About Excel
Founded in 2018 by Ex British ski team athlete Rob Bullen. Rob quickly progressed through his ski racing career starting from a low-level athlete and ski racer to become one of the best skiers in the UK winning the English Alpine Championships on multiple occasions as well as taking the British Men’s Slalom title back in 2011. Retiring from ski racing in 2013 after 6 years as a full time athlete Rob moved straight into coaching and after spending a year completing his BASI qualifications took a job with Ambition Racing where he stayed for four great years and as a team contributed to the development and success of Ambition and many of their athletes.
Come the spring of 2018 and the time felt right for Rob to branch out and create his own team with some well-established values as well as a unique flexible and approach to providing programmes and access to great training to athletes of all ages and all abilities.
Locations
A stable base provides athletes with a home-like feel.
Winter base
During the winter months, we are based in the Tirol region of Austria. We have built great relationships with local schools, sports facilities, and training slopes, which all combine to create fantastic training opportunities for our athletes.
We stay in Hotel Iris, Kramsach, which is at the end of the Zillertal Valley, just 30 minutes from Innsbruck airport.
Our location is central to seven ‘local’ training hills, including Alpbach, Reith, Inneralpbach, Fugen, Hockfugen, Kaltenbach, and Mayrhofen. We also have the added benefit of being just 45 minutes away from the Hintertux Glacier which provides our programmes with snow certainty all year round.
Summer
During the summer months we train in a variety of locations that best suit the athletes’ needs. These locations vary depending on age and programme. Specific details on pre-season camp locations can be found in the Programme calendar.
Southern Hemisphere
We provide an annual training camp in El Colorado Chile. This is available to athletes from U16+. El Colorado provide us with ski in ski out accommodation and private training lanes where we can train DH, Super-G, GS and SL.
Coach Profiles
Pastoral Care & Safeguarding
We understand that our athletes are a long way from home and their families, and this brings with it issues and concerns which our staff manage sensitively and responsibly. Our pastoral staff and guardians have the responsibility for parental controls and discipline as well as for nurturing the children, acting as role models and providing advice and guidance when needed.
Supervision
Children and athletes are supervised and cared for by designated house parents, coaching staff and teachers, alll of whom are fully DBS checked and are First Aid trained. With the number of athletes that we accept onto the programme, each member of staff has the time they need to do their job. As well as care for and raise athletes, house parents arrange ‘Activities’ for evenings and days off.
SnowSafe
We work continually to affiliate ourselves with Snow Sport England’s ‘SnowSafe Policy’. SnowSafe comes with strict guidelines and ensures both athletes and parents have a clear route to raise child welfare issues to our Club Welfare Officer (CWO) who is supported by the safeguarding lead at SSE – Bridget Owens. We take the welfare of our athletes very seriously and our CWO is up to date with all mandatory courses as well as continually keeping up to date with other relevant subjects such as Mental health awareness in sport and safeguarding and protecting children in the digital world.