PARK CITY, Utah – U.S. Ski & Snowboard announced the appointment of marketing veteran Andy McKeon to the Chief Marketing Officer position. As CMO, McKeon will lead U.S. Ski & Snowboard marketing, communications, and partner support. McKeon assumes these roles as Chief Commercial Officer Dan Barnett steps aside for a move back to the United Kingdom.

“I dreamed about it as a kid - and finally, I’ve made the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Team,” says the delighted McKeon. “It took me longer than I expected, but I never gave up. I was somewhat hampered by being an impressively slow ski racer, but I never let that put me off. Don’t give up on your dreams, kids!”

McKeon will report to U.S. Ski & Snowboard President and CEO Tiger Shaw and will be tasked with elevating the awareness of the organizations’ world-class athlete roster with a keen focus on digital strategy - including social media, content production/distribution, the account executive team, merchandise and support of athletes. U.S. Ski & Snowboard will merge its content, creative and communications groups, working as one mini-agency with McKeon leading the charge.

“I am thrilled to have Andy joining us,” said Shaw. “Andy is a world-class strategic leader in the sports world, with a track record and the experience to keep our teams out front. Our partners will enjoy the content and authentic stories of our athletes pursuing their dreams. It’s all about the members of our teams and their amazing successes.”

McKeon honed his storytelling skills at some of the best ad agencies in the world including Wieden + Kennedy in Portland, Oregon, where he worked on the Nike account and at Goodby Silverstein & Partners in San Francisco. The digital world fascinated McKeon, so he moved his family to Silicon Valley as a Director in Apple’s large internal Marcom team. He then spent six years at Facebook Inc. helping many of their most valuable advertisers and agencies transition to the digital age, including U.S. Ski & Snowboard partners Visa Inc. and Liberty Mutual Insurance.

He has also has been working with U.S. Ski & Snowboard as an advisor since 2013 and has worked with a number of athletes in various disciplines. McKeon has twice been a keynote speaker at the organization’s annual Partner Summit, tapping his lifelong passion for all snow sports, the mountains and the snow community at large. In his role at Facebook Inc., McKeon helped create a Facebook Live session with double Olympic champion Mikaela Shiffrin (Edwards, Colo.) and Sheryl Sandberg, and orchestrated live streams from events such as the World Cup Finals in Aspen.

“We have nearly 200 athletes in a diverse array of thrilling sports. Every one of them has a different and amazing story to tell. We are going to use our left and right brains to harness all the powerful and fast-changing channels like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Google, Twitter, TV and more to help them share their captivating stories and those of our incredible partners, with the world,” McKeon added. “Already we have Super Bowl-type reach every week – EVERY WEEK! – across all of our athlete and Team channels. The digital transformation means it’s an incredibly exciting time to be in marketing.”

“U.S. Ski & Snowboard also has the opportunity to play a more purpose-driven role in meaningful areas such as environmental preservation. We can’t take the mountains for granted. I’m committed to grow and spread the love of snow sports” says McKeon. “As a parent who is battling screen time and other cultural pulls, I think it’s the most wonderful family activity – quality time together, health and fitness, it teaches kids tenacity, executive functioning, independence, gives them a sense of community and as I’ve found – a lifetime of adventures and friendships.”

Originally hailing from the mighty hills of Australia, McKeon has an “unimpressive” (his word) background in alpine ski racing as a former member of the Australian National Team, is an avid and enthusiastic NASTAR participant, keen snowboarder and mogul skier – knees pending. He, his wife Anna and two children - Lauren (8) and Tucker (10) and dog Tiki (2 – 14 in dog years) will be relocating to Park City, Utah from Menlo Park, California. Lauren has high hopes of becoming an Olympic skier and a member of the PC Bladies, and Anna and Tucker are eager to kickstart their biathlon careers.

The Sports Education department continues to develop it’s offerings for coaches’ education and recently hired Amanda Kelley as their new instructional designer.  With an extensive background in web design, graphic design, and coding, she will be an asset for improving the coach certification process. 

 Instructional designers are a crucial part of improving educational needs as they have a good understanding of how to create an engaging curriculum that aligns with the needs of the organization. The Sport Education department identified the need for better coach training, and Kelley will bring solutions to fulfill that need. 

“Do you need better tools? What is going to solve your problem?” she explains. Through her work so far with Sports Education, the department decided to develop virtual learning. “So now we have to gather our learning objectives and create an outline curriculum. This will include all of the written content, graphic design, animations, video development, and more.” 

Kelley will create the learning content used in coaches’ certifications levels 100, 200 and 300 by updating existing content and revamping the online certification course. “I am taking the existing content from an old platform and putting it into a newer, nicer, easy-to-use platform and finding ways to better it,” says Kelley. “Having a great learning and certification program can help branch out more accurate information to everybody so it becomes both secondhand and cohesive.” In order to provide accurate content, Kelley will rely heavily on collaboration between the Sports Education staff, coaches and athletes to make sure procedures are translated correctly. 

Kelley’s goals with her new position directly align the Sport Education department’s goals of increasing the number of coach certifications through a new and updated system. “I hope to make it really immersive and interactive. Right now, the courses are very text-heavy, and so I want to make it more user-friendly and more exciting for the user,” she explains. 

A blended learning model is the best practice for delivering a training curriculum to a large group of people. The Sport Education department moved to a blended learning curriculum to drive coach education within U.S. Ski & Snowboard three years ago and all certification courses are being shifted to this model. All courses will contain a series of eLearning modules that provide the overall content, a portfolio that provides an opportunity to develop skills, a face-to-face evaluation where clinic leaders evaluate coaches on their ability to coach, perform movement analysis, and demonstrate skills to the desired competency level, and a final exam that coordinates all of these components into one assessment. 

Knowledgeable, fun and engaging coaches are U.S. Ski & Snowboard’s greatest resource. Being able to effectively train those who work directly with athletes, both through the development process and at the national team level, and to provide consistent content to clubs across the country is what the Sport Education department hopes to achieve through this massive content undertaking. 

“Professional development is important for developing coaches that are equipped to make a lasting positive impact on their athletes,” said Sport Education Director Gareth Trayner. “Creating engaging content, like incorporating the Coaches in the Field series, for instance, makes the content more relevant for coaches participating. The software that we use to create our courses allows us to provide a level of interactivity that makes learning engaging, relevant, and more enjoyable than simply reading through pages of text. Creating this type of blended learning experience where coaches have plenty of time to review and learn the content, participate in activities that develop skills, and collaborate with one another on the hill should increase the number of coaches entering and staying within the coach development pathway.”