It's a first appearence for me in this section so let me introduce myself:
I work at a ski/board shop in Israel. The shop is the biggest one with the most experience in this area, and probably the whole middle-east (not that it's a real achievement hehe).
It started out over 30 years ago as and has an ever growing snowboard department for the past 10 years.
As you probably can imagine, the winter sports market in Israel isn't exactly huge. There are about 10 shops in Israel that carry snowboard equipment.
Now, the issue I wish to discuss is the following:
The average Israeli skier/boarder gets around 7 days riding done per season. The guys that take it seriously ride about 15-20 days. Usually 6 of them in Europe, and the rest here on Mt. Heron (a tiny hill with no park and 15 slopes, barely).
The thing is, us shop employees don't get much more than that done either.
Now, how can you be a proper sailsman with so few days on the snow, and accordingly barely any experiance on a wide range of equipment?
The information we base our knowledge on is eachother's experiences, and mostly the company's catalogs. This sounds quite ridiculous, but that's all we got. We don't have enough snow days, nor the opertunity to have demo runs on upcoming equipment. You can probably imagine that no company has demo days here.
So, how do I, or any other shop employee here, become a good and credible one? |
