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As president, he has worked tirelessly to increase the number of racers in the Sierra League races. He formed a communications committee that developed a detailed communications plan to promote racing in the Reno, Tahoe and Sacramento areas.

He worked with the Singles League to provide two joint races between the two leagues, which provided increased competition within the various classes and helped both leagues to put on more cost-effective races. He reached out to the Bay area leagues to participate in the Sierra Super G race. He contacted the Master’s racers and invited them to race with Sierra on weekends when no Masters race was scheduled. To encourage young racers, Pavel invited all of the Northstar Junior Racers to participate in Sierra League’s Northstar Races. They were offered a free first time race of two runs and a second race for just $15. Under his direction, the Sierra Council has built an extensive email data base to keep members and racers informed about races and other council activities.

Pavel instituted The Sierra Team Challenge this year and invited other organizations, teams, schools, businesses and racers to compete in friendly competition. The format was a six person team with at least one woman or junior racer per team. Several local businesses donated items for the first and second place teams. The event proved to be lots of fun and will be continued and expanded next year.

He and other top Sierra racers have put on a successful race training clinic for the past four years. This year the clinic was expanded to two days over President’s Day weekend at Boreal, and the BAC leagues were invited to participate. A number of BAC racers took advantage of the excellent, cost-effective training. The instructors donated their time and expertise, enabling the Sierra League to bring in needed income to improve the bottom line for the racing season.

Pavel used his computer programming skills to develop an online race registration process for the Sierra League, which has been well-received. Racers can sign up for races for the entire season or for each race, thus eliminating lengthy wait lines on race days. The process also benefits the statistician who can input data prior to the race day.

He has developed a revised system for placing racers in the appropriate class for racing that he has presented to the Far West Racing Association for consideration. Several benefits for his computerized system are listed here:

• Use more reasonable movements from class to class
• Eliminate subjectivity of adjustments in handicap calculations
• Improve reliability of handicaps
• Simplify participation of racers in other league races
• Provide single source of data – eliminate data duplication and inconsistency
• Provide online services (racer data self-updates, registration, results reporting, results calculations, etc. )

Pavel began with Sierra Council as the web master in 2003, and has continued to do the bulk of that function to this date. In fact, this year he has essentially done three jobs—president, race director and web master.

Pavel is a native of Russia, where he learned to ski as a child. He and his family immigrated to the United States in 1991. While serving as a professor at Northeastern Oklahoma University, he taught skiing at Red River Resort in New Mexico. He resides in California where he works for a computer technology start up company.

He formed the RU Ski Club to compete in the Sierra League. He recruited a fellow Russian to be the statistician for the Sierra League, and continues to foster interest in racing within his community. Pavel is an outstanding example of everything that is good about the skiing community.

He fosters good relations among the three NorCal racing leagues. He provides outstanding leadership to the Sierra Council and race league. He freely donates his considerable computer skills to create and maintain the Sierra website, and to streamline race registration through the online registration function.