By Peter Minde
STRATTON, Vermont — Having met the new kids on the block at Mansfield Pro Nordic not quite a year ago, another spring road trip to visit Vermont-based professional ski clubs seemed in order. Gavin and I have discussed the inefficiency of driving 150 miles one way, on back roads, to an interview, instead of picking up the phone and dialing. But I’ll be housebound from the end of May for a while after the other knee gets replaced; I need to get out.
Colin Rodgers, SMS T2 program director and head coach, kindly consented to an interview. I wrangled a pet sitter, gassed up the shooting brake (an extremely fancy way of saying station wagon), and absquatulated up to Stratton. On a blazing, bright Monday morning in early May, I drove past the Stratton alpine hill to meet Rodgers at Stratton Mountain School.
SMS began in 1972 as the brainchild of Warren Hellman and Donald Tarinelli. They wanted a milieu where their children could get an education while also preparing for top-level alpine skiing. Initially, parents provided housing, until the school moved into the defunct Hotel Tyrol at Stratton’s base. (For those reading this from outside the northeast, ersatz Swiss chalet/alpine architectural motifs dominated Vermont resort architecture in the 1960s.) In a casually sexist article from just a few years earlier, the New York Times recommended Hotel Tyrol as “fine for singles with a bit of money.” While the story focuses on alpine, it’s an interesting read into the gestalt of the ski scene 56 years ago. No paywall.
To this day, Manchester, Vermont, downhill from Stratton and the other alpine and nordic ski centers, remains affluent, as the 1970 Times author observed. Unfortunately, in Vermont’s bougiest town, a good espresso is hard to come by. Adding insult to injury, it was served in a paper cup. In the name of all that’s holy, please do better. (The astute reader will observe a Boomer correspondent desperately trying to remain relevant, writing “bougie” instead of the archaic “swanky.”) [You really ate with this one. –Ed.]
It is unknown how Hotel Tyrol went from swingers’ magnet to insolvency, but it served the growing ski academy for over 20 years. In 1999, SMS opened an actual campus in the same area, replete with dormitories, dining hall, classrooms, and faculty offices.
The cross-country skiing pro team came along in 2012, under the school’s auspices, and quickly became one of the country’s powerhouse teams. This historic article on the club’s founding, from May 2012, is entitled, “With Elite Team, Stratton Aims To Create ‘Hotbed of Skiing’ in Southern Vermont.” Hindsight is 20/20, but this seems to have worked out pretty well.
The team was initially coached by Gus Kaeding, alongside SMS lifer Sverre Caldwell. It was later helmed by Pat O’Brien (2014–2022), Perry Thomas and Maria Stuber (2022–2024), then just Stuber (2024–2025). Rodgers was announced as head coach in April 2025.
Matt Boobar, SMS’s nordic program director, arrived to accompany Rodgers and a reporter on a tour of the school. The strength training rooms alone are impressive, and include an indoor ramp for the freestyle skiers to practice aerial moves, using skis and snowboards equipped with inline skate wheels. The school even has its own physical therapy office. There’s a 10-kilometer nordic trail system, and if students need a change of scenery, Wild Wings and VIking are right up the road.
Afterwards, Rodgers, Boobar, and I sat down in a conference room to chat. Sunlight streamed into the window behind Rodgers, lighting up the room and framing Rodgers in silhouette. The following conversation is lightly edited for clarity
Like Mansfield Nordic to the north, SMS T2 welcomes college skiers to train over the summer.
“We’ve had a summer training group of college athletes for years,” Rodgers said. “It’s an NCAA training program for the summer, and the athletes are able to train with some of the very best in the world. When you’ve got athletes like Ben and Jessie and Julia around, it’s an inspiring place to be training out of. There’s some serious draw to training with these athletes.”
Although he moved to SMS T2 from Green Mountain Valley School, a high school ski academy located in Waitsfield, Rodgers has prior experience coaching at the elite level. From 2012 to 2016, he was the head coach for the SVSEF Gold Team, working with athletes like Mikey Sinnott, Miles Havlick, and Chelsea Holmes (also, briefly, Simi Hamilton, before the sprinter headed east to join what was at the time the new program at… SMS).
“I was coaching elite, older athletes” at Sun Valley, Rodgers said. “Last year, I transitioned back into that role. Obviously, I had Ben, Jessie, Julia, Rémi [Drolet], who were athletes that were all very competitive at the highest level, in the World Cup. We had high-level athletes when I was on the Gold Team too, but we didn’t have overall World Cup winners. I think the foundation of what we’re doing day in and day out, is not all that different” from what they were doing at Sun Valley ten years ago.
Moving to SMS T2, Rodgers said, gave him the chance to learn not only from the athletes, but also from other coaches. “It was great to work with Jason [Cork],” Rodgers said. “He’s been here, working with the T2 program in the summertime now for, I think, 12 or 13 years.”
On Jessie Diggins’s retirement, Rodgers said, “Jessie will leave a huge hole for sure, but there’s really strong athletes that are coming up right behind. She’s paved the way for a good future. The men’s team is right there, and you got athletes like Julia right there, and, yeah, we’ll fill the void.”
“I’ve been here since the inception of the elite team,” Boobar said. “Of course, [there’s] a huge hole in Diggins leaving, but it’s also a massive opportunity to rethink how people want to approach things.”
How do you mean?
“Diggins had her way of training, which worked really well for her,” Boobar continued. “Are there other ways to look at programming that maybe no one thought of? Because people were kind of keying off what was clearly highly successful training” for Diggins.
Rodgers pointed out that Ben Ogden and Julia Kern also had custom-tailored training plans. “I think the reason that this team has been so successful, it’s the program and the community that’s created around the team and the support network,” Rodgers said. He credited both Matt Boobar and longtime SMS coach Sverre Caldwell with building a culture of excellence.
“And it’s not only about the skiing, but it’s also the balance between how we can connect with the next generation of skiers coming up and junior development and inspiring the next generation. I think that that’s a huge part of what we do here, and it’s also one of the reasons why we’re looked at in such a positive light. When Jessie, Ben, Julia, and Rémi go on the road, they’re trying to be at their very best athletically, but they’re also connecting with the local communities around them.”
When one looks at clubs like the Green Racing Project or APU, one sees rosters of twenty or more athletes (some on GRP are biathletes). Is there a conscious decision to keep SMS T2 smaller?
“We’re trying to give every athlete the opportunity to get really world-class training and support,” Rodgers said. “We can only afford to support so many athletes at that level.”
Rodgers said that the elite skiers receive financial support from a nonprofit called World Cup Dreams Foundation, whose mission is “empowering America’s top snowsport athletes.” The T2 Foundation and World Cup Dreams Foundation merged in 2021, though T2 is still mentioned in the full name of the club.
“I think a key part is the mission, right?” Boobar said. “‘International excellence, local inspiration.’ That’s your mission.”
Boobar stressed Sverre Caldwell’s vision: to get post-college athletes to the World Cup. “We want to be a stepping stool, not a parking lot, as far as keeping people on [the] SuperTour indefinitely.”
In this scheme, the core group is keyed into international competition. The goal of the summer program is to prepare younger, college athletes for the SuperTour and, hopefully, for international competition. “The goal isn’t to be on the SuperTour for five years, and maybe not quite making that jump,” Boobar said. “That’s definitely how I interpreted it from Sverre.”
Boobar also credited collaboration with other coaches for SMS’s success, citing, for example, Patrick Weaver (head nordic coach at UVM), Kristen Bourne (USST), and Cork as coaches who had helped them to effectively manage individual training plans for multiple athletes. “How do we keep it as a team workout as much as we can, but also meeting individual needs, which is probably the biggest challenge being an elite coach, versus what I do in high school coaching,” Boobar said.
SMS T2 and APU are the two dominant U.S. ski clubs these days, and have been for years now; 2026 marked the first time that any club other than SMS or APU won the mixed relay at Spring Series, an event first held in 2014, and SMS and APU perennially claim an outsized share of USST athletes. Between SMS and APU, one of those teams is based in a place where winter lasts longer than just about anywhere else on the continent. Does the amount of on-snow time that APU skiers get give them an advantage?
“A lot of Alaskans are coming into Ruka [Period 1] super prepared, because they’ve been skiing on snow for a few weeks prior to getting over to Finland,” Rodgers said. “So that’s an advantage for sure, but it doesn’t mean you can’t be competitive.”
“It levels out after the first few weeks of the World Cup, that on-snow advantage,” Boobar added.
And now, the nitty gritty, the secret sauce. Have training plans evolved, have you had an aha moment with a breakthrough, magical workout? Or is it all just gradual evolution from one year to the next?
According to Rodgers, it really is all just about the fundamentals. Lots of hours in level one. Add in intervals and speed work. Also strength. Cultivate mental toughness. The only secret is that there is no secret, as they say.
“You’re not really doing too many things that are all that high level, super fancy, cutting edge,” Rodgers said. “You hear about athletes that are trying to do new things, and sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t. But the gist of what basic training philosophy is is, you have to train hard. It takes years and years and years of hard training. That’s why the best athletes are generally older.”
Those who become superstars at a younger age (looking at you, Klæbo), may have had guidance from exceptional teachers or coaches as kids.
“I think we’re fortunate right now to have great teachers, folks that have taught us a lot as coaches that are our peers and a little bit older than us,” Rodgers said. “Stratton has a huge tradition of really good skiers and people that are very knowledgeable. You think back to Bill Koch, John Caldwell, Mike Gallagher, folks that are hugely inspirational for U.S. cross-country skiing. I mean, they’re all from right around here.”
Should a young skier go to college and get NCAA starts, or go straight into full-time training?
“The [U.S.] Ski Team has flip flopped on that 1,000 percent, way back when Sophie [Caldwell] was coming up,” Boobar said. “She was in Dartmouth and was a little bit behind the curve on national team stuff. Maybe, like eight years ago, they realized the value of trying to use college as a development tool because of the level of support they get. There’s no financial commitment, really, to college, so they’re trying to balance that.”
(For a deep dive on this enduring question, particularly a look at how, as Boobar notes, the pendulum has completely swung within a generation, compare these two articles by Nat Herz: this one, from 2009, on the perception that NCAA skiing was not the best stepping stone for international success, and this one, from 2022, in which Matt Whitcomb says that an approach to development that did not welcome NCAA skiing was “an error.”)
What about the depth of the American ski pool. What are the limiting steps?
“I think a little bit is talent ID,” Boobar said. “We have so many bigger sports in the U.S., and only, what, a third of the country [skis], or really less than that.”
Within that smaller group, kids that might have become standout skiers may gravitate to other sports. Durango native Sepp Kuss’s father coached the U.S. Ski Team from 1963 to 1972; his mother taught nordic skiing. But he chose bike racing. Currently, he’s 19th overall in the Giro d’Italia, riding with Team Visma–Lease a Bike. In 2023, he won the Vuelta a España. Courtney Dauwalter won state high school skiing championships in Minnesota and attended the University of Denver on a ski scholarship. Instead of continuing to ski, she chose ultrarunning, where her palmarès include wins at Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc, Hardrock (clockwise course record), and Western States (course record). Scott Jurek, a Duluth native who ski raced in high school, turned to running instead, winning Western States seven times in a row. What kind of skiers would they have been?
In that vein, would having an additional top-level club or two in this country increase the talent pool of American cross-country skiing?
“I think it’s nice to have fewer clubs that are executing at the highest level, versus more clubs that aren’t able to execute at the highest level,” Rodgers said. “If you really want to get the most out of each athlete, it’s best to have the programs that can really support the athletes to get to where they really want to get to and reach their ultimate goals.”
Finally, what else should people know that wasn’t asked about here?
“One of the reasons this program is so successful, we’re really true to our roots,” Rodgers said. “Matt mentioned our mission. It’s so simple: international success and local inspiration. It’s a great program to be a part of.”
Currently on the SMS roster: Elite Team: Haley Brewster, Rémi Drolet, Zach Jayne, Julia Kern, and Ben Ogden; Development Team: Fin Bailey, Tabor Greenberg, and Jack Lange; NCAA summer training group: Micah Bruner, Finn Christiansen, Nathan Doughty, Joe Graziadei, Miles Miner, and Luke Rizio.
