Hey guys! I'm new here. I'm a collegiate skiier and work at a summer camp teaching kids to ski. Last summer was awesome, I had an amazing boat driver and with him driving and me in the water with the kid, we got 100% of the kids who tried to ski up for at least a few seconds. This summer, my driver had exactly one weekend of experience driving a boat before coming to camp and our success rate was significantly lower. When I drive, I can get most kids up, but my driver wasn't very good at working with the kids in the water. If we had decent boats, this wouldn't be a problem, but we work with jet boats, and those are tricky to control at the best of times. (I keep begging my camp's director for Nautiques with booms, it's not going to happen :( ). The kids only get about 3-5 tries to get up before it's someone else's turn, and they may only have 2 or 3 opportunities to ski while they're at camp, so it's really important to me to get kids up on that first day.
I'm already thinking about next summer, and I really want to experiment with not just sitting in the water keeping the kids in the right position, but putting on a pair of skis myself and skiing alongside them. But just by thinking about how I would do that, I don't know how it would work. I think it would be the most effective for the under 10 crowd. I think for the smallest kids, sitting behind them with my skis on either side of theirs would be the best way to make sure they got up, but I don't know if that's safe. For bigger kids, I could sit next to them and hold on to the handle with one hand and the kid with the other to pull them up, but I don't know if that would actually get a kid up or if I would fall over sideways.
Do any of you have experience teaching kids to ski this way? Or any other methods that would work? I got into collegiate skiing because of a camp counselor, and even if none of my kids ever end up skiing competitively, making sure they enjoy the sport and have fun is my #1 goal.