By Gavin Kentch
At some point this fall, U.S. Ski & Snowboard will officially announce the athletes named to this year’s national team. (I broke this news back in April, if you’d like to know now what that announcement will say.) Social media reactions to this press release, if history is any guide, will largely be local in nature; the Midwest will celebrate Zak Ketterson and Kevin Bolger, the Methow will be psyched for Novie McCabe and Buster Richardson, and so on. This is good, actually; it is hard to make the national team, and local clubs should celebrate their local heroes.
But in this article, I wanted to take a step back for a moment to look at some broader patterns of the geographic origins of national-team athletes. Which states consistently send skiers to the U.S. Ski Team? Have those trends changed with time? What does it mean that there have only been two athletes named “Lindsay” or “Lindsey” on the national team this century, and that both were Minnesota residents skiing at this level between 2006 and 2010? These feel like important questions for the past and future of American skiing development, albeit some of them more important than others.
Methodology and data set
I started by pulling national-team rosters for as far back as I could reliably find. That got me a complete list of team nominations over the past twenty years, from the 2004/2005 season through 2023/2024. I didn’t include the 2024/2025 season, because (a) that roster hasn’t been officially announced yet and I could still be wrong about who’s on it, and (b) ending with last season gives me a twenty-year span for my data set, which is a pleasingly round number. This is what you get when a liberal arts major assembles your data. I then went through all 20 team announcement posts and entered all athlete names into a single spreadsheet organized by year.
You can find that compilation of names here, as a webpage, or here, as a PDF (pages 1–8 of this document). If you get nothing else out of this article, you will probably enjoy, as they say over at Defector, Remembering Some Guys. Did you remember that Alexa Turzian was on the national team for two seasons in the late aughts? Skyler Davis? Laura Valaas? Some of these names may surprise you!
Crucially for this project, I wanted to see where national-team skiers *come from,* not where they currently train. The latter would just involve a lot of work to establish that there presently exists a largely bimodal and bicoastal distribution of high-level skiers in this country in Alaska (because APU) and Vermont (because SMS). I actually think that there is an interesting article to be written here about the increasing consolidation of elite club skiing in this country over the last decade-plus — on the one hand, group effect is good; on the other hand, loss of additional perspectives or ideas is potentially bad — but this is not that article.
So, in my first pass through the data (PDF pp. 1–8), I tagged each athlete with the state listed for them when they first came onto the national team. I then kept this tag consistent throughout the entire data set, i.e., Rosie Brennan is tagged as “Utah” all ten times she occurs even though she has been based in Anchorage for the past decade-plus, Jessie Diggins is “Minnesota” throughout even though she currently owns a house in New England, etc. If you read the press releases diachronically you will see that an athlete’s town often eventually changes to the place where they have lived and trained for the past several years, but I did not reflect that change in my data.
(Disclosure: I did code Holly Brooks as Alaska, rather than as Washington, and Caitlin Gregg as Minnesota, not as New York (birthplace) or Vermont (where she began skiing), reflecting both women’s mid-career success. If you disagree with this interpretation, and you may well do so, then adjust your own totals accordingly. I also coded Carl Swenson as Utah, because his listed hometown in USST documents going back to 2004 is Park City. Move him from the Utah column over to New Hampshire if you prefer.)
Sheet two of my original spreadsheet, PDF pages 9–18, presents the same data as sheet one, but with years filled in on the left-hand side. In sheet three, PDF pages 19–28, I then sort this data by state.
Finally, in sheet four, PDF pages 29–39, I group the states into regions. My regions largely map onto those used for selecting athletes to Regional Elite Group camps, except that I further split the Western region into Pacific and Mountain: the Alaska region is eponymous; the Pacific region is Washington and California; the Mountain region is Colorado, Idaho, Montana, and Utah; the Central region is Minnesota and Wisconsin; and the Eastern region is Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont.
(The thirteen states listed above are the only ones appearing in the data set. Had athletes from other states been included, I would have tagged Oregon as being in the Pacific region, Wyoming as Mountain, Michigan as Central, New York as Eastern, etc. Hopefully this is all pretty sensible and non-controversial. If there is someone in, like, South Dakota reading this right now and wondering where they fit in, I have to admit that I didn’t think about that one — I guess you’d be Central, because you’re in the Midwest division for purposes of JNs. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.)
Embed from Getty ImagesWhat the data show
So what did I find? Before telling you my conclusions, let me explain the last thing I did here: I looked at not only the total number of athletes on the national team since 2004/2005, but also the total number of athlete years, where one athlete year represents one athlete being on the national team for one year. This made sense to me as a way to approximate quantifying athlete “value,” i.e., 13 years’ worth of Jessie Diggins should “count” more for Minnesota than one year worth of Lindsey Dehlin (above), even though each of them is a discrete athlete from the North Star State who was on the national team within the last 20 years.
There happen to be precisely 300 athlete years represented within this data set, which is a suspiciously round number, but that is what the data show.
So. Here are my findings. Here is the data grouped by individual state:
| state | total athlete years | athletes |
| Vermont | 67 | 12 |
| Alaska | 50 | 12 |
| Washington | 35 | 7 |
| Colorado | 33 | 8 |
| Minnesota | 29 | 7 |
| Utah | 17 | 4 |
| New Hampshire | 15 | 3 |
| Idaho | 14 | 4 |
| California | 13 | 3 |
| Wisconsin | 10 | 3 |
| Massachusetts | 9 | 1 |
| Maine | 4 | 1 |
| Montana | 4 | 2 |
| total: 300 | total: 67 |
And here is the data grouped by region (regional definitions in article above, but should be pretty self-explanatory):
| region | total athlete years | percentage of total |
| Eastern | 95 | 31.7% |
| Mountain | 68 | 22.7% |
| Alaska | 50 | 16.7% |
| Pacific | 48 | 16.0% |
| Central | 39 | 13.0% |
So what does this all mean?
Uh, I don’t know. I’m just the reporter; this is all above my pay grade.
Seriously though, the Greta Andersons of the world think about this stuff a lot more than I do, which is why I reached out to her for comment, q.v., infra. That said, if you’d like to listen to me first, the conclusions that jump out to me after doing this research are:
• There are just not that many names on this list total. The U.S. is, like, good at skiing now; we were fourth in the Nations Cup standings last season, a hairsbreadth back of Finland in third. And we’re doing all this off of only 68 discrete national-team athletes over the past two decades. (Yes I know that athletes not on the national team also score World Cup points that count toward the Nations Cup; I’m using USST as a measurable proxy here.) It’s no secret that the top three countries on the Nations Cup list (currently, and pretty persistently, Norway, Sweden, and Finland) have a deep bench, but I was still struck by this.
Embed from Getty Images• There are just not that many names on this list per state. I grew up skiing in Anchorage in the 1990s; between first Nina Kemppel (above) and then Kikkan Randall as prominent athletes on the women’s national team, I could be forgiven for thinking that there have “always” been lots of Alaskans on the U.S. Ski Team.
But if you look at, say, the seven Alaskans who started the distance races in Canmore — Scott Patterson, Gus Schumacher, Zanden McMullen, David Norris, Luke Jager, Hunter Wonders, and Michael Earnhart — that represents a full half of the 12 Alaskans who have been on the national team over the past twenty years. (I am aware that seven is not actually half of twelve; one of the athletes listed above has never been on the national team throughout his storied career. Sore subject.) For one, the bench, again, is just not that deep; for another, I should be chary of assuming too much about history based on just the last few years. Recency bias is a thing.
• Speaking of which, there are pronounced regional cycles within the data set. If you zero in on, again, Alaska for a moment, there are no Alaskans on the national team for the first two years (see chart above for this and the next few paragraphs). Kikkan Randall enters the picture in 2006/2007, and stays there through 2017/2018… but from 2006 through 2012 it’s either just Kikkan on the national team from The Last Frontier, or Kikkan and Taz Mannix. As late as 2016/2017, Kikkan is the only athlete from Alaska on the national team. There is not a single Alaskan male on the national team in the entire data set until Scott Patterson in 2017/2018, the fourteenth year for which I tracked things.
Three years later there are seven Alaskans on the national team during the 2020/2021 season, six of them men, a gender imbalance that largely persists to this day. The question of what was in the water in Anchorage and Fairbanks x years earlier that would lead to this embarrassment of riches in 2020/2021 is a great example of something well above my pay grade, but I trust that all of American skiing would be better off if we could quantify that and broadly replicate it. (Yes I know this is more art than science, but when you have four future World Cup skiers in the same boys high school race it feels to me like there’s something good going on there.)
Colorado has seen a similar resurgence. Between Noah Hoffman and Simi Hamilton there were typically two athletes from the Centennial State on the national team throughout nearly all of the data set — but, excepting the three-athlete years of 2011/2012 and 2012/2013 (add in Tad Elliott to the two men mentioned above), there were never more than two athletes for decades. Then 2019/2020 saw Simi Hamilton, Hailey Swirbul, and Noel Keeffe, with the same three athletes there again the following year. Finn O’Connell made an appearance in 2022/2023. Haley Brewster in 2023/2024. Trey Jones forthcoming in 2024/2025. The American roster for World Juniors in 2023 saw three of six women and two of six women hail from Colorado, so there is a deep bench of up-and-coming athletes there. Again, I truly do not know what explains this change, but it is striking.
On the other end of the spectrum, Washington is just reliably there. Never more than three athletes on the national team at once, but also at least one athlete on the national team in every year in the data set save one (the notorious post-Olympics season of 2010/2011, when the team dropped from 11 athletes to seven and launched a thousand takes about the future of Torin Koos). From Koos to Laura Valaas to a combined 19 years’ worth of Sadie and Erik Bjornsen to, more recently, Novie McCabe, Walker Hall, and Buster Richardson, Washington just keeps on showing up.
Vermont, finally, does the same, and then some; it has seen at least two athletes on the national team in every single year of this data set. No other state has had even one athlete consistently on the team throughout that time. This is impressive to me.
• As noted above, there are 300 total athlete years included here. There are 67 athletes in the data set, meaning that each athlete represented here was on the national team for an average of 4.5 seasons.
This… does not feel like a very long time to me. The question of how to keep more American athletes in the sport for more years of development is an important one. And a complicated one. And a tentacular one. I’m not sure that Greta Anderson, Development Team Coach for the U.S. Ski Team, makes reference to this every time that we talk about American skiing, but she might, and she would be justified in doing so.
I don’t have statistics on hand to back this up, and as with anything how you define your terms bears directly on what you will conclude — but I strongly suspect that it takes the average skier more than 4.5 years on the national team to achieve international-level “success,” however you define that. Andy Newell would like to see more support for Americans skiing on the World Cup, financial and otherwise. He is not alone in this, suffice to say.
• There are only 13 states total on this list. Some states that are pretty strongly associated with skiing in this country — the national team has trekked to Bend Camp in Oregon for decades now; New York has both an upcoming World Cup stop and an Olympic Training Center; Michigan has hosted U.S. Nationals in Houghton at least six times this century alone — are not included.
Zach Jayne of Bend will be on the 2024/2025 team, and Neve Gerard, also of Bend and now joining Jayne at the University of Utah, is going places, so clearly these things change over time. But I have to say that I was surprised not to see more states total on the list.
• The list is quite top-heavy: Over half of athlete years come from just three states, and 71 percent of athlete years come from five states. Vermont, Alaska, and Washington have a combined 152 athlete years out of 300 total; if you add Colorado and Minnesota to those three you get to 214 athlete years total, or 71.3 percent. The other states on the list make up the remaining 29 percent of athlete years.
On the one hand, I assume that everyone involved in U.S. skiing would like for the base of the skiing development pyramid in this country to be larger. On the other hand, athletes from the “other” eight states have produced multiple World Cup podiums (Rosie Brennan for Utah, JC Schoonmaker for California, Julia Kern for Massachusetts, Sophia Laukli for Maine; John Steel Hagenbuch and Sammy Smith have World Juniors/U23 podiums for Idaho), so the top of that pyramid is pretty darn robust. But we would all like the base to be more expansive.
• On that note, there are two states represented on the list by a single athlete. Shoutout to Julia Kern (nine years and counting) and Sophia Laukli (four years and counting) for holding down the fort for Massachusetts and Maine, respectively.
Embed from Getty Images• Lindsey/Lindsay is disproportionately overrepresented in Minnesota in the pre-Diggins darkness of 2006–2009, when Lindsey Weier (later, after marraige, Lindsey Dehlin) begat Lindsay Williams, a brief halcyon era before the name, in any spelling, vanished from the national team entirely.
(The highest-ranked Lindsey/Lindsay in the most recent USSS database, in case you were curious, is currently Lindsay Williams — yes, that Lindsay Williams, pictured above racing at 2006 U.S. Nationals — who was a healthy 122nd in the sprint rankings at the end of last season. The only other Lindsey/Lindsay in the database is one Lindsey Bengtson of Montana. The two of them were born in 1984 and 1982, respectively. As any parent can tell you, baby names rise and fall in popularity over time; ask my mid-century mother how many other Susans there were in her high school class.)
• Finally, and on a more serious note regarding Minnesota, please don’t hate me when I say this, Midwestern nice readers, but current evidence for the Jessie Diggins effect on World Cup–level skiing, out of Minnesota specifically, remains relatively scant.
Since Diggins’s first season on the U.S. Ski Team in 2011/2012, Minnesota has seen Ben Saxton (two years), Caitlin Gregg (one year, zero if you class her as not-Minnesota depending on your interpretation of her career track), Ian Torchia (three years), and Zak Ketterson (three years and counting) make the national team. I’m not sure what you would expect after a decade-plus of an incandescent star plus youth ski numbers through the roof, but, respectfully, it might be more than a combined nine seasons on the national team? Feel free to disagree in the comments.
I should be quick to add that the Jessie Diggins effect is palpable at the youth development level; it’s hard to argue with total participation numbers in the Minnesota Youth Ski League literally doubling between “here comes Diggins!” in 2018 and two more Olympic medals in 2022. That plus 20,000 people at Theodore Wirth will presumptively get more bodies into the sport, some of whom could be making this list in a few years’ time.
But. As one hopeful commenter wrote last winter, “The population of the Kingdom of Norway is roughly 5.5 million; just a bit smaller than the State of Minnesota’s 5.7 million. It stands to reason that Minnesota (with a gene pool not all that dissimilar to Norway) should be producing a team of cross country skiing world beaters. Perhaps they will! Perhaps Jessie Diggins is just the tip of the Minnesota iceberg! Perhaps the attention garnered by this winter’s Minneapolis World Cup will reveal a new generation of glitter-splashed world-beating snow-speedsters.”
Perhaps they will indeed. Stay tuned.
What does the U.S. Ski Team think about this?
Greta Anderson, Development Team Coach for the U.S. Ski Team, was not unappreciative of my research efforts here when shown a preliminary version of this spreadsheet and asked for comment. But she focused less on the “standings” of which state had sent how many athletes to the national team for how long, and more on the potential for athletes to find different things that work well for them in different parts of a large country.
“One of the most difficult things for other nations to understand about our skiing in the United States and our ski identity as a country” is that we operate across five time zones and thousands of miles, said Anderson in a recent phone call.
With the exception of Russia and its eleven (!) time zones, she noted, “Every other major ski nation is working in one time zone,” and is simply much more compact than the U.S. Anderson finds herself explaining to her European counterparts that “we have athletes that maybe only see each other once a season at Junior Nationals or twice a season at Nationals and Junior Nationals,” a dynamic unique to this country.
“And we want to capitalize on that,” said Anderson, “not scrutinize it.”
“I feel like the united is the key portion of the United States Ski Team,” Anderson said, “because we benefit from our differences.”
While Anderson shared my surprise that, say, Oregon was not (yet) present on this list, she also noted that, “To give credit where credit is due, so many skiers from the states you listed do pass through Bend, do pass through Oregon … as a step in their success.”
More broadly, Anderson likened the process of high-end skier development to the process of high-end car customization, where “It’s always better to have it made for you with all of your specifics in mind, and you really feel like it fits you and is your personality. There’s that ownership in it and feeling of, ‘I have these custom designs, and this is mine; I put this together.’”
Just so, when an athlete successfully draws on strengths from different regions of the country and crafts a career path that works for them, Anderson sees this as a victory. She noted that some American skiers “are born and raised and stay in one geographic area or at one club,” while others “travel to two or three different clubs and work with four or five different coaches by the time they’re scoring points on the World Cup and by the time they’re on the national team.”
(My examples here: think of Gus Schumacher and Alaska or Ben Ogden and Vermont for the former, Sophia Laukli (grew up in Maine, college in Vermont and Utah, club team in Norway) or Rosie Brennan (grew up in Utah, college in New Hampshire, club team in Alaska) as just two of many exemplars for the latter. “I would say the ones that come from one place and stay in one place at this point are … in the minority,” Anderson said. “Some of them are World Cup champions, so I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily a bad thing. I just think it’s a bit more rare.”)
With regard to my list of states, Anderson noted that Statistics 101 teaches that there are multiple ways to interpret any data set.
“You can look at this and say, These are the only states that good skiers come from, or you could say, My best chance to become a good skier must be in Vermont and my worst chance to become a good skier must be in Florida,” she parsed. “But one of the beautiful things about what we do is that we line athletes up on a start line, and it doesn’t matter if you’re from Hawaii, or Ohio, or Utah, or Massachusetts, or New Hampshire, or Alaska.”
More broadly, Anderson said, “Any athlete that believes in what they’re doing is going to say, My idea is the best, my way of doing it is the best. I want every athlete … to feel like, The program I’m in is the best for me right now at this time. As they grow through programs, they’re going to say this program that was an asset for me two or five years ago, maybe now it’s a crutch because it’s time to — or something that I need to supplement because I’ve grown, and now it’s time to add in something else or do something different.” So Anderson encouraged athletes to continue thinking critically for themselves about where they are and what they need.
Bottom line, Anderson concluded, as with “any article you could read this and be very discouraged or you can read it and be super encouraged. I think one perspective probably supports much more growth and enthusiasm and success, both short- and long-term, than the other.”
It will not surprise you that Anderson encourages athletes thinking about their future in the sport to pursue the former path.
Correction: This article was edited on September 9th, following publication, to reflect the fact that “Lindsey Weier” and “Lindsey Dehlin” are the same person; the athlete married during her ski career and changed her name. I changed the total number of athletes from Minnesota from 8 to 7, changed the total number of athletes in the data set from 68 to 67, and changed the average number of years an athlete was on the national team from 4.4 to 4.5 after re-running the math. I regret the error, and sincerely thank the astute reader who pointed this out to me.
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.
