I built the coach I needed and could not find.

I raced in the nineties, then like a lot of racers I changed direction and put my focus into a career in software development.

When things opened back up after COVID, we bought a family season pass at our local hill, and I started taking my three kids every weekend. Somewhere in those mornings I fell back in love with it, especially these wild modern skis that did things mine never could. I also realized that letting twenty-five years slip by was one of the few real regrets of my life.

One day my youngest watched a masters race and said, "Daddy, I want to do that." I told her, "Yes you do. And I am going to coach you." I took the Entry Level course a few weeks later, and Snow Valley Racing gave me a chance the next season.

Darrin and his daughter at the hill, both in helmets and goggles — the kid who started it all

The first day of training, I was introduced to my group of U8s, and I realized that all my planning and coach training had not prepared me for this. The whole coaching pathway leans on racers who age out of U19/FIS and step straight into coaching, fresh off years of being coached themselves. I was not that anymore. I had raced, but I had not been coached in over twenty-five years, and I had never been taught how to coach. I made it through the season bribing seven-year-olds with candy to keep them pointed downhill.

The season is busy and making time to train coaches is very hard. I took that learning on myself. I asked as many questions as I could. I volunteered to attend camps as a tail gunner and shadowed other coaches. I read everything I could find, watched videos. I started compiling the things I was learning and building my own knowledge base.

I signed up for masters racing, this helped me refresh and re-learn new skills, but also work under a coach for the first time in decades. That is how I finished my own Development Level on-snow assessment, the second time through.

Over the next few seasons I moved up to U14 and U16, learned to set courses, and slowly started to feel like I had a handle on it. But one thing was still challenging. I could see that something was wrong with a racer. Figuring out the real cause underneath it, and knowing which drills or cures to fix it, that was the part the courses never had time to teach. I wanted a veteran standing next to me on the hill who I could just ask.

So, leveraging the decades I've spent solving problems with technology, I built one.

Coach Hans is the coaching brain I wanted in my pocket from day one. It is for every coach who got handed a group and had to figure out the rest alone. It is for every coach that moves up from one age group to another and encounters new challenges. It is for every coach that in a pinch needs an idea for a drill or to gamify a drill. It is for every coach that has years of knowledge in their heads and wants to share that with their more junior coaches.

I am still coaching, and still using it before, during and after every session.

Darrin Maidlow

Our mission

We make great coaching outlast the coach, and reach every coach who needs it.

Coaching doesn't have a knowledge problem. It has a knowledge-sharing problem.

The knowledge is there. Walk into any club and you will find people who have spent a lifetime coaching, full time or on weekends, who carry more about this sport in their heads than any course could hold. The problem is that almost none of it gets out. It moves in trickles, a clinic here, a bit of one on one there, and then it stops. When those coaches step off the hill for the last time, most of what they knew goes with them.

Meanwhile the pipeline runs the other way. A kid ages out at eighteen, is not going to make the national team, and starts coaching, usually with the youngest group. They are at the very start of their lives. They coach through university, then leave to build careers. Nobody invests heavily in growing them as coaches, because the return walks out the door in a season or two. So the people with the most to give cannot get it out, and the people who most need it are gone before it lands.

The result is a leaky bucket. Every season the sport pours knowledge into people who carry it away or never receive it, and the clubs and federations that should be getting smarter never accumulate a thing. The same lessons get relearned, the hard way, over and over.

We think the answer is to stop relying on the knowledge living only in people.

Coach Hans captures what an experienced coach knows, in the moment they are already coaching, and keeps it. From then on it is there for every coach who needs it, instantly, no matter who is on the hill that day. The veteran does not have to be present. The new coach does not have to spend years they do not have. The club finally keeps what it learns.

We are honest about the limit. We can capture the knowledge that can be put into words, the diagnoses, the drills, the progressions, the tactics. We cannot bottle the eye and the feel and the timing that a master coach has and cannot quite explain. We are not trying to. The part that can be shared is enormous, and it is exactly the part a new coach is missing.

A coach near the end of their years deserves to know their work will outlast them. A new coach handed a group deserves better than figuring it out alone. And a sport deserves to get better every year instead of starting over.

That is what we are building.

The team

The people building Hans.

Darrin Maidlow

Founder / Coach

25+ years building software
AI / agentic LLM systems
Development Level coach

The coaching half of Hans, and the one who dreamt up the idea. Darrin spent the twenty-five years he was away from racing as a software engineer and architect, solving problems by shipping production systems and, most recently, AI and agentic LLM applications. Coach Hans is where his two careers collide: the alpine coaching he relearned run by run, encoded into a system that can diagnose a racer and prescribe the fix the way a veteran standing next to you on the hill would, leveraging the LegacyX AI knowledge management platform his team at LegacyX has been building. He is still coaching, learning and growing along with his athletes — and still using Hans before, during, and after every session.

Piyush Batra

Data Scientist / Engineering

Piyush Batra is the engineering half of Hans, the master nerd turning deep race-coaching knowledge into something you can actually talk to between runs. He does not ski. Yet. We are fixing that this season.

Be in the first group of coaches to use it.

Coach Hans is in private beta now, going live for the 2026-27 season.

Become a pioneer coach