In the corporate world, there are meetings.

In sportswriting, it’s conference calls.

At the end of some of those calls, just like at the end of some of those meetings in the business world, you think to yourself, bummer, I am never getting those 45 minutes of my life back.

And then there are the good calls — the ones where, at the end, you hang up and think, you know, the person I was just listening to gets it, whether it’s an athlete or, as it was Wednesday, Bill Marolt, the president and chief executive of the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Assn.

Marolt totally gets it — everything from the federation’s mission to the theory and practice of leadership and the vision thing.

In just a few months, at the Vancouver Winter Olympics next February, Marolt’s federation is going to be under the spotlight. USSA’s unabashed mission — to be the best in the world — carries with it to these Olympics expectations unlike any prior Winter Games, because the U.S. team stands poised to produce like never before.

U.S. athletes won 14 world championship medals during the 2008-09 season. Lindsey Vonn is indisputedly the world’s best female alpine skier. In cross-country, Kikkan Randall this past winter became the first American woman to win a medal at the worlds, in the individual sprint. In Nordic combined, Billy Demong (one gold) and Todd Lodwick (two) rocked the 2009 worlds.

Pressure? Sure. But, Marolt said, that’s totally ok.

He said, “We take this opportunity going into the Olympics to — as we have said now for the last three and half years now — raise the bar, to really create a sense of urgency. In line with our brand, it’s all out, the time is now.”

A few moments later, he also said, “Having the Olympics in North America is something that we like. In a sense it gives us a home-field advantage,” which ought to breed confidence, which is why he added, “I don’t necessarily look at the downside. I look at the upside.”

USSA’s main job, he said, is to put its athletes in position to succeed — or, as he put it, switching to a baseball metaphor, to “hit one out of there.”

To that end, the program directors of the four disciplines — alpine, snowboard, nordic and freestyle — have essentially been on the ground in and around Vancouver since the end of the Torino Olympics in 2006, executing housing and transit plans and more.

As CEO, Marolt has empowered those directors to do what good executives do — make decisions. Four years ago, he had to make too many himself, and the delay in getting issues up the federation food chain “hurt our momentum,” he said.

So that changed.

The mark of an executive unafraid to succeed is one who can embrace that kind of change.

USSA, meanwhile, last month opened at its Park City, Utah, base a real game-changer, a building dubbed the “Center of Excellence.” It’s 85,000 square feet over three floors and features not just world-class but innovative training facilities, including a “ramps and tramps” area — essentially, a skate park — designed for freestylers and snowboarders.

While the place is dedicated to the notion of competitive excellence, the real idea of it is as center — that is, as the place for the U.S. ski community, a relationship- and team-builder. Vonn, Marolt said, has already been working out there. As have many others.

“What we have learned through the years,” he said, “is that when we can find a way for our athletes to train together, physically on the snow or however we do it, there’s a higher work ethic and more effort goes into the final product.

“Through that whole process … you start to develop a respect for each other and you start to develop a bond,” he said, and while skiing is by definition an individual sport, at competition time the hours spent together in training can enhance team ethic, and “particularly when you have momentum, you have positive momentum, that’s a positive force.”

Heading into Vancouver, the U.S. ski team has momentum. “This is an exciting time for us,” Marolt said. “This is how we get measured every four years; the Olympics is the time the American public pays attention to us. It’s a real opportunity for us to go out and make our country proud of what we are doing.”

Anyone surveying the U.S. Olympic scene knows there are just a few well-run federations and a lot more not-so-well-run federations, and the U.S. Olympic effort would be a lot healthier if more organizations were run by men and women delivering leadership like Bill Marolt.

There can never be a guarantee of anything in skiing or snowboarding. But if the American athletes do what they should in Vancouver, Marolt will be due extraordinary credit. Which he will deflect.

He gets that, too.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009 at 10:58 pm and is filed under alanabrahamson. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.