Eastern Highschool Championships

The last official race of the season was the Eastern Highschool Champs, up in Rumford ME. CSU sent pretty much every kid to this race on the Massachusetts team, and I was head coach, which meant I could make all the other coaches do the work while I ate brownies and watched the races.



Race venue was Black Mountain of Maine, in Rumford. I love this race course, it's hard but fair, with some good climbing and lots of skiing, not just a highway. I don't love the smell of the town of Rumford, but that paper mill employs a lot of people, so can't complain too much. Usually the wind is blowing the right way to take the smell away from the ski area.

Love how many women we have on our coaching staff. I think we may even outnumber the men on this team, not a normal thing in the ski coaching world. Brian Burt photo.

Caught in the act of actually doing some work. Brian Burt photo.

First race of the weekend was Friday's 5k skate. Turns out the Massachusetts boys all brought their A-games this year, and absolutely carried the team. The CSU boys were a large part of that, led by senior Oliver in 5th, then James in 6th, Ayden in 16th (huge race for him!), Jackson in 18th, and Jacob in 21st. That was just the first page! Laura led the girls in 6th, with Shea 11th, Madeline 13th, Amelia 21st and Rebecca 25th. Super strong showing for first-page results, though unfortunately Mass also had a reasonable showing on the last-page results, too, for the girls.

Saturday morning started with a mass start classic race. Hardwax in March! It's always great when EHS isn't a total klister-fest. We had more great results from my CSU kids, and mass starts are so exciting to watch. Laura moved up into 4th, skiing the whole race with the lead pack, followed by Shea in 9th, Madeline 15th, Rebecca 16th, and Amelia 26th. The boys absolutely sent it again, led by James in 2nd, Jacob in 6th, Oliver 18th, Henry 22nd, Jackson 24th, and Linden 27th.

Start of the girls' mass start. Winter conditions.

Boys' mass start, OSnow in a good start

Saturday afternoon was the sprints, wave starts with one skier from each state in each wave. That's a super fun format for spectating, again, and I really enjoyed watching the races. Mass had a great day in the sprints, and we ended up 2nd among all the teams after the three individual races. On the boys' side, CSU put 10 in the top 33! That's pretty good for a single club that trains on a golf course in eastern MA. Huge results Alex, Kevin, Dwight, Connor, and Thor, stepping way up.

The final race of the weekend is the mixed-gender/mixed-technique relay. This is my favorite race of the weekend, because the kids tend to absolutely send it. Nothing makes you work hard like doing it for a teammate! We had a couple really good relay teams, and it was a super exciting race to watch. We took the silver medal, which was the first year in the last eight or something that we haven't won the relay, but that was a tall order this year with Ben Ogden on the VT team. He put something like a 40-second gap on the field, which is almost impossible to make up. But in making that move, it strung out the pack, and Jacob was able to hang on for a little while, buying some time for the rest of his team.

Our second relay also had a great ski, with some really gutsy moves along the way. They ended up in 7th, and our third relay was 11th, just 0.1 seconds out of 10th. NH ended up beating us on the day, but not by enough to move ahead, so Mass held on to the silver medal position! I'm super proud of this team and my CSU kids, the guts and determination and attitudes they brought made a huge difference in both the results and the professionalism on the team.

My boy Jackson absolutely crushing the last leg of his relay. Brian Burt photo. 

Start of the relay, Laura and Kate in good position

My kids skied great. This senior class was the one who had been on the fateful bus trip from Fort Kent four years ago, and it was great fun to have them close out their Highschool careers at this event. I was super psyched to see the great attitudes everyone brought. Lots of positive energy, fast skiing, and some heavy snotcicles.

The relay podium, Mass in second place! 

 Thanks to all my coaches who did the actual work! Hilary Greene, Robert Bradlee, Maddy Wendt, peter Rayton, Frank Feist, Gunther Kern, Dorothee Kern, Susannah Wheelwright, Hiram Greene, Graham Taylor. And a huge thanks to NENSA, Amber Dodge Freeman, and Chisholm Ski Club for hosting this great event!

March coaching

March has all the fun marathons, but it also has all the big championship events for the juniors, and this year I put the coaching first. I coached at Junior Nationals for team New England, and then turned around and led the Massachusetts team at Eastern High School Championships. 

Junior Nationals

JNs this year was in Lake Placid, the site of my last JNs when I was a kid. Unfortunately due to low snow they had to move the venue from Van Hoevenburg to the Olympic Jump Complex, which meant the courses got a lot less interesting to ski, with a lot more hill. It was about 60m from the bottom to the top, with very little recovery along the way. The NE team showed their fitness, and left nothing to chance, dominating the entire week. I was in charge of the U20 women's team, and they were a great group. Positive, supportive, and super speedy, headed by Julia Kern, who came through the CSU program. Now she's off racing World Cups, and she showed that she was at a totally different level during the week of junior competitions. Case in point: winning the sprint qualifier by 24 seconds.

JKern and Mackenzie on the podium after the 5k skate

They called themselves the lady bosses. Pretty accurate.

I was super impressed with the quality of this event - the organizers did a fabulous job, with a "chillax" zone for the athletes, an ice cream social and ice skating during mid-week awards, and excellent facilities during the races. Team NE got to stay at the Olympic Training Center, which is always a cool experience for these kids. And with Superior Timing in charge, the racing side of things went off without a hitch. 

I may have escaped one afternoon and trotted up Cascade. love those high peaks. Thank you Inov-8 for my metal-studded Arctic Talons, or that would have been a sketchy run in places.

The jumps made an impressive backdrop to our racing. We had a wide variety of weather, from sunny and 40+ degrees to snow squalls to -8F for the relay morning. Here, a storm rolls in during the sprint heats.

CSU had sent 7 current athletes to JNs; we came away with three all-Americans (top 10 in their age class) and everybody having at least one top-thirty result. Rob and I were there for coaches, but what's great about JNs is that the team is well-integrated, with all the kids hanging out together rather than club-by-club.

Eastern High School Championships

This year, Easterns was up at Mountaintop Inn and Resort, in central VT. We'd just gotten a big nor'easter dump, which allowed the event to use all the trails rather than their 2km manmade loop. That was almost too close for comfort, but the venue and event staff did a fabulous job getting everything packed and ready for the 200-odd skiers and their four races. I had a great coaching staff working for me, which meant that I mostly got to ski around and watch the races. (ok, I may have done a little more work than that given how tired I was on Monday, but largely, I just enjoyed skiing in beautiful conditions). 

CSU qualified every skier who was of age (although two girls ended up not going, one because of illness and one injured), and most of them skied really well. We made up a large part of the team, with the Greylock ski team making up most of the rest of the spots, with occasional other kids. I was psyched to see them all getting along well; sometimes you have problems bringing a lot of ski teams together but most of these guys know each other pretty well. 

Maddy and I got out during the boys' classic race

Drool.

Team Massachusetts!

After the first three races (5k skate, 7.5k classic, and 1.2k skate), we were in third place, about 600 points behind NH, but only 130 points ahead of ME. VT was way out front with like a 2000 point lead. The relay teams are mixed gender, mixed technique, and our goal was to try and close that gap to NH. Our girls had been holding even, but the boys had been losing ground steadily every day, so this was going to be difficult. Luckily, the boys really upped their game, and we ended up winning the relay, and only a 30-point deficit to NH on the day! After first place our depth dropped quickly, but I was still really proud of the kids for all skiing well above their abilities.

Frank and I out during the sprint race

Pretty idyllic setting

Jeff, Maddy, and I discussing who knows what. Probably waiting for doughnuts.

With that, the ski season is over. We still have some snow, so may eke out a couple more Tuesday night races, and I may have spent an hour practicing my jump skills at Weston yesterday, but I'm looking forward to the "off" season. If only for the relief from driving to practice!

Eastern Highschool Championships

Each season usually wraps up with a championship race for the juniors, whether it is Junior Nationals, U16 Championships, or Eastern Highschool Champs. The U16 and EHS champs are where the states are pitted against each other, and CSU makes up a large portion of the Massachusetts Team. I love coaching these events, because it is always fun to watch my skiers really throw down when it matters.

Last year I coached the U16 trip, and this year it was EHS. We were up at Rikert Nordic, which harvested snow masterfully through this bleak season, and despite the weather stay above freezing for the entire week before, we managed to have our four races. If it hadn't dropped below freezing on Friday night I think we might have been SOL, but they worked some serious magic defying mother nature last weekend.

Conditions were seriously treacherous each day, for varying reasons. There were the deep ruts in the slush, grabbing your skis and sending you sideways into the woods. There was the icy mass start on a downhill into a 180-degree corner with 110 skiers. There was glare ice on the uphills, glare ice on the downhill corners, and glare ice in the tag zone of the relay. We had one broken thumb, two broken skis, a slew of broken poles, a sprained wrist and a lot of bruises from some pile-ups in the mass start. We had skiers fall off the trail into the mud, bounce back up and keep skiing without skipping a beat. We had crashes in the tag zone. It was a weekend about rising above the challenges and reaching past your limits, and I saw some seriously impressive performances. Of course not all my skiers were happy with their races, but you could tell who had kept training through the last month of crappy training conditions, and who had given up. The Mass team showed their mettle, and I was impressed.


Matt and Oliver slogging through the ankle-deep slush and mud.

My job as head coach this weekend was really easy. We had a large coaching staff, and the parent wax team for in the trenches. I mostly stood around and leaned on my poles. Got a chance to watch all the races, talk to each kid before and after the races, and even go on a couple course tours! What a treat. It's easy to run a large team like this when they're so good at what they do.


The view from the "team" side of the team photo.

That definitely marks the end of a painful ski season. We were struggling pretty hard to keep doing this sport all winter, and it is actually a huge weight off my shoulders now that I no longer have to worry about what we'll be doing for practice. Ironically, it snowed 4" on Sunday night in Boston...

Here's to the spring racing season!