By Gavin Kentch
Earlier this week I posted an article outlining who I expect to be named to this year’s cross-country skiing national team. After publishing it I got a few polite refinements regarding athletes who had qualified for the B-Team rather than the D-Team, but no outright corrections, which feels like further indicia of the accuracy of my analysis. So far so good.
I also got several requests to look into the collegiate skiing background of athletes on this year’s national team. I aim to serve; here is that analysis:
Athletes on the 2024/2025 U.S. Ski Team who skied for RMISA schools
Kevin Bolger, Utah
Luke Jager, Utah
Zach Jayne, Utah
Trey Jones, Colorado
Murphy Kimball, University of Alaska Anchorage, or UAA
Will Koch, Colorado
Kendall Kramer, University of Alaska Fairbanks
Sophia Laukli, Utah
Novie McCabe, Utah
Zanden McMullen, Montana State
Sydney Palmer-Leger, Utah
JC Schoonmaker, UAA
Athletes who skied for EISA schools
Fin Bailey, Vermont
Rosie Brennan, Dartmouth
Haley Brewster, Vermont
John Steel Hagenbuch, Dartmouth
Jack Lange, Dartmouth
Sophia Laukli, Middlebury
Ben Ogden, Vermont
Ava Thurston, Dartmouth
Jack Young, Colby
Athletes who skied for CCSA schools
Zach Jayne, St. Scholastica
Zak Ketterson, Northern Michigan
Athletes skiing at non-NCAA schools
Michael Earnhart, APU
Buster Richardson, APU
Athletes who are attending NCAA schools but not skiing for them
Sammy Smith, Stanford
Athletes who were not officially on a college ski team
Jessie Diggins [has taken some online classes from Westminster University, with particular interests in sociology and psychology per this 2018 Q&A from, uh, Teen Vogue, but deferred and then turned down a scholarship from Northern Michigan University in order to become a professional skier at age 19]
Julia Kern [attended and graduated from Dartmouth College; Kern may have spent some time training with the Dartmouth ski team, but never formally competed for them]
Gus Schumacher [attends and is about to graduate from the University of Alaska Anchorage; often trained with the UAA ski team, and competed in some Anchorage-based RMISA races, but never formally competed for them]
That’s 12 athletes who skied for RMISA, nine who skied for EISA, and two who skied for CCSA, both of whom were named Zak/Zach. Utah is the single most popular school on this list, counting six national team athletes among its alumni. Dartmouth has four athletes on this list, and Vermont three. There are a total of 11 different schools represented here, or 13 if you count the APU and Stanford folks that I clearly didn’t quite know what to do with.
A note on methodology: All of Murphy Kimball, Fin Bailey, and Sammy Smith will not matriculate until this fall, so, strictly speaking, read “will ski for” rather than “skied for” for these three athletes. Also, Sophia Laukli began her college ski career with Middlebury before transferring to Utah; Zach Jayne began his with the College of St. Scholastica before also transferring to Utah. I listed both Laukli and Jayne under both schools, since it didn’t seem fair to choose one over the other. There are therefore 29 discrete entries on this list, as against only 27 athletes objectively selected to this year’s national team.
The math is simple: 21 out of 27 athletes on this year’s national team skied, or will ski, for an NCAA program. Two more are doing some combination of taking college classes and skiing, in this case at the non-NCAA school of Alaska Pacific University. A third will be taking college classes and, uh, playing soccer at the paradigmatic NCAA Olympic sports powerhouse of Stanford University, and tbh my mind is still sort of blown that Sammy Smith has ten top-30 World Cup finishes to her name at age 18, but nordic skiing might not even be her best sport.
Regardless of what you do with the APU and Stanford athletes on this list, the overall trend is clear: NCAA skiing is currently well-established in this country as a path that can let young athletes achieve long-term international success in skiing.
This was not always the case. Here’s then–USST head coach Pete Vordenberg, writing in May 2009, setting forth what was at the time the national team’s vision of the ideal path for high-level juniors as they finished skiing in high school (source: this blog post that it took me a while to find):
“The USST is encouraging top athletes graduating from high school to follow the USST post-graduate pathway,” Vordenberg wrote 15 years ago this month. “This pathway involves committing one to two years to full time ski training with either the USST or a USST partner program directly after high school.”
“This program is a win-win situation for all involved. The main players are the athlete, the parents, college programs, club programs and the US Ski Team. Firstly, the athlete will be able to focus on training and racing in two very important developmental years. This ensures that they are on track with their international counterparts. Secondly, the athlete can test the life of a full time ski racer and make an educated decision about continuing to ski full time or skiing in college. Thirdly, should the athlete decide to ski in college after a year or two they will be stronger, fitter and more mature. This makes them a better recruit for the college and will be more likely to win a scholarship over the more mature foreign recruits. Finally, the older more mature athlete will be a much more focused student.
“These factors are important to the athlete, but also to the parent and to the college. The parent is sending more directed, mature and focused student/athlete to a college that will be more interested in giving that student/athlete a scholarship. The college will benefit from recruiting fitter, faster and more mature student/athletes. These students will help the college realize it’s [sic] NCAA goals as well as round out a college ski team.
“The final players are the USST and USST partner programs who benefit from being able to train the USA’s top athletes toward international success in these formative years as well as be able to retain those who wish to continue as full time skiers after the initial post graduate years. This is truly a win-win situation for all involved.”
By contrast, here’s now–USST head coach Matt Whitcomb, at the Beijing Olympics in February 2022, talking about the received wisdom of the late aughts that it was best for top juniors to forgo NCAA skiing:
“We were cutting the community in half. We took a hard stance, and it was an error.”
(Source: this fine article, which I am about to tell you to go read in full.)
There is an article to be written here, one about the pace and implications of generational change in views on best practices for skier development, and on the diachronic shift of NCAA skiing from outlier to keystone within American junior skiing. But… Nat Herz already wrote that article, and probably did a better job of it than I would have. Lord knows that he didn’t use the word “diachronic” at any point.
So you should go read this article, by Nat in the Anchorage Daily News in February 2022. Then you should go read this article, by Nat in FasterSkier in June 2009, for a great historical compare and contrast on the role of NCAA skiing vis-à-vis the national team.
Finally, you should also consider reading, yes, the comments on the 2009 FasterSkier piece. Mostly because they are a great period piece of recognizable names in American skiing (Chad Salmela, Morgan Arritola, Martin Hall, Tim Kelley, Adam St.Pierre, et al.) working through these issues in a generally respectful manner, secondarily because APUNSC is at one point described as “a workaholic cliquy black box social enigma even in Anchorage,” which is imho an all-time line. I will let others decide whether or not it was or is an accurate one.
(Disclosure: I have trained and raced with APU Masters for the past 11 seasons.)
You’re reading this on Nordic Insights, one man’s labor of love dedicated to publicizing American nordic skiing. Last season’s GoFundMe is literally the only reason why I turned a profit in year one of Nordic Insights, and in turn the only reason why there is a year two of Nordic Insights for you to be reading now: I was okay with working for very little money to get this love letter to American cross-country skiing off the ground, but I didn’t want to lose money for the privilege of doing so. If you would like to support what remains a brutally shoestring operation, this season’s GoFundMe may be found here. Thank you for your consideration, and, especially, for reading.
