By Christian Green, Executive Editor

This is an excerpt from a school director profile published in the Winter 2026 Issue of 32 Degrees. Access the full issue here.

Remember summer camp? Those carefree days of our youth when we made lifelong friends, learned new skills, and most importantly got to spend hours outside participating in activities we loved.

Campers came from near and far to join in an experience that united everyone, regardless of their upbringing. Tim Kenney, ski and ride school director at Eldora Mountain, in Boulder County, Colorado, remembers those days well and likens the school he leads to summer camp. “People come from all over the place to attend summer camp,” he said. “They come from super diverse backgrounds and from different states and may not see each other the rest of the year. But when they’re at camp, they’re buddies. They have a special, unique bond.”

He strives to create this type of community at Eldora, where he says the school’s diverse group of instructors — from aerospace engineers to recent college graduates — come together to support each other through the good times and challenging times. Despite a shared love of the outdoors, it takes a lot of effort to capture the same type of environment experienced during the halcyon days of camp.

MENTORS, TRAINING SET KENNEY ON THE RIGHT PATH

In 2012, Kenney started working in the Rocky Mountain Region office, first as membership coordinator and then as education manager. In those roles, he worked closely with members to understand their concerns and needs, as well as bridge the gap with school directors. He had the opportunity to work on several committees and began focusing on leadership training under Education Director Dave Gregory. One of the programs that stood out for Kenney was extreme ownership training, a 10-point system that “teaches leaders to take full responsibility for everything that happens within their team, organization, or life, focusing on actionable strategies to improve performance and solve problems.”

Another influential leadership training program was Rudy Miick’s conscious communication. “It helped me communicate with the membership, and it’s really helped me communicate with supervisors,” he said. “Whether it’s managers or instructors, it helps peel away the layers that maybe aren’t relevant and helps get to the meat of issues we need to solve.”

Kenney was also grateful to have worked with region CEO Dana Forbes, particularly because she and Gregory are proponents of Rocky Mountain’s annual Member School Management (MSM) event and their Directors’ conference, both designed to educate the region’s trainers and managers about new processes, procedures, and standards. “The directors and managers of the schools would come together and tackle topics pertaining to the schools, whether it’s volume, staffing, housing, those kinds of things,” he said. “But we also talked through the relationship between PSIA-AASI and the schools.”

At the resort level, Kenney credits two longtime Steamboat leaders for setting good examples. “Nelson Wingard [now vice president of Steamboat’s SnowSports School] is someone I find inspirational in terms of how he’s led that school and some of the changes he’s made there,” Kenney said. “And I’ve worked closely with someone who just took over the director role, Dina Castor. She actually hired me my first year in 2001.”

In addition, he credits the influence of National Team alumni Scott Anfang. “It’s funny because I didn’t actually meet Scott until I started training for my Snowboard Level III, just the way they had things stratified,” he said. “But I’ll still pick up the phone and call Scott because he’s always got an interesting take on things that’s so grounded, in the real-life boots-on-the-ground experience.”

A STRONG LEADER VALUES EMPATHY

When Kenney took over as ski and ride school director at Eldora in January 2023, he was well prepared to implement what he had learned over the years. Besides the aforementioned individuals, he credits a couple leadership philosophies for playing a huge role in his development. First, is the trust triangle, which espouses that trust is garnered through authenticity, logic, and empathy. “Every once in a while, you dig into leadership theories, and you think to yourself, ‘Huh, I may have been doing that all along without knowing it,’” he observed. “The model I like is the trust triangle…it simplifies things in terms of how we interact with individuals.”

Kenney uses the model with his supervisors and managers and keys in on the empathy aspect in particular. For example, during lineup on a busy Saturday, instructors’ stress levels may be higher than normal, and a seemingly small issue may come up for an instructor. As he related, a supervisor’s first inclination may be to let the instructor know that the issue is not important in the moment, but it’s not helpful to express that. “It’s not for us to judge whether the issue is big or small, but it’s important to get back to the logic of what we need to get done that day and do that in a way that doesn’t come off too heavy-handed or too harsh,” he said.

He added that he’s an advocate of leading with a carrot, rather than a stick, and his empathy for others carries beyond his staff. “We don’t know what everyone’s going through throughout their day, whether that’s a guest or an employee, and it’s easy to place our own values in front of an individual’s,” he maintained.

Kenney also leans into the on-stage mentality championed by individuals like Dan Thurmon, a motivational speaker who was part of a leadership training seminar Kenney participated in during the pandemic. This mentality pervades Eldora’s culture; it’s something supervisors pass down to instructors. “We’re training them to be aware that they are always representing Eldora, in all their actions in uniform and outside of uniform,” he said. “Whether they like it or not, they are always on stage, and in all their interactions at the coffee shop, on the shuttle bus, and coming up to work in front of their guests people are assessing them and then laying the layer of Eldora over top.”

Read the rest of the feature here. And read about fellow snowsports school directors Dave McKinley of Perfect North and Jess Kluth of Magic Mountain in these 32 Degrees features.