'Former athletes are assets': Jessica Jerome on her second act in Ski Jumping

In 1992, a coach from the local Ski Jumping club walked into a Park City elementary school looking for recruits. A six-year-old named Jessica Jerome took the brochure home, told her parents that was what she wanted to do, and that, as she puts it, was kind of the end of it. More than three decades later, her bond with the sport remains intact; what has kept evolving is her role.

Today Jerome is a FIS Technical Delegate (TD), one of a small group of women officiating international Ski Jumping, alongside two of her former US teammates. In conversation with Inside FIS, she spoke about the pathway from athlete to official, why she drew the line at big mountain skiing, and her mission to bring "more people like us" into the sport's technical roles.

Inside FIS: So, Jessica, how did you first catch the Ski Jumping bug?

Jessica Jerome (JJ): I was probably six or seven years old. I grew up in Park City, Utah, and I liked to ski, and I liked to go off into the trees and hit the bumps and the jumps and everything. A coach from our local club came to my school and did a presentation about Ski Jumping, trying to recruit little kids to come up and join. So, I took the brochure home and told my parents that's what I wanted to do. And that was kind of the end of it!

Inside FIS: Did you enjoy stunts and jumps in other sports too?

JJ: No, not really. Being in Park City, we grew up mountain biking and doing stuff outside, but I pretty much just stuck to Ski Jumping. Later in my career, I became friendly with a lot of people who did big mountain skiing [Editor's note: a sub-genre of freeriding], and they would always say, hey, you can hit jumps, why don't you come skiing with us? And I was like, no, it's not the same. What you guys do is terrifying and what I do is not!

Inside FIS: Where was the line for you? For the uninitiated, they both seem terrifying!

JJ: As crazy as it sounds, Ski Jumping is very controlled, and safety is always the top priority. Learning to do it in that controlled environment with the proper equipment made me feel fine about it. And for some reason, in my mind, doing that up on the mountain off a cliff with Alpine equipment didn't translate to me.

Inside FIS: You enjoyed a long and successful career, including appearing at the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics. How did you find competing at a national and international level?

JJ: It was my entire life for over 20 years, and it was great! I was with a group of probably five girls pretty solidly, and we kind of became family. We travelled, competed and trained together, and interestingly enough, two of my teammates who I was very close with when I was competing, Lindsey Van and Alissa Johnson, have also become TDs.

So we've been getting back into this, but instead of being on the front end as competitors, we're on the back end, kind of running everything. It's been really fun for us to get into this together. Every day we'll say something to each other like, “hey, do you remember when we were athletes and we did this?” Or, “do you remember when we had this one competition and this wasn't done? How crazy was that?”

Inside FIS: How did you get the opportunity to qualify as a TD?

JJ: I need to shout out the American ombudsman for Ski Jumping, Reed Zuehlke. He had a big hand in getting the three of us to do this. There has been an effort from the IOC and FIS to increase gender equality in all of the roles. Being that we are native English speakers and recent high-level athletes, FIS essentially approached us to become TDs.

Historically, it was a longer process, but it's been made shorter recently. And if you were a World Cup athlete, with our experience, it's easier for us to go into an officiating position and be able to flick a switch and think like an athlete again - to put ourselves in their shoes.

So essentially Reed Zuehlke came to us and asked if we would like to do this. I think I said yes, not knowing what it would entail, and it's been great. It's been about five years now, and we're all still here doing it!

We're slowly trying to recruit more women who we jumped with to come over, because a lot of the time when you quit a sport and want to stay involved in it, the only opportunity to do that is coaching. And a lot of people don't want to be coaches.

Inside FIS: Is that because, traditionally, coaching can involve long hours for low pay? Especially when first starting out…

JJ: It's really difficult, especially in the US, because if it involves travel, you're not just traveling for a day trip. You're not going to travel for just a couple of hours to see a new ski jump. You'll be traveling either across the country or across an ocean to access ski jumps, which makes coaching very tough.

Inside FIS: Has becoming a TD eased the post-retirement transition? Some top-level athletes retire and lose a little of their sense of purpose.

JJ: Yeah, for sure. When I quit jumping, and this wasn't on purpose, I moved for a job opportunity and I kind of checked out of Ski Jumping for a couple of years. I would watch it when I could, I would pay attention to results when I could, but I just wasn't in it. When I got back in, it was easier than I thought, because a lot of the same people are still there. The people who I've known for 20 years are still there. It's been really rewarding to come back in and continue to do good for the sport.

Inside FIS: What have you learned from being a TD that you didn't know as an athlete?

JJ: When I was an athlete, I understood the concept of the competition jury, but I didn't know who these people were. They were just some guys in a tower on the side of the hill. It was really easy for me to be upset about a jury decision, if they changed the gate or postponed a competition or something like that.

Now, being in it, I understand it's much more nuanced than that. I didn't realize how much goes into hosting a competition: how many people, how many hours, how much coordination and communication.

Sometimes when I go to women's competitions, a lot of the athletes are women I competed with. I've had them say to me, "We really enjoy seeing you here. It makes me feel better to know you're up there, because you care about us and you were one of us."

Being able to put a name and a face to the people running the competition bridges the gap between the front of house and the back of house, the athletes and the competition management. We're all working together here. We all want to put on an amazing, safe, fun competition.

Inside FIS: Do you combine it with other roles? I don’t know your situation, but I imagine it’s a job that works on an assignment-by-assignment basis, rather than being a 9-5.

JJ: Yeah, of course, and it's funny, because a lot of my non-Ski-Jumping friends say to me, “hey, Jess, you seem to enjoy doing this, why don't you make it a full-time job?” And it doesn't exist in a full-time capacity. The key to keeping it fair is that it's a different TD every time, from a different country. You want new blood in there. You don't want the same thing all the time. And they're only weekend assignments, usually in the winter, with a couple in the summer.

Inside FIS: Are you actively looking to recruit former colleagues to follow that path?

JJ: That's not my main goal, but when I run into people from the past, I've always been like, “hey, why don't you think about doing this too?” About a year ago, we, for the most part, successfully recruited Atsuko Tanaka. She was a Canadian ski jumper, and she's been coaching. We were like, “since you're already doing Ski Jumping all the time, why don't you think about being a TD?”

Knowledge like hers is super valuable and I think FIS is realizing that these former athletes are assets, and they're trying to tap into that. Recruiting isn't my top priority, but it's something I'm always saying and talking about. Like, “hey, why don't you do this too? We need more people like us.”

Inside FIS: Is there anything FIS or USA Ski Jumping could do to make it easier for more women to take on technical roles?

JJ: In some countries their ski teams and national governing bodies pay for their officials to go to the required seminars and meetings, but in the US that comes out of our own pocket. For those interested [in following that path], there’s a bit of a financial commitment - so somehow trying to remove that burden would help.

It would also be good to talk more about how we need more chiefs of competition, and how we need more female chiefs of competition. We're a little bit oversaturated with TDs right now.

That said, it's not really something that FIS decides. FIS committees [made up of representatives from National Ski Associations] work out how many spots are available and how they should be divvied out. Then it's up to the countries’ associations to nominate somebody and pass that on to FIS, essentially.

[Click here to access key information about Ski Jumping Technical Official (TO) education]

Inside FIS: You mentioned you'd love to hold a ski jumping event with all-women judges and jury. What needs to be done to make it a reality?

JJ: Our biggest hurdle right now is finding a female chief of competition. It's a hard position, because there's a lot of overlap with TD work, but it's also very important that the chief of competition knows the venue and knows the people around the venue and knows how the snow acts and the weather acts.

Historically, we think about a chief of competition as the wise old person who knows the lay of the land. And recruiting anybody to do that job, not just women, has been difficult, just because it's a lot to handle. A lot of people don't necessarily live close to a home venue, so the issue we have recruiting chiefs of competition is not specific to women: it's people in general.

In terms of judges and jury, I don't have the exact figures, but internationally there are maybe 40 female judges in total, and I think we have less than ten women who can be Technical Delegates and Assistant Technical Delegates.

Then, depending on where this conversation goes and who would like to host, that's for anybody to decide. Since Lake Placid has been hosting World Cups the last couple of years, I've been working with the organizing committee there quite a bit, and some of the head people there are women who are great at their jobs and passionate about the sport. So who knows, maybe I could go to them and ask?

Watch this space!