Country Ski & Sport ready to get families back on the mountain this year

Country Ski & Sport offers a popular junior league program for families.

This story is sponsored content.

There are no two ways about it; skiing is expensive.

From the skis to the boots to the tickets, the costs involved rack up quickly. Now, mix in season passes (do you buy one, or two?), breakfasts, lunches, and dinners on the go, gasoline, and hotel accommodations for an entire family, and it can be a daunting financial commitment.

The people at Country Ski & Sport have found a way to help families keep those costs down by changing the way customers shop for youth skis and boots. Instead of buying with the idea of the gear being a bit too big for the first year, just right for year two, and hoping that everything isn’t too small for the third winter, junior seasonal leases allow the child to be fitted for skis and boots every season.

In addition to a proper fit, you take the gear home, so that takes out having to hit the ski shop to pick up (and later drop off) a rental before trekking to the mountains. That means no more dealing with renting from the ski area in the early hours of the morning, a time-consuming and costly proposition for anyone who goes more than one weekend a year.

This season, for every junior seasonal lease purchased at Country Ski & Sport, the recipient will receive a junior season pass to Saddleback Mountain in Rangeley, Maine, as well as a $20 credit each year toward the child’s first adult ski set.

A family taking advantage of the program for 10 years is common, according to Country Ski & Sport owner Ray Stenson. So, when that child is ready to buy for the first time, they’ll be starting with a $200 discount.

“People love it. Absolutely love it,” Stenson said. “We love it too because it gets the parents in every year.”

Stenson said the program has been wildly successful over the 15 years or so that it has been offered, and that it continues to grow. During the pandemic, Country Ski created an appointment system for lease fittings in order to help spread out the number of customers. It has proven to be a big hit.

“Instead of everyone showing up at 1 p.m. on a Saturday and getting upset that they’ve got to come back in three hours, everyone has their slot,” Stenson said. “So, we’ve kept that, and it works really well.”

Junior lease appointments for the 2023-24 season started at the beginning of August and will continue into the ski season. With locations in Hanson, Quincy and Westwood, most of Eastern Mass. is within an hour of one of their shops.

Country Ski & Sport will also, once again, host the Country Ski Expo over Veterans Day weekend (Nov. 9-12) at its Hanover warehouse (389 Columbia Road, just behind Tractor Supply Co. on Route 53). Now in its fourth season, the expo is an offshoot from when the shop was the official retailer of the former Boston Ski & Snowboard Expo before it was sold in 2019.

Prior to its now-annual expo, Country Ski’s warehouse was used primarily for spring and fall equipment sales. Stenson has long had the idea brewing to re-create Boston’s popular ski expo on a smaller scale. But as the official retailer of the BEWI Ski and Snowboard Expo for a number of years, Stenson was uneasy about going head-to-head with friend Bernie Weichsel, who had run the expo since 1979.

“I did say, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to have it here?’ But my partnership with Bernie Weichsel was extremely close,” Stenson said in 2022. “So I never even really considered it.”

Flash forward to 2019, and Weichsel sold both the Boston and Colorado Ski and Snowboard Expos to Snowsports Industries of America. That opened the door for Stenson’s idea, which has been a tremendous success.

Mountains from around New England and brand representatives will be on hand offering preseason deals and showing off the latest gear amidst a clearance sale with some of the best deals you’ll be able to find while preparing for the upcoming season. The expo also has the task of simply building excitement for skiing.

“(The initial show) was thrown together haphazardly because we had all this merchandise, and we were trying to figure out what we were going to do,” Stenson said of the 2020 show. “I’d say it’s grown five times since then. It’s a big event, thousands of people come. There will be more this year than ever.”

CountrySkiExpo.com has the growing list of exhibitors for this year’s show.

The Country Ski Expo has free parking and free admission. There will be food trucks in the parking lot and the Red Bull DJ party truck has been known to make an appearance.

The expo provides the boost needed to bridge the gap between the leaves coming off the trees and waiting for the lifts to spin. Country Ski & Sport is making it easier for you and your family to get to that finish line.

Find more about Country Ski & Sport at their website, countryski.com.

This story is sponsored content.