Collegiate Club Skiing

I want to start this by thanking Jonathan Miller for his recent writing on Midwest Collegiate Skiing; he brought up many good points about upper-level skiing in the Midwest and agree with most of what he says. This letter is not intended to refute anything he writes, simply to provide another perspective.

I am a student. That is the occupation I list when I’m filling out forms, that is my first priority when I’m managing my all-too-little time, and that is what is driving my future. I am passionate about learning and even more passionate about my major (physics!), something that will not take long to come up in conversation with a new acquaintance.

However, here on campus, where everyone knows I am a student, another of my identities quickly emerges: I am a Nordic skier.

Specifically, I’m a Carleton College Nordic skier, and I want to share with people what our club is really like. Carleton was one of the first collegiate teams to get cut, preceding CSB/SJU and now Gustavus, along with others. Unlike many of the other teams in Midwest (as Miller pointed out), when we lost our team we also lost our coach, meaning that what was left of the Carleton team became entirely student-run, somewhat unique among Nordic club teams. Having recently closed my first season as a team captain, I have an entirely new outlook on club sports.

Miller admits that the focus of his article is on “high-competition” and a system built for the athlete hoping “to develop to an Olympic level skier.” While I certainly understand the importance and desire for a high-competition atmosphere among some skiers, that simply cannot be the only level of competition offered. As Miller says in his article that here in the Midwest we are raising incredibly talented high school skiers, who we then lose to the east or west as they head off to get even better. He would like Midwest schools to better foster the homegrown talent—“to keep competitive skiers in the Midwest”.

But what about people from the east and west, the south, the farther north, from everywhere else?

If you take an admissions tour at Carleton, they will proudly inform you that we draw students from 48 states and 33 different countries. A lot of our students have never seen snow before (during the first snowfall every year, campus is filled with the screams and yells of people catching snowflakes on their tongues and admiring the fluff white stuff they often start cursing within a few months), much less skied on it. This fascination with winter culture (combined with the College’s mandatory 4 terms of PE credit) mean that most of the people on our team are learning to ski for the first time. We take them out on our beautiful Arb trails, using the old fish-scales they can rent for free from our Rec Center, and the falls and laughs and jokes eventually lead to a bunch of college kids who actually sort-of know how to ski (kinda). No one from our team is going on to win the Olympics, but in the end-of-season survey, one of the main responses we get is how much the new skiers loved the friendly team atmosphere and experiencing the under-appreciated beauty of a Minnesota winter.

We can’t leave these skiers behind. Yes, there are days at practice when teaching people to double-pole feels too much like my time as a KidSki coach teaching 5-year-olds. Yes, there are days when I just want to feel the burn of a really good interval set. Yes, there are days where getting in my own workout means going out at 1:30 so I can ski for a couple hours before practice starts at 3:30, and by the time I get home at 6 there’s still dinner and showering and emails to send and answer before I even open tomorrow’s problem set. But we make it work.

I say we, and I mean we - we are the captains. There are four of us in charge of a club team of around 50+ people (although we have 278 subscribed to the email list). As Miller says, most people have the perception that “club is somehow less than NCAA”. We see this not only with skiers from other schools who still have varsity teams, but with other varsity athletes from our own school and non-college community members.

This is where I get a little defensive: I fully understand that being in a varsity collegiate sport is hard. I skied on a very competitive high school team; I saw where that lifestyle was headed and made the conscious decision not to follow it. That being said, being on a club sport is not automatically any different. Varsity athletes are expected to show up to practice, work hard at practice, and compete once or twice a week—something that definitely takes hard work and time away from schoolwork. In comparison, from personal experience, I can tell you that this past ski season I (and the other 3 captains) showed up to practice every day (Monday-Thursday, Saturday, Sunday), getting there early and staying late to prepare and put away team equipment; participated in practice, whether that meant teaching or leading intervals/strength or skiing the trails helping people we passed; answered multiple emails a day from team members and others about skiing; managed the (tiny) team budget, working to raise money for the team trip (which we organized, from lodging to driving to food) and expanding our fleet of team equipment; attended administrative meetings with our club sports director (he’s great); organized and put on our own invite (huge thanks to all the skiers who came and raced!); and did many other little things that just start to take over your winter. Varsity athletes are expected to be athletes, and I respect that. But club sport athletes are expected to be athletes and coaches and administrators, and everyone seems to think that what we do is somehow easier.

The thing about club sports is that they can be whatever each individual wants: if you want to come out and ski around a couple times a week, that’s fine. If you want to train for the Birkie with hard interval sets and some long ODs on the weekends, that’s fine too. Besides our own skiers, who have been very successful in many citizen races, we have excellent proof of other competitive club teams here at Carleton: both men and women have club frisbee teams that compete and often win at the D-1 level, impressive competition for a school of less than 2,000 students.

You’re probably hoping that this letter will deliver its point soon, especially since I’ve used my last morning of spring break to write it (and now I need to buckle down and submit our team’s budget proposal for next year).

What I’ve been trying to say above can be boiled down to a few points: first, I am incredibly sorry for the Gustavus Nordic team. All of those skiers chose their college thinking they would have a varsity team, and I continue to hold out hope that their administration will reverse their decision. Second, I implore the Nordic community not to forget about the late-comers. Between the friendly and supportive community I know Nordic skiing to be and our Minnesota niceties, we should all be working to welcome new members into the community of our sport. Nordic has always been about more than just being the best, and that’s the way it should stay. Finally, I ask everyone to reexamine their view of collegiate club teams and their athletes. Club sport status is not a death sentence to all forms of athleticism. Club sport athletes can be just as competitive as their varsity competitors, yet the club sport atmosphere, with no cuts and no expectations, provide an amazing atmosphere for people to try new things. At Carleton, we’ve been trying for the past few years to re-vamp the competitive side of our team, and our first invite this winter with racers from Gustavus, U of M, and St. Olaf was a great success for us. We hope to see even more of these successes in the future, and would love to get in contact with other teams in the region about hosting more races and expanding the collegiate club circuit.

Please email me at [email protected] if you’re interested helping to shape this future. We’d love to ski with you!