Jeff Archibald

Jeff was born and raised in Ogden, Utah. He started snowboarding in golf courses and backyards and took it to the resort in 1985 when Powder Mountain pioneered the first lift service for Utah snowboarders.  At 18 Jeff moved to Salt Lake City to study at the University of Utah Exercise Science Department.  He joined the US Alpine Snowboard Team and competed internationally, ranking 2nd in the world in 1998, while also finishing his degree from 1995-2001.   Retiring from his athletic career he began working with development athletes and eventually was hired in 2005 to help lead the US Snowboardcross Team in its inaugural Olympic Games in Torino.  Jeff continued coaching for the US Snowboard Team until 2019 where he coached 4 Olympic Medals and 12 World Championship Medals.  Throughout this process he worked closely with the US Snowboard Team Sport Science department to create progressive strength and conditioning programming that emphasized skill acquisition and cognitive processing.

“I evolved in my thinking as I watched what factors facilitated athletic progress, recreational or professional.  It’s not just about working hard in the gym and at your sport.  Of course, you need to do both of those things.  However, they should be put in context with a variety of other variables.  A few examples being individual personalities, cognitive and information processing demands of the sport, age, training history, psychological skills, and past injury’s.  You need to adopt an approach that takes into account this complexity, then build a holistic program mixing and layering these variables more like a recipe. That is the art and the fun part!  It’s fluid and there is no guide book.”

Jeff recently moved to Teton Valley with his wife and two girls.  He spends his free time snowboarding in the backcountry, mountain biking, climbing and painting.