FARMINGTON – Riding the T-bar with a 5-year-old isn’t the easiest thing to do. The child’s rear end is about as high as the back of an adult’s knee: The only way to stay on is to pull a hamstring.

Some students at the University of Maine at Farmington already have sore hamstrings that they will have to limber up for the coming snow season.

For the past four years, the ski industries program at UMF has been running Alpine Snow Kids at Titcomb Mountain in Farmington, a system designed to draw and hold the attention of children from kindergarten to grade 3.

The idea is to get these children into Alpine skiing early, said Leigh Breidenbach, UMF ski industries director. “The earlier you engage them in a meaningful way,” Breidenbach said, “the more likely they are to continue with that activity.”

Breidenbach enlists an average of 20 UMF ski industries students a year to corral the 65 “little missiles on skis,” as she puts it.

According to Breidenbach, “children will self-select athletic activities that they may want to do for life between fourth and seventh grade,” and are more likely to stop doing them in high school; they simply lose interest.

Breidenbach jokes that Alpine Snow Kids is her way of wiping out basketball.

The idea of starting Snow Kids was actually a response to a survey conducted by the National Ski Area Association and a company called Customers First, which tried to find the reason for the flat growth in the ski industry.

Flat growth basically means that for every one person who starts skiing, there is one who stops.

Breidenbach’s answer to the problem was simple: Get children involved. “UMF ski industries can grow the sport by 65 kids a year” by getting kids active early, Breidenbach said.

There have been similar efforts throughout Maine with the Maine Winter Sports Center, an organization that has constructed state-of-the-art Nordic and biathlon ski centers in Presque Isle and Fort Kent. “It’s all part of the same story,” Breidenbach said.

Over the past four years, the return rate of kids has been almost 100 percent, meaning that almost all of the kids who start the program continue in it for the full four years. Since the beginning of the program, only two kids have dropped out, according to Breidenbach.

What can you possibly teach a kindergarten-aged kid about skiing?

The goal of the first year, Breidenbach said, is to grab their attention. “If you don’t have their attention, you can’t teach them anything.”