Capstone #3 Interview

If you have read my earlier posts you will know that my class is doing our Capstone projects right now. To continue from the last post I have decided that my main inquiry question will be, “Which medical, safety, and technological advances have most improved alpine ski racing?” My five sub questions are,

“How have safety standards improved?,

How has the fitness of the skiers improved overtime?,

How has technology improved to benefit the skiers?,

What event have led to improvements that affected alpine ski racing?, and

What medical, safety, and technological issues are we planning to fix now?”

The next step after choosing our main inquiry question and sub questions is finding an interview. To help with our research we have to interview an expert on our topic. At first when I was looking for someone to interview I couldn’t find anyone. I looked through tons of articles but I couldn’t find anyone. I’m lucky I have a dad, though because when I asked him to help me try to find someone he found someone right away. He found a former US ski team coach who he knew personally. His name was Ron Kipp.

Now we had to email him to ask him if we could interview him. Amazingly he said yes! Then we scheduled a time for the interview. But you can’t do an interview without any questions so I got to work making my questions. Once I had finished all ten of them I went to Mrs. Edwards so she could tweak them a bit. That she did, I thought my questions were really good. Then the day before the interview I asked my dad to check over the questions. He kept them the same, mostly. The only major change he made was that he took out one of the questions because it was too similar to another one of them. Here are my final nine questions:

1 – What were your responsibilities as a coach of the US ski team and head of the alpine sports education for the USSA? What are your responsibilities now at Squaw Valley?

2 – How has the performance of skiers improved this century, and to what do attribute the improvement?

3 – How has technology contributed to the improved performance of skiers?

4 – How has improved medical knowledge and care affected the performance of skiers?

5 – How have improvements in physical fitness and training affected skiers?

6 – What is the ideal physical training regimen, both on and off the slopes, for an alpine ski racer?

7 – What events have led to improvements in the sport (death / crash causing change in safety regulations, of introduction of parallel slalom increasing viewers, etc.)

8 – What current medical, safety, or technological issues do you feel need to be addressed to further improve the sport?

9 – What do you consider to be the most important advancement in the sport of alpine ski racing?

As I was preparing to make the face time call, I realized how nervous I was. I hadn’t realized how nervous I was until that moment. Once he accepted the face time I just started staring at him for a few seconds. I had no clue how to start. Luckily he saved me by starting the conversation. After a little small talk I got right into it.

After the interview was over I looked down at all the notes I had written. I got  mostly what I expected but his answers to questions 6 and 7 really took me by surprise. For question 6 his answer was that the skiers mostly do excersizes that look like skiing every day. I was expecting for him to list all that the skiers do every day. But instead he only gave type of excersize they do. For question 7 his answer was going to the 35 meter ski. I was surprise because I thought he was going to go into all this stuff about the olympics and Ulrike Maier’s death. I was expecting him to say events that have affected the sport not the actual skiing.

Overall I think the interview was extremely helpful and it will make my project much better. I can’t wait to get started with the final project! Bye!