Midwest Collegiate Skiing

This week my alma mater, Gustavus, became the most recent school to transition from NCAA to club skiing. I have been through this before when I was a freshman at Carleton and chose to transfer to Gustavus after Carleton cut their ski program. Since I graduated from Gustavus I have been a ski coach, and in my current role with the Loppet Foundation I have put a great deal of thought into the development of Midwest skiing. I want to begin by saying that the Gustavus team means the world to me. It is where I met my best friends and is an enormous part of who I am today. I have also seen many programs transitioned to club status and know that the decision has never been reversed. Until recently I always felt this was a defeat. But I have begun to develop a different perspective, seeing this as an opportunity. Here I want to provide a vision for the collegiate piece of Midwest skiing, and make the argument that transitioning away from NCAA to club teams could be beneficial.

In my position at the Loppet Foundation, I work from the vision that children in the Twin Cities will learn skiing from grade school, have access to teams in middle school and high school and will move on to a college where they can continue to compete at skiing. Competition means different things to different people, so let me simplify this argument by focusing on high-competition, providing the support needed for an athlete to develop to an Olympic level skier. The assumption I am making is that if the community has built support for this type of development, then it will also inherently support the thousands of non-Olympic level athletes who are inspired by our top level athletes.

To those of us who are close to this sport, the most tangible aspect of this high-competition development is the Junior National Championships. Our best young athletes compete to qualify for this championship and various international trips through the year. And our pre-collegiate athletes are the best in the country. When you break down the Alaska Cup points, which show which region had the best overall performance at Junior Nationals, the Midwest had the best points of any region for U18 skiers and the top two club teams – Loppet Nordic Racing and Endurance United. New England was the best region this year in large part on the strength of their U20 skiers. This seems strong evidence that we are producing great high-school racers who go out east (or west) for college and become part of that New England strength in the U20 category.

This presents a goal of keeping those talented athletes in the Midwest during their collegiate years so they can continue to provide examples to and competition for those younger athletes who will benefit from having the strongest possible competition at regional and local races. As I have seen teams cut year by year, I have come to the conclusion that using the NCAA Championships as our benchmark for the success of our collegiate teams hurts Midwest collegiate skiing. The NCAAs are awarded as a single championship that combines scores from a team’s Nordic and Alpine, men and women racers. As no Midwest schools support an NCAA Alpine team, Midwest schools never win an NCAA Championship. A great program like Northern Michigan may sweep the podium in the Nordic events and still not come close to the overall team title. This provides incentive to allow the East and West Regions – which can win the overall championship – many more Nordic qualifiers than the Central Region. Because the number of qualifiers from the Central Region is so low, it becomes a victory at many schools just to have an athlete qualify. While I don’t know the thoughts behind all the decisions to cut teams, I would guess that this difficulty in having success at the NCAA level has a strong effect on Athletic Directors.

This brings me to the vision for collegiate skiing in the Midwest. As teams are cut, athletes feel hurt at the transition to club status, thinking club is somehow less than NCAA. But, Loppet Nordic Racing and Endurance United are also clubs – though not affiliated with a University – and there is a model – Alaska Pacific University – where a highly competitive club is affiliated with a University. APU has produced Olympians. If we want to keep competitive skiers in the Midwest during college, and give them an education – which should be a simultaneous goal since skiing is not a big money sport at the professional level except for the absolute best racers in the world – we should embrace the opportunities of club skiing. The biggest of these is that the schools and athletic departments are now pursuing goals that can be achieved even after the athlete has left the school – like being named to an Olympic team or being ranked high nationally. This lets the coaches focus on the long-term development of the athlete rather than their 5 year development to win NCAAs before they leave school. This can also help collegiate clubs align more with the USSA's development pipeline, having their athletes compete at Junior National Qualifiers and Championships and SuperTour races.

There are many details to how this vision would be implemented that I will not go into here, but one element is crucial: keeping a coach who has a vision of developing top athletes. Gustavus is an exceptional place and the letter from the Athletic Director to ski team alumni indicated that the current coach would be kept on as a full time Gustavus staff member in a slightly different capacity, but in part to continue to coach the club team. This is a world of difference from my experience in leaving Carleton, where the coach was let go when the team was cut. Of course, this transition for Gustavus brings up some of these painful memories from Carleton, but it has helped me clarify some of the thoughts I presented above and I hope Gustavus will be one of the first in this new model of collegiate skiing that will keep the best of our racers in the Midwest.

Of course there is one big hurdle to this vision: money. One of the big pains in moving to club status is that the teams are not funded to the same level as varsity teams. But here again is an opportunity – clubs are not bound by NCAA rules, thus can seek sponsors and pursue other innovative ways of gathering funding. Right now there is going to be a lot of effort put towards trying to get the Gustavus Athletic Department to reverse its decision. Given all I have seen I do not believe it is possible to reverse this decision – it has never happened in the past. I want to offer this as an alternative: let’s turn the discussion to what is needed now to support the student athletes at Gustavus in a constructive way – finding funding for the club so they can continue to compete at a high national and international level. The Gustavus team will not look like it did when I was there, and at some level that hurts, but if we are constructive and put our effort where it can do good Gustavus can still be a great ski school. I know there are probably many who don’t share my thoughts on this, but I hope this can open up some discussion for where the sport should go, especially at the important level of college skiing.