After 90 years of fostering winter sports in Bend, the Mt. Bachelor Sports Education Foundation is ready for its first permanent training facility.

MBSEF executive director John Schiemer said the organization, which was founded as the Skyliners Ski Club in 1927, is now raising money through a capital campaign called “A Place to Soar” and hopes to have the new facility open ahead of the 2020 winter season.

“The building that we’re in now has been a great facility, we’ve been here for 12 years and it’s really served its needs, but over the last few years it just became apparent that we are outgrowing the facility that we’re in,” Schiemer said, noting that the number of kids enrolled in nordic ski, alpine ski and freeride ski and snowboard programs has jumped from 400 when he became director in 2012 to 600 today. “I’ve been talking about this for the last three or four years, as something we really need to think about, and it was really about a year ago this summer that we said let’s move forward and explore the feasibility of doing this.”

Schiemer said MBSEF has an option to purchase a plot in the Northwest Crossing neighborhood of Bend, next to the Snap Fitness location. Schiemer said the plan for the future MBSEF headquarters is about 9,700 square feet, more than double the size of their current offices on Century Drive on Bend’s west side. The new building would house the organization’s offices as well as a gym for dryland training and trampolines for the freeride athletes to learn and practice new tricks.

“Right now, we’re in various different gym locations throughout town for our dryland training, and we use a couple of gyms that have trampolines for our freeride program,” Schiemer said, adding that he hopes the new facility can serve as a clubhouse for MBSEF athletes. “We’ll have a little bit more space for those kids that want to do some schoolwork here, a little bit more meeting space for parents meetings and a larger wax room and things like that. It’ll provide a place for kids to congregate and work out and hopefully improve their fitness, and that translates to better performance on the mountain.”

While the new training facility will be a convenient meeting and training location for current MBSEF athletes, Schiemer said he does not expect an increase in enrollment in their winter programs, several of which are already at capacity because of the slopes and facilities available to the club at Mount Bachelor.

“They’re not building a bigger mountain,” Schiemer said.

Schiemer declined to say how much money MBSEF hopes to raise for the new headquarters, but he did say the fundraising campaign is aimed, in part, at the many alumni of the program.

“Having been around for a long, long time, this organization has a lot of alumni, and a lot of people have been connected with the program, not only in Bend but throughout the Northwest, people who have raced or competed here,” Schiemer said. “By and large, they have very fond memories of MBSEF and what the program did for them. So we’re reaching out to as many people as we can to get involved with the project.”