By Gavin Kentch
Welcome to Nordic Insights 2.0. We’re still working out what weekly coverage will look like this season, but I can tell you now that we are sending Peter Minde to 2027 U.S. Nationals in Cable, marking the fifth consecutive year that we will have in-person coverage from the most important domestic races of the season. We truly believe in the value of boots-on-the-ground reporting, but, real talk, I will lose money on this venture. Peter will lose even more money. You should donate here to help cover his travel expenses so that he loses less money. Thank you for consideration, and thank you, as always, for reading.
Matt Whitcomb will leave his position as head coach of the U.S. Ski Team following the 2026/2027 season to become the new head of school at Burke Mountain Academy, a private alpine ski school in Vermont, according to a press release from BMA. The move will bring to an end Whitcomb’s two-decade coaching role with the national team.
The news was first reported in a BMA press release dated October 30, which was largely reprinted in this story from local outlet North Star Monthly. It was first reported in the ski media sphere by Ryan Sederquist of Seder-Skier earlier today; massive shoutout to Sederquist for noticing this. “Seems like there should have been a press release about this … or a story… or something …,” Sederquist sagely notes (ellipses in original).
So here’s your story, or at least a brief version of same. And, again, many thanks to Sederquist for bringing this news to my inbox.
[photo: This is the only photo of Whitcomb tagged as such in Getty Images. Fittingly, for a man who has always cared deeply about the people around him, he is hugging an athlete, Rosie Brennan.]
Embed from Getty ImagesWhitcomb’s New England roots are strong: He grew up in Worthington, Massachusetts, where he raced for Wahconah Regional High School, home of the Warriors. He attended Stratton as an athlete, then skied for Middlebury College; he graduated from there in 2001. He spent a season coaching for Glacier Nordic in Montana, then returned to Vermont in 2002 to spend four years at Burke as the Head Nordic Coach.
Whitcomb moved to the U.S. Ski Team in 2006. He has publicly credited the success of his then-BMA athlete, Liz Stephen, for helping him land the attention of the national team. His job title for his first Olympic quadrennial-plus was Head Development Coach; this gave way to Head Women’s Coach in 2012, then to Head Coach in ca. 2020.
When Whitcomb first joined the USST, the national-team roster looked, in its entirety, like this: Kris Freeman, Andrew Johnson, Torin Koos, Andy Newell, Carl Swenson. The team now has 21 athletes for the 2026/2027 season, and has averaged roughly 23 athletes over the past several years. There are even women on the national team now, too!
To get a little elegiac here, Whitcomb was on scene for the Kikkan era, the Kikkan-and-Jessie era, the Jessie era, and, at least for this season, the post-Jessie era (“the Gus and Ben era”?). He was with the national team for Torino in 2006, and, again in Italy, at Milano–Cortina in 2026. In his tenure the team won, by my count, six Olympic and ten World Championships medals.
In probably the single most noteworthy entry on his CV, Whitcomb also appeared in this USST “Uptown Funk” parody video in 2015; you can see him, impressively bearded, starting at the 2:47 mark of same:
On a personal note, Whitcomb graciously handled my noob-reporter questions at a national-team camp in Anchorage in 2016, one of my first official “assignments” for another ski news website. I conducted a ten-minute interview with him without flaming out too spectacularly, then in a moment of nervous inattention somehow managed to delete my audio at the end of the interview rather than save it. A completely unperturbed Whitcomb promptly redid the entire exchange with me when I confessed my error. Whitcomb is not perfect — no one in skiing is — but I cannot write around the fact that he has always been gracious and kind and available to me as media (also to Nat, and others), and I clearly wish him well. May his new job give him a respite from replying to my emails at 11 p.m. his time on world champs race days.
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Back to reporting: “Feeling grateful for my past, present, and future,” Whitcomb wrote last week in a brief note on his personal Facebook page above the hiring announcement from BMA. “My community means everything to me, and it’s about to grow. For now, the hammer is down on one final season with the U.S. Ski & Snowboard Team XC.”
USSS does not seem to have any news about this up on its site at present.
In the BMA press release, Whitcomb says, “Burke Mountain Academy shaped me as a coach in my 20s. After 20 years coaching the U.S. Ski Team and learning to become the best leader I can be, I’m excited to return to where it all began. When I explain BMA to people, I tell them it’s a place where kids come to pursue their dreams of becoming great ski racers. And that does happen. But along the way, they also learn about team culture, grit, character, and how to contribute to society. They learn to be part of something bigger than themselves, not to mention how to outwork the competition before breakfast. I’ve always been impressed by BMA graduates.”
“The opportunity to work with Jesse Hunt, whom I know from our shared years at U.S. Ski & Snowboard, and BMA’s exceptional leadership team and staff was a big inspiration for me. I’m excited to join that team and come home to be a part of the BMA magic again.”
Barring a significant change at a pedigreed private institution that celebrates its commitment to “excellence in alpine ski racing” (emphasis added), the move brings to a close, for the time being, the nordic skiing–centric portion of Whitcomb’s professional life. The school, the alma mater of Olympians Liz Stephen and Ida Sargent, does not currently have a nordic team; previous attempts to resuscitate same have… not gone over well.
I plan to catch up with Whitcomb soon for a longer piece on this news, and his thoughts ahead of his final season with the national team. Stay tuned.
