By Gavin Kentch
It is fall. The pavement is cold when I rollerski now and it hurts my elbows. It is therefore time for previews of the six main professional ski clubs in this country.
I do this every year not because it is a simple or easy task to compile notable results for a cumulative several dozen skiers, but because I think it is important. (Okay I am also a massive dork and truly enjoy that frisson of seeing once more who finished, say, 17th in a lightly attended Period 3 SuperTour, but I’m making a point here.)
It is easy to cheer for Jessie and Rosie (and you should! they’re good people and good skiers!), but no one reaches a World Cup podium without a strong team behind them. During the heart of the European race season, that team looks, most visibly, like the World Cup coaches and staff. During the rest of the year — i.e., the period in which the lion’s share of training occurs — that team looks like the rest of the SMS and APU teams. If you want to go far, as they say, go together.
But it’s not just about the headliners here. Jessie Diggins or Rosie Brennan (or Gus Schumacher or Ben Ogden, etc., insert favorite podium finisher here) are the tip of the pyramid, to be sure, but pyramids crumple without a strong base.
Will Dane Karch or Benon Brattebo or Anabel Needham be making headlines on the World Cup a few years from now? I have no idea, and, within reason, neither do you; I’ve run out of ways to say on this website that talent identification is an opaque and inexact science at best. But I do know that athletes will not be winning races if they’re not still skiing. Domestic clubs, alongside NCAA skiing, alongside whatever we class APU as (APUNSC is not an NCAA-affiliated ski program), are what keep people in this sport.
Anyway. That proselytizing aside — but speaking of growing the base of the sport in this country amirite, just look at the total team size here — first up is Team Birkie to start off this fall’s domestic team previews.
What is the official name of this ski team? Team Birkie
Where is it located? Minneapolis, Minnesota (also: Hayward, Wisconsin)
Who’s on the coaching staff? *deep breath here, this is a well-resourced squad*
Coaches: Julie Ensrud (Head Coach), Erin Moening (Assistant Head Coach), Chad Salmela (High Performance Director), Nichole Bathe (Coach), Jake Stiele (Development, Regional, and Marathon Team Coach)
Healthcare/wellness team: Ryan Maxwell (strength and conditioning coach), Abigail Larson (nutritionist), Katie Eichten (doctor), Abby Reckinger (mental performance coach), Jesse Coenen (doctor)
Who’s on the roster this season?
Again, this is going to take a while; in Team Birkie’s house there are many rooms.
World Team (skiers primarily racing internationally): Zak Ketterson, Kevin Bolger, Alayna Sonnesyn, Mariel Pulles, Christopher Kalev, Paul Schommer (biathlete). Ketterson and Bolger are on the U.S. Ski Team. Pulles and Kalev are on the Estonian National Team.
Continental Team (skiers primarily racing domestically, at the SuperTour level): Gretta Scholz, Henry Snider, Luci Anderson, Aidan Ripp
Regional Team (skiers racing, uh, regionally): Emma Stertz, Dolcie Tanguay, David Ronnevik, Conner Roberts
Development Team (current college skiers with a primarily domestic racing focus): Adrik Kraftson, Benon Brattebo, Colin Freed, Greta Hansen, Maggie Wagner, Morgan Richter
Marathon Team (amateur athletes focusing on local marathons): Delaney FitzPatrick, Jenna Nelson, Nicole Eliasson, Vivian Johnson, Sam Holt, Zach Nelson, Maxwell Turnberg
College Training Program: [there appear to have been as many as 26 current collegiate athletes in Team Birkie’s summer training group this year. This is great, actually, but also if I write out everyone’s name here this section is going to take forever and I write too much as it is. See roster for full details on this.]
Team Ambassadors: Jessica Yeaton, David Norris, Lindsay Williams
What’s different now from when I did this last year? Yet again, there has been some turnover here. Ketterson and Bolger return from last year’s World Team. Gus Schatzlein, a skier, and Amanda Kautzer, a biathlete, have moved on.
Ketterson and Bolger are joined by four new athletes: Alayna Sonnesyn, Mariel Pulles, Christopher Kalev, and biathlete Paul Schommer. Sonnesyn returns to her Midwest roots here after several years with SMS in Vermont. Pulles and Kalev are Estonian nationals who have skied for the University of Alaska Fairbanks for several years now; both athletes are now back at UAF while pursuing Masters degrees. Schommer moves east from Team Crosscut in Bozeman to continue biathlon training in his native Midwest; he grew up in Appleton and skied for St. Scholastica.
Last year’s Development Team included Anabel Needham, Gretta Scholz, Rose Clayton, and Henry Snider. This year’s team, now called the Continental Team, brings back Scholz and Snider. Needham and Clayton both finished NCAA skiing last year; Needham headed north to pursue post-collegiate skiing with APU. Luci Anderson and Aidan Ripp are new to this year’s team.
At the coaching level, Team Birkie officially has its third head coach in as many years: first Caitlin Gregg for 2022/2023, then Chad Salmela for 2023/2024, and now Julie Ensrud. This is perhaps a little misleading, though; see below for Salmela’s take on his evolving role with the team. Salmela, Erin Moening, and Nichole Bathe continue with the team as coaches. Matthew Clarke has moved on. Jake Stiele joins the team. Bolger also continues his work with Trondheim-based coach Einar Flaktveit Moxnes; he and longtime partner Maja Dahlqvist relocated to Trondheim over the summer in advance of this winter’s world championships there. UAF coaches Eliška Albrigtsen and Ben Buck probably deserve mention here too for their school-year work with Pulles and Kalev.
What were some results highlights of last season?
Bolger came into the season with a specific results goal and ably achieved it, consistently skiing well enough throughout the World Cup season to be renamed to the U.S. Ski Team after being absent from it during 2023/2024. Results highlights along the way included making six World Cup sprint heats, with a highwater mark of twelfth in both Oberhof (classic sprint) and Trondheim (skate sprint). He was 17th, 18th, 20th, and 24th in four more skate sprints, in Davos, Canmore, Minneapolis, and Toblach, respectively. No I am still not used to offhandedly writing “Minneapolis” alongside those other, more traditional venues. Bolger was also 15th in the 20km skate in Swedish national championships in March.
On the other end of things, Bolger was at one point 62nd in a World Cup sprint qual, and 65th and 72nd in two World Cup distance races. I mention this not to drag Kevin Bolger, whom I think quite highly of and really like, but rather to remind the juniors (and others) reading this that even USST skiers have their ups and downs; very few athletes have results sheets that are nothing but rainbows and unicorns all the time. Skiing is hard, actually, and sometimes reality reminds you of that fact.
Non-results highlights for Bolger included co-starring with Dahlqvist in one of the ski world’s best vlogs, and headlining one of the all-time most-read articles on this site, about who the American sprinters are dating. (If you’re reading this, Kev, you should know that searches for “Maja Dahlqvist boyfriend” are like 10x more popular in my analytics than searches for “Kevin Bolger girlfriend.” No offense.)
Ketterson’s season goals included skiing well enough in the first half of the year to qualify for his home World Cup races at Wirth Park in Minneapolis (not “home” in the metonymic sense that Ketterson is an American athlete, more “home” in the near-literal sense that Ketterson grew up in Bloomington and attended high school at Jefferson, a 20-minute drive from the venue). It was very close, but he pulled it off.
To qualify for the races that will likely stand as a career highlight for anyone who raced in them, Ketterson’s season came down to a single race in January. To that point in the season his individual World Cup results were as follows: 49th, 71st, 52nd, and 58th. Just as things had been starting to turn the corner for him, Ketterson then got Covid, and had to make some difficult decisions in the heart of the race season.
Let’s let Salmela take it from there (I am quoting here from this January 19 Facebook post):
“A few twists of fate and a couple guys turning down the start spots in Oberhof, and Zak got a single chance — today — to qualify to race at his home World Cup in Minneapolis. He needed a top 30. Today.
“Three cancelled or postponed flights since Wednesday’s snowstorm in Oslo, got him into Oberhof late last night without his bags. No perfectly planned training approach. Not even clothes to race in! Just waiting for flights — trying to get there — to get to the start. Bought some underwear and socks in Oberhof and borrowed gloves and hats, and he was in the start this morning. His single shot at racing in Minneapolis. In new/somebody else’s clothes.
“He finished the qualifier in 29th. Then went on to ski a heck of a quarter final heat in which he was 3rd, and the top lucky loser for a bit before being eliminated. He ended up 16th on the day — his 2nd best World Cup finish.”
Again, ski racing is not always rainbows and unicorns.
In Minneapolis, Ketterson made the heats in a fast field, ultimately finishing 21st. Other strong World Cup results included that 16th in Oberhof, 18th in the classic sprint in Canmore, and 29th in an obscure, little-heralded classic sprint venue called Drammen. His World Cup distance results were generally clustered in the 40s and 50s. At home, Ketterson had two fourth-place finishes at Spring Series (in each case the third American), and was sixth in the circle Birkie after an ill-timed fall on the final turn that dropped him from second and had him publicly ruing “my own dumbassery.”
(In brief compass for athletes who were racing for other teams last year: Sonnesyn had 12 World Cup starts, from which she logged five top-40s. The Plymouth native also got to do both races in Minneapolis. She was among the top female domestic racers last year, with multiple podia on the SuperTour and at U.S. Nationals. Sonnesyn was third in the Birkie, her first time finishing anywhere other than the top step of the podium in five races, done in this time by some rando named “Jessie Diggins.”
Pulles notched a SuperTour podium in Anchorage and a Nationals sprint final in Soho. She was a consistent top-10 finisher in RMISA races, and was eighth and 28th at NCAA Championships in Steamboat. She started four of the six North American World Cup races, highlighted by a 21st in the skate sprint in Canmore.
Pulles’s UAF teammate, Kalev, joined her at NCAA Championships, where he was 14th and 17th. Kalev was fifth in the 10km classic at U.S. Nationals, and fifth in the classic sprint at a December SuperTour in Anchorage. He had strong results throughout the RMISA season, with best finishes there of 6th and 8th, both in 20km classic races. Kalev started five of the six North American World Cup races, with a best finish of 48th, in the 15km skate in Canmore.
I do not believe that Paul Schommer raced last season; he underwent knee surgery in spring 2023.)
What does the coaching staff have to say?
Here’s head coach Julie Ensrud on some of the highlights of summer training:
“Summer has been great in my eyes. Our athletes have put in high quality training — volume, intensity, strength and even done some racing like the Shoreline, Inline Marathon, Birkie Trail run and some of the loppet events like the City Trail Loppet. It has been a summer of introducing our new team members to the area and trying to show off what the city has to offer for skiers. It has been a warm summer, so lots of focus on fueling and managing the heat. As a coach it is an exciting time as we quickly see the athletes get faster, stronger and better by showing up every day.
“Right now we are turning our eyes towards the annual Park City camp with the other clubs and USST which will be a great period before we hope for some snowfall soon after!”
And here’s High Performance Director Chad Salmela on his evolving role within the program, and the overall growth and trajectory of the team:
“We were really excited to bring Julie on as the head coach. I held the title last year, but the team last year was quite small by comparison, and I was not in a position to do more work than last year. We needed Julie for this to work, and she’s doing a wonderful job as the head coach.
“I am working as the High Performance Manager, which is more descriptive of what I’ve always done. Julie has done a tremendous job of wearing the many, many hats a program like this needs in a head coach, and we’ve had a really great group of athletes at all levels work through our summer programs. It was a very packed and energy-filled summer with a lot of great training vibes and energy. Erin Moening and Jake Stiele recruited, coached, and managed the College Summer and Development teams — which are massive in their own rights — as well as the Regional and Marathon teams.
“The whole Team Birkie grew this summer and we felt it! It has us motivated for a great winter on snow. We just tested before the team goes out to Park City, to identify how the athletes have responded to the training we’ve done, to catch any adjustments we might want to consider as we head into specific preparation for racing in less than two months.”
How can you get more information or follow the team? website | Instagram | blog
See also:
recent Extra Blue podcast episode on Team Birkie (Extra Blue is the podcast project of team member Alayna Sonnesyn; this episode looks at Team Birkie specifically)
Zak Ketterson’s blog (updated infrequently)
Zak Ketterson’s Strava (updated frequently)
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, last season’s GoFundMe may be found here. Thank you for your consideration, and, especially, for reading.
