This article was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers. If you value coverage like this, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription. Part two of a two-part series. Read part one here. A parent once cornered Adam St. Pierre to complain that he was letting the kids play games. St. Pierre had ten-year-olds on skis running sharks and minnows, shrieking and chasing each other across the snow, and the parent was...
This article was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers. If you value coverage like this, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription. Part one of a two-part series. Adam St. Pierre finished second to last in the first cross-country ski race of his life. The one skier he beat had crashed into a tree. He was a sophomore at Fall Mountain Regional High School, a rural school in Charlestown, New Hampshire,...
Auburn Ski Club (ASC) is a historic non-profit organization dedicated to providing snow sports opportunities to the greater Northern California region since 1928. Today, ASC operates a snow sports Training Center on Donner Summit that provides athletic programs, USSS/FIS competition and training venues, and youth snow sports teams ranging from entry-level to elite for Alpine, Snowboard, Nordic, and Biathlon. The Training Center’s cross-country venue also operates as a 25-kilometer Nordic Center open to the public....
Position Title: Development Coach, National Ski Team (NST), Olympic Location: Canada About Nordiq Canada Nordiq Canada is the national governing body for both cross-country and Para Nordic skiing. We lead, support, and inspire world-class performances and lifelong participation in these sports nationwide. The Opportunity Reporting to the High-Performance Director and working within a collaborative high-performance environment, the primary responsibility of the Development Coach will be to lead and oversee the Development Team program. Development Team...
Seasonal Nordic Head Coach Sovereign Lake Nordic Centre (SLNC) is offering an exceptional opportunity for a Head Coach who wants to lead, inspire, and shape one of Canada’s strongest cross-country ski communities. As one of Canada’s largest Nordic clubs, with 50+ km of daily groomed trails, a thriving athlete base, and a full suite of high-performance facilities, it’s a place where a coach can truly make an impact. Located just minutes from the City of...
Park City Ski & Snowboard is seeking a Head Cross Country Competition Coach to lead its U16+ competitive Nordic program. The full-time, year-round position reports to Cross Country Director Emma Garrard. Below is the full job description. Reports To: Cross Country Director, Emma Garrard Employment Status: Full-time, year-round, salaried exempt Compensation: Annual salary commensurate with experience, plus benefits Athlete Focus: U16 and above Position Summary The Head Comp Team Coach will manage the...
This article was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers. If you value coverage like this, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription. As the season winds down, it’s worth stepping back and asking a simple question: Does the way we develop young skiers in the United States reflect the philosophy we say we believe in? I know everyone is probably done with hearing about how the Norwegians do it, so let’s look...
This article was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers who have helped put our Nat Herz on the ground at the Olympics. If you value coverage like this, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription. When Hailey Swirbul logged onto a Zoom call from Italy last Monday, she was already living inside uncertainty. “I’m in Livigno right now,” she said. “Yeah — the higher one.” The U.S. team held two pre-Olympic altitude...
This article was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers. If you value coverage like this, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription. On Monday, a clear winter morning in northern Italy, Zak Ketterson skied intervals while his teammates enjoyed a point-to-point on an idyllic pre-Olympic winter day. The sun was out. The snow was good. He was working. “I did some hard intervals,” he said later. “So it was still nice...
This article was made possible through the generous support of our voluntary subscribers. If you value coverage like this, please support FasterSkier with a voluntary subscription. By the time Lauren Jortberg made the U.S. Olympic Cross-Country Ski Team, the achievement arrived not as a burst of disbelief or relief, but as something quieter and stranger: a moment that required processing. “It is a lot to take in,” she said, speaking from Seefeld, Austria in the...
On the Wednesday before the World Cup season opens in Ruka, Jack Young sits in a small condo, looking out at over a foot of new snow that’s been drifting down all morning. The air is much warmer today than it was before he and the U.S. Ski Team loaded onto a six-plus hour bus ride yesterday — “Muonio was friggin’ cold,” he says — and the mood is calmer, quieter, the way he wants...
Last June, U.S. Ski & Snowboard announced the hiring of Greta Anderson as Development Team Coach, supporting Cross Country Program Manager Bryan Fish in “all aspects of leadership and logistics surrounding the U.S. Development Pathway, including National Training Group camps, U.S. Nationals and Junior/U23 World Championships, Europa Cup, select SuperTour and other national-level competitions, as well as working on Coaches’ Education and Certification.” (Read an in-depth interview with Anderson following the announcement here.) As she...
Three years ago, U.S. Ski and Snowboard (officially dropped nordic combined from its funding rolls. It was a potentially big blow and flat-liner moment for a program coming off one the most successful runs in U.S. nordic sports history. As recently as 2013, the foursome of Todd Lodwick, Billy Demong, Bryan Fletcher, and Taylor Fletcher earned bronze in the team event at World Championships in Val di Fiemme, Italy. Now, under the umbrella of USA Nordic, and two World Championships...
In the 2013 World Junior Championships sprint, half of the male competitors in the final were born in the last five months of the eligibility window. Is this a case of a relative age effect - and what are the implications for elite sports on the whole, or retaining youngsters to be recreational athletes for life?
SISU Foundation Hires Director of Athlete Development Kask Returns to Minnesota After Work with USAT Prepping for London Olympic Games; Will Run SISU’s Newly Developed D-Team ST. PAUL, Minn. – On March 7, the Sisu Foundation (SISU), a Twin Cities-based organization dedicated to the development, support and promotion of Nordic Skiing in Minnesota, announced that Jason Kask joined its coaching staff. Kask, currently a member USA Triathlon’s High Performance Department, has been hired as the...
At a Fast and Female event in early December, a multi-time World Cup medalist stood in awe of what the program was offering to young girls. “It’s amazing what can change the course of a kid’s life, and hopefully this will change it for the better,” she said. Chandra Crawford? Kikkan Randall? Nope. This time, it was top Canadian alpine skier Kelly VanderBeek. Fast and Female, which was founded by Crawford in 2005, is a...
This year, the U.S. Biathlon Association (USBA) had a radical shift in its athlete development strategy: instead of sending a full squad to the World Cup and leaving the rest of the American biathlon field at home, they would minimize their World Cup presence to only those athletes who were succeeding, and field a much larger team at the IBU (International Biathlon Union) Cup races. While the U.S. biathletes that FasterSkier talked to, on and...