Colin Rodgers and the Culture of SMS T2

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The first time I saw Colin Rodgers, he was climbing onto a podium in the basement of a hotel in Biwabik, Minnesota. I honestly can’t remember the name of the hotel, but I can remember the rooms, the enormous lobby complete with an indoor minigolf course, and the basement where the awards were taking place. It was Junior Nationals, 1997, and he’d just won the opening U16 race. We were there with the New England contingent. They held the awards in this low-ceilinged basement room, and although he wasn’t the tallest of boys, his blonde hair almost touched the ceiling tiles. Colin went to Holderness School in New Hampshire, and as I looked up at his smiling face, it was obvious that he was the kind of kid who was going somewhere.

A few years later, I was watching him again, but this time from behind as he skied away from me up one of the small climbs on Woodpecker during the 3 x 5 k Classic Relay at the Williams College Carnival. Colin raced for Middlebury, and I raced for UNH, and at carnivals, he’d ski away from me. That was the deal. He was always a step, or a lot more, ahead.

We caught up over Zoom last week. Colin was in a hotel room in Falun, Sweden, traveling with the U.S. Ski Team on the World Cup circuit. I was sitting on a rocking chair in the foyer of our local dentist’s office while my boys were inside getting their teeth cleaned. That’s how FasterSkier interviews happen sometimes.

Since his competitive career ended, Colin has given himself fully to coaching. First with the SVSEF Gold Team, who he had raced for at the end of his career, and later junior skiers at Green Mountain Valley School, where he spent nine years. And now, as head coach of the SMS T2 Team at Stratton Mountain School in Vermont, he works with some of the best cross-country skiers in the world.

The team this year included Jessie Diggins, Ben Ogden, Julia Kern, and Canadian skier Remi Drolet, as well as collegiate skiers Fin Bailey and Jack Lange. Of the professional skiers, three of them finished in the top six at the Olympics. All four were in the top 20. Ben Ogden came home with two silver medals and ended a 50-year Olympic medal drought for American men in cross-country skiing. And Jessie Diggins, who is currently wrapping up a career that is the best of any American skier ever, added a bronze medal to her collection.

Colin still seemed a little stunned by it all when we spoke.

“We were so far beyond wherever I thought we were going to be,” he said. “I had a good feeling about this year. But for Ben to take home two silvers, and Jesse a bronze, and Remi to be in the top 20 and really help Canada with a historic relay finish, and Julia in the top six. It’s stuff that I could never believe was truly going to happen. And here we are talking about it.”

Colin grew up in Westford, Vermont. His father was the program director for the U.S. Biathlon team from 1984 to 1988, which brought the family to northern Vermont. His parents built a house in Westford that year and never left.

He went to Holderness, then Middlebury, and after college, he headed to the Maine Winter Sports Center, where coaches like Jens Johansson, Eli Brown and Will Sweetser were building something in the northern reaches of the state. From there, he moved to Sun Valley, Idaho, where he joined the SVSEF Gold Team and kept racing.

Colin was good. He raced on the World Cup. But the jump he’d always hoped to make didn’t quite happen.

“I think as a nation now, we’re so much more educated,” he said. “I had amazing coaches. But we were just kind of, maybe sometimes trying too hard.”

He talked about spending time in Scandinavia and being around athletes who were significantly better than him. What he noticed wasn’t that they worked harder. It was that they were smarter about the work.

“I probably trained at level two way too much of the time,” he said. “Especially being a little more anaerobic and linked to the sprint side. I really needed to be doing the easy training even easier.”

He paused.

“When it’s time to go, you’ve got to let the dog run,” he said, quoting his old Middlebury coach Terry Aldrich. “And that was the exact opposite. Like, now it’s time to really peak, and you let it loose.”

I told him I’d heard a version of that from the other direction. When I was coaching, I used to tell my kids about Matt Whitcomb, who had been a teammate of Rodgers at Middlebury, previewing a course at Junior Nationals and telling the athletes they had to “walk the f-ing dog.” Every time they got to a climb, they were pulling back on the leash. Walking the dog.

Two coaches. Related metaphor. Opposite leash relationships. That’s about as clean a summary of training philosophy as you’ll find in this sport. Keep the dog relaxed in training often, until it is time to let it run when it matters.

Before Stratton, the coaching experience that shaped Colin most was the time he spent around Rick Kapala at Sun Valley.

Kapala ran the Sun Valley Education Foundation for nearly 30 years and built a program Colin still talks about with real admiration.

“It was serious training, but it was also really creative,” Colin said. “You’d go out for long mountain adventures, do different kinds of workouts. It kept people engaged.”

That stuck with him. When he moved to GMVS to coach high school athletes, he kept coming back to a simple question.

“What would make me really want to go to practice today?”

He laughed when he said it.

“It sounds basic. But it actually matters a lot. If people don’t want to be there, something’s probably off.”

He talked about his coaching years at GMVS and how, for him, the job was about getting kids to believe in what they could do.

“When kids are in high school, they’re questioning everything. How they look, how they’re growing. And you’re just like, no, dude, this is fun. This can be a real blast. And believe. Like, damn, I can do a good job at this. If I’m doing this every day, I might as well be good at it, right?”

He spent nine years doing that work. And then the SMS T2 job came along.

“It was an opportunity there’s no way I was going to pass up,” he said. “It’s changed my life. Literally.”

The program at Stratton operates under a mission statement crafted by Colin’s predecessor, Sverre Caldwell: international excellence and local inspiration.

Colin said that phrase was part of what sold him on the job.

“It’s everything I believe in. We’re trying to be the best we can be, win races, kick ass internationally. But then also, along the way, inspire the next generation of skiers coming up.”

At Stratton, those two things aren’t separate. The T2 athletes train on the same roads and trails as the younger skiers in the school’s Nordic program. When Stratton kids show up for a summer or fall practice, and the older athletes are there, everyone just funnels in together and heads out.

“It doesn’t even need to be talked about, really,” Colin said. “It’s just showing up, doing the work. This is how it’s done. And if you keep working really hard for a long time, you’re probably going to get really good too.”

He brought up the chain of inspiration that runs through American skiing. Jessie Diggins was inspired by Kikkan Randall, by Andy Newell, by Simi Hamilton. Kern was inspired by Diggins.

“When you get motivated by somebody who’s special and inspiring to you, if you have some talent and the fire to go for it, you realize you can chase that person. And then it’s like, oh, I can maybe be them. And then it’s like, oh, maybe I can be better than them.”

One of the more interesting aspects of Colin’s role at SMS T2 is that he’s not the only coach in the picture. Not even close.

Diggins works primarily with Jason Cork on the U.S. Ski Team staff. Ogden’s training has long been guided by Patrick Weaver, his college coach at UVM. Kern has a deep relationship with Kristen Bourne, who is also a national team coach. Drolet works with Dave Wood, a former coach of the Canadian national team. And Bailey goes to UVM and skis for Weaver, while Lange goes to Dartmouth and is coached by Brayton Osgood.

Colin sees his job as connecting the dots.

“Each athlete comes in with their own support network,” he said. “Jason has been working with Jesse forever. Ben has a really close connection with Weave. And I’ve been able to learn a lot from Patrick about how Ben ticks.”

He was honest about what that requires.

“When you step into a role like this, you have to check your ego,” he said. “It’s not about being the only voice in the room. It’s about helping the athlete succeed.”

What he brings is proximity. He sees the athletes more frequently than some of their other coaches, especially during training blocks in Vermont. He can offer technique advice, fill gaps when someone else isn’t available, and keep everyone communicating.

“I think one of my strengths is the ability to connect people,” he said. “And to connect with people.”

Colin has watched American skiing grow up. When he was racing, relatively few American men were competitive at the highest levels. The development pathways weren’t as clear. The coaching wasn’t as sophisticated.

“We’re closer as a nation now to what it means to go to that next level,” he said. “We know what to do. As coaches, we’re totally clued in on this systematic, long-term idea of how to periodize correctly, and also how to make it fun.”

He pointed to results at every level. At the time we spoke, American athletes were fighting with the best in the world at the World Junior Championships. On the World Cup, Diggins, Kern, and Ogden, along with the APU-based skiers, are proving it can happen at the very top.

“A lot of people have helped build this,” he said. “It’s not just one program or one coach.”

But the jump from junior skiing to the World Cup is still enormous. And programs like SMS T2 exist to help athletes survive that transition.

“Having environments where athletes can develop during that stage is really important,” he said. “The gap is huge.”

Before we wrapped up, I asked Colin what success looks like for him five years from now.

He went big picture with a slightly longer lens. The 2034 Olympics will be in Salt Lake City. There’s a generation of young American skiers who have already raced at Soldier Hollow, the Nordic venue, during their youth careers. Now they’re looking ahead to competing on home soil.

“We’re working towards 2034,” he said. “And we want to be successful there. If we stay on this trajectory, we can have medals. That’s our ultimate goal.”

Within Stratton, he wants to grow the team thoughtfully. This year was lean, focused on supporting the Olympic athletes. Going forward, he wants to build back toward four or five athletes on each side, men and women, plus NCAA skiers.

“We have to do it the right way,” he said. “We don’t want to take on too many people too fast.”

He’s also thinking about the athletes who won’t be there. Jessie Diggins is retiring. That will leave a void at SMS T2 and on the World Cup, where Colin noted she currently sits at 380 career starts, more than any other skier.

“Jesse’s going to go on and do a lot of really cool things and still inspire the next generation in new ways,” he said. “And then there’s going to be up-and-comers who are going to step up and be inspired by everything she’s done, and by everything Ben and Julia and Remy are already doing.”

International excellence. Local inspiration. It’s a simple mission. But Colin Rodgers has spent a career learning that the simple things are usually the ones that matter most.

He’s been chasing the highest levels of this sport since he was 15 years old, standing on a podium in a hotel basement in Minnesota. The path just looks different now.

 

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