Q&A: GM Tim Smith on bringing the World Cup to Waterville Valley

Tim Smith has been general manager at Waterville Valley since 2015. (File Photo)

Waterville Valley president and general manager Tim Smith said he remembers being a bit shocked when he first arrived at the New Hampshire resort as director of mountain operations in 2014 to find East Coast representatives of the U.S. Ski Team regularly attending meetings. For Smith, who was named GM the following season and president the year after that, ownership’s directive was clear — find a way to host marquee events like Waterville always has done.

“So, I just became friendly and just kind of poked and prodded, and started asking questions,” Smith said.

This month (Jan. 26-27), the resort is poised to host its first-ever FIS World Cup moguls and dual moguls events for both men and women, a prestigious feather in the cap for the resort known widely as the “birthplace of freestyle skiing.”

With anticipation for the event building, Smith managed to find some time in the midst of leading the team’s preparations to speak with New England Ski Journal about the excitement of Waterville Valley taking the world stage:

New England Ski Journal: Can you talk a little about the culture at Waterville Valley that has earned it the reputation as being the birthplace of freestyle skiing?

Tim Smith: The resort is really focused on taking everyone in the family to their next level, as we say. I know it sounds cliché, but we’re trying to let everyone in the family explore whatever aspect of the sport that they want to, at every level. But for the freestylers, it’s kind of unique because a lot of the freestyle movement started in Waterville Valley. Two-time Olympic moguls medalist Hannah Kearney came directly out of the Waterville Valley Academy BBTS — Black and Blue Trail Smashers — program, and kids can see the trajectory that they can go. They can start all the way from Mogul Mites, the first organized coaching that they get, and they can see from the very beginning that they can go all the way to multiple Olympic medals here at Waterville. It really inspires them.

NESJ: Waterville Valley has hosted 11 FIS Alpine World Cup races in its history, but this marks its first-ever World Cup in freestyle moguls. How did you manage to land these events for both 2024 and 2025?

Smith: In my first season I was working with Nick Preston, who was Hannah Kearney’s coach, and he said, ‘Tim, you’ve got to hold mogul events. Lower Bobby’s is the perfect hill for it.’ So, we built it for Rosemary Bowl (a two-day mogul event) the first year, then we built it for Easterns, and that’s where we started to get a little notoriety about our moguls. At the same time, the U.S. Ski Team asked us to be the East Coast venue for the Revolution Tour, so we did that for a number of years. And then they offered to do the U.S. Freestyle Moguls National Championships here. The U.S. Ski Team gave us an award for being the best venue that year, and the next year they gave us Alpine Nationals. We had alpine and mogul nationals, I think, a week apart from each other. They were really excited that we’re so easy to work with, and that spawned into talks about World Cup.

NESJ: What makes Waterville Valley such an attractive venue for U.S. Ski and Snowboard to stage high-profile events there?

Smith: We are very easy to work with because when the U.S. Ski Team comes to a venue, they only want to deal with one entity … one entity for the food, one entity for the arena, one entity for the mountain, one entity for the snowmaking. The biggest one for us is our lodging and conference center. We can host them in town, in our own lodges, and feed them at our conference center.

NESJ: I imagine hosting an event like this comes with endless logistics. Can you talk about some of those challenges?

Smith: It’s really interesting all the little logistical things you have to learn to put on a production like this, and at a different scale when you’re working with something that’s going to be broadcast live to 10 million people around the world. We have to get the cameras set up on the side of a mountain, a half-mile up, and get that broadcast down to a satellite truck and then out on fiber optic. We put new fiber optic cable all the way up there and we had to learn all about dual-pack generators. So, if one generator goes down, there’s absolutely no hiccups in the television broadcast; otherwise the whole thing shuts down for 45 minutes. We’ve got a great team, led by Jamie Cobbett, who’s the marketing manager and does an amazing job.

NESJ: What have you done to prepare for all the spectators anticipated at the venue?

Smith: We had a long conversation about jersey barriers, because that’s what will hold the 60-by-80-foot hospitality tent down. We have 16 jersey barriers coming in that each weigh 2,600 pounds or something like that. And we have to get them from the shop, which is at the bottom of the mountain, to the venue, which is halfway up the mountain. And it’s like, ‘How are we going to do that?’ So, we’re loading them on these skid trailers that we can pull behind the snowcat. And we’re bringing an excavator up to pull them off. It’s those little details that we’re tying up right now.

NESJ: Can you tell us about the snowmaking expansion in the area of Lower Bobby’s Run?

Smith: We’ve had snowmaking on skier’s right, which always had a hard time reaching all the way across the run. We put in some new pedestals that allow us to put very powerful snowmaking fans in the middle of the trail. All these fans that are out in the middle of the trail we can point up, and, with the predominant wind coming straight down the ski slope and because it’s so steep, can basically cover the entire slope. We’ve been lighting that up.

NESJ: One thing that isn’t a logistical challenge is the moguls course itself on Lower Bobby’s Run. What makes that trail such a natural location to host a World Cup moguls contest?

Smith: Honestly, the course is about the easiest course you could imagine because it’s exactly to FIS specs. The length, the pitches, everything’s exactly where FIS would like a mogul course to be. So that was kind of the easiest thing.

NESJ: Waterville Valley has a comprehensive 10-Year Master Development Plan. Is hosting events like this an important component of the resort’s long-term goals?

Smith: Absolutely. This is critical in the development process. The idea here is to get us out onto the world stage again, touting Waterville Valley as a competitive mountain and one of the best mountains in New England. So, these types of events showcase that and they also put that stamp of approval on the mountain and as a world-class resort.

From the archives of the Basecamp podcast: Tim Smith on the changing face of Waterville: