By Gavin Kentch
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It is once again time for the annual feature in which I prognosticate who will be named to the national team when official nominations for next season come out. Because this article is increasingly well-received every year (apparently this is information that people are curious about, who knew), let me just give you my take up front, then show my work below. I will say here only that I am batting 1.000 when it comes to objective selections for the national team and the Olympics roster over the last half-dozen or so times I have written a version of this article. We will, to be sure, see about this year, but I have a promising track record here.
Without further ado, the following athletes have, on my analysis, met the objective criteria for nomination to the U.S. Cross Country Ski Team for 2026/2027. Club affiliations are my own.
A-Team
men
Ben Ogden (SMS)
JC Schoonmaker (APU)
Gus Schumacher (APU)
women
[on paper: Jessie Diggins (SMS)]
B-Team
men
John Steel Hagenbuch (Sun Valley)
Zak Ketterson (Team Birkie)
Zanden McMullen (APU)
Jack Young (Craftsbury)
women
Julia Kern (SMS)
Kendall Kramer (APU)
Novie McCabe (APU)
Sammy Smith (Stanford University)
Ava Thurston (currently Dartmouth, though she graduates soon)
D-Team
men
Corbin Carpenter (University of Alaska Anchorage)
Tabor Greenberg (University of Vermont)
Zach Jayne (currently University of Utah, though he graduates soon)
Murphy Kimball (University of Alaska Anchorage)
Jack Leveque (Alaska Winter Stars)
women
Neve Gerard (University of Utah)
Showing my work, plus some thoughts for USSS Legal
This analysis is based off of this year’s USSS team naming criteria document, which you can find here. You can find World Cup discipline standings here, and the relevant FIS world rankings here. If you would like a compilation of which skiers finished in the top x positions y times in various international race series, a criterion that frequently occurs in this year’s USSS document in various iterations, well, that’s the value that I’m adding with this article, since it’s hard to make the FIS database tell you this without a lot of prodding.
If you read the raw data of race results and world rankings against the standards set forth in the criteria document, you get the nineteen, or really more like eighteen, names set forth above. As to that discrepancy, what do we do with the only entry for the A-Team women, “on paper: Jessie Diggins”? Strictly speaking, I am reading here from a document entitled “Team Nomination Criterion” (the final word in the title should more properly be the plural “criteria,” but, different issue). So the focus here is on who will be nominated, I suspect some time soonish, as opposed to officially named, this fall, a process that presumptively involves athletes declining or accepting team nominations in advance of a team-naming press release.
By the time that USSS moves to officially name the team this fall, I assume that Diggins will no longer possess a “valid … FIS license,” at least on the assumption that “valid” is synonymous with “active.” Additionally or in the alternative, she could simply decline the nomination if things get that far.
Finally, as an aside for U.S. Ski & Snowboard and/or its lawyers, the criteria document reads to me as unintentionally ambiguous on the question of how to treat results in team competitions vis-à-vis potential nomination to the B-Team. The top of page two refers, in the second bullet point under A-Team qualification, to “an individual … podium” at the 2026 Winter Olympics or during the 2025/2026 World Cup season, then in the third to qualifying finishes in “individual … competitions.” And the bottom of page three similarly refers to an “individual … result” as a means for D-Team qualification, multiple times. This is pretty clear, and in keeping with prior practice for team naming; so far, so good.
But. Between them, on the bottom half of page two, the first three bullet points under B-Team qualification refer simply to “results,” not to “individual results.” The fourth and fifth bullet points, by contrast, again refer to “individual” results, as does the first potential tiebreaker on page three.
If I knew nothing about the sport, or prior custom in this area, I would assume that the careful use of “individual” everywhere in this document save this one section was intentional, and so we should look not only to individual but also to team results, on the World Cup and/or Olympic level, for potential B-Team athletes born in 1997 through 2002. Expressio unius est exclusio alterius, and all that. In practice, I know that this interpretation does an injury to everything I have historically seen in team selection, and so I will let it be. But I do want to flag this, in a spirit of service; suffice to say that people feel strongly about ambiguities in USSS selection documents.
(What does this look like on the ground? Under this theory, someone like Lauren Jortberg (YOB 1997) picks up a top-20 World Cup result for her 15th-place finish in the team sprint in Goms. I didn’t fully run the numbers to definitively establish whether there exists an athlete who would be off the team via individual results only but on the team if you also include team events; my strong sense is that this is in fact a null set. This year. Someone at USSS Legal should feel fortunate that Hailey Swirbul, who has one Olympics top-20 finish to her name from 2025/2026, didn’t also start a World Cup team sprint and relay last season; things could get messy fast.)
Anyway. Here is the basis for objective qualification to the national team for each athlete set forth in the first part of this article.
A-Team
Ben Ogden (basis or bases for qualification: top-15 World Cup sprint ranking at the end of last season; individual Olympic medal; three or more top-12 World Cup or Olympic finishes last season)
JC Schoonmaker (three or more top-12 World Cup or Olympic finishes)
Gus Schumacher (top-15 World Cup distance ranking; individual World Cup podiums; three or more top-12 World Cup or Olympic finishes)
[Jessie Diggins (top-15 World Cup sprint ranking; top-15 World Cup distance ranking; individual Olympic and World Cup podiums; approximately one million top-12 World Cup or Olympic finishes)]
B-Team
John Steel Hagenbuch (top-100 world rank for distance for male athlete born in 2001 or later)
Zak Ketterson (three or more top-20 World Cup or Olympic finishes for athlete born in 1997)
Zanden McMullen (three or more top-30 World Cup or Olympic finishes for athlete born in 2001; top-100 world rank for distance for male athlete born in 2001 or later)
Jack Young (three or more top-30 World Cup or Olympic finishes for athlete born in 2002; top-80 world rank for sprint for male athlete born in 2001 or later)
Julia Kern (three or more top-20 World Cup or Olympic finishes for athlete born in 1997)
Kendall Kramer (three or more top-30 World Cup or Olympic finishes for athlete born in 2002; top-80 world rank for distance for female athlete born in 2001 or later)
Novie McCabe (three or more top-30 World Cup or Olympic finishes for athlete born in 2001)
Sammy Smith (three or more top-30 World Cup or Olympic finishes for athlete born in 2001 or later; top-80 world rank for sprint for female athlete born in 2001 or later)
Ava Thurston (two top-10 finishes at 2026 U23 Championships for athlete born in 2003 or later)
D-Team
Corbin Carpenter (one top-10 finish at 2026 World Juniors for athlete born in 2003–2005)
Tabor Greenberg (one top-10 finish at 2026 World Juniors for athlete born in 2006; top-400 world rank for distance for male athlete born in 2006)
Zach Jayne (one top-30 World Cup result for athlete born in 2003 or later)
Murphy Kimball (one top-10 finish at 2026 World Juniors for athlete born in 2006; top-250 world rank for sprint for male athlete born in 2006)
Jack Leveque (one top-10 finish at 2026 World Juniors for athlete born in 2006 or later)
Neve Gerard (one top-10 finish at 2026 World Juniors for athlete born in 2006)
On team size and discretionary nods
The total size of the national team over the past decade-ish has ranged from 27 athletes, in 2024/2025, to 16 athletes, for three years in a row from 2016/2017 through 2018/2019. Last year saw 21 athletes on the national team total: the 16 whom I accurately identified as qualifying on an objective basis in this article, plus five more who were named on a discretionary basis, largely due to illness or injury (Rosie Brennan, Novie McCabe, Jack Lange, Fin Bailey, and Haley Brewster).
So… who, if anyone, comes in via discretion this year? Brennan, maybe, under an injury/illness theory, though that feels like a harder sell this year than last tbh. Maybe Sydney Palmer-Leger, who I am sorry to say has had a pretty snakebitten few seasons here, culminating in both a broken foot and a mono diagnosis last season alone. Lange and Bailey both raced broadly this year, so probably not qua illness? I don’t make the rules. Hailey Swirbul, in theory, under the “indicia of medal potential” criterion — her palmarès through age 24 clearly stand alone among active American skiers — but it has been ages since anyone came in on purely discretionary criteria like that (KO in 2020 comes to mind, though don’t quote me on that having necessarily been the last such pick), and I don’t personally see USSS doing that here. And I say this as a Hailey stan for the past, yikes, decade now.
Finally, Sophia Laukli feels like a sort of sui generis injury case. An argument for naming her to this year’s team is that the potential is clearly there! An argument against it is that she is, like, really starting from square one here; this is an athlete who took five weeks entirely off from skiing in the middle of the season, returning only at the level of walking on skis (see Instagram embed from March 23 above). Personally speaking, I would name her to the team if I were USSS, just to show her that she was included and not forgotten, but that is definitely the heart speaking here, not the head. I truly do not know what will happen with Laukli. Probably she does get named, by analogy to Novie McCabe’s status at this point last season? Hopefully Laukli can follow a similar trajectory for her return.
On a mostly unrelated note, it appears that this will be the first year with no women on the A-Team (or, previously, the World Cup Team) since at least 2005/2006, when the team had just five athletes on it total, all men.
Congratulations to all athletes named to the national team this year. Official announcement from USSS should come within the spring, at which point you can all see whether I got this right again or not.
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