, including tom barbeau, director of human performance, jason guilbert head men's coach, patrick purcell, head women's coach and dan shuffleton, director of freeski, freestyle and snowboard.distinguished alumni in the program include olympic gold medalists hannah kearney and nikki stone, as well as olympians julia krass, chas guldemond, and chemmie alcott. Our vision is a pioneering snowsport training program in order to cultivate tomorrow's leaders.