“Put Me in, Coach…”

Coach – Produced, Directed by Katie Burrell

Trailer – https://vimeo.com/457375975

Rating: 8.0

Ski movies are like stand-up comedy – they’re hard to do well. Most ski movies tend to be macho pissing contests with plenty of whooping and high-fiving and smashing back Red Bull—year after year after year. (Hey, we get it, Warren Miller, it’s a formula). As for stand-up comedy, well, what could go wrong about getting in front of a group of strangers and telling jokes that would make your mom faint?

Katie Burrell – a Vancouver stand-up comic who emceed Ski Night at last year’s VIMFF – is really funny and, using a cliché, a breath of fresh air into the fart-joke ski media world. Her latest movie, Coach – is not very funny, unless you like watching cringey, unscripted moments of athlete/coach tension. And that’s a good thing.

From the plot synopsis: “When celebrated professional skiers Lorraine Huber and Hedvig Wessel join forces to take on the Freeride World Tour, director Katie Burrell thinks this just might be a premise dreamt up in Girl-Boss heaven. The “Plan,” as it were, was to film Norway and Hoobs supporting each other through their complementary transitions – one from athlete to coach, and the other from mogul skier to big mountain freerider. Proving women can have it all.”

That set-up is perhaps a bit artificial and there is some context missing – for instance, how much money is up for grabs? Do any of the other female skiers have former champions as coaches? But as a slice of low-budget reality TV based on following a bunch of skiing gypsies to mind-boggling mountain locations around the world, Coach definitely works. Like crash-reel segments in ski movies, reality TV works best when things go haywire and you suddenly feel badly for the person on the other side of the camera.

Huber’s role is essentially to tell Wessel where to ski – which pucker-inducing lines are likely to win the judge’s favour at each of the five Freeride World Tour venues in Hakuba, Kicking Horse, Andorra, and Austria. Emotions boil over after Wessel crashes out in Andorra because she ended up skiing a line that (her boyfriend? Another competitor? – not Coach Huber ) – recommended.

Halfway through Coach, I found myself thinking of the tension between the Robert Redford and Gene Hackman characters in the 1974 classic Downhill Racer. Like Redford, Wessel comes across as arrogant, spoiled and petulant, indeed, as many talented and driven athletes are. (She does throw down two beauty back flips that clearly illustrate her superior abilities). Like Hackman, Huber has to multi-task between working as an on-line TV commentator (and painfully botching the job) and as a neophyte coach – neither of which she’s done before. She gets the best line in the movie: “I’m just trying to stay relevant, here,” which kind of describes a lot of people in the ski industry at any given time.

Downhill Racer did not make competitive skiing look like fun, and neither, for that matter, does Coach. And of course, there’s Burrell, with the cameras rolling, doubtless rubbing her hands with glee as faces tighten and tempers fray. As a stand-up comic might say, “someday, we’ll look back at all of this and laugh.”