After a 25 year absence, the National Collegiate Ski Championships returns this week to celebrate its golden anniversary in the cradle of intercollegiate skiing.
Dartmouth will host the 2003 NCAA Skiing Men's and Women's National Collegiate Championships, beginning today and running through Saturday. Nearly 150 student-athletes from more than 20 colleges and universities will compete in the alpine race at the Dartmouth Skiway in Lyme Center and in cross country events at the Dartmouth Cross Country Ski Center at Oak Hill in Hanover.
This year marks the first time Dartmouth has hosted the Championships since 1978, when alpine races were held at Cannon Mountain in northern New Hampshire and cross-country races were held at the then-brand-new Bretton Woods Ski Touring Center. The selection of Dartmouth as the host for the Championships was made by the NCAA Skiing Committee last March, after the conclusion of the 2002 Championships in Anchorage, Alaska.
"We're excited and very proud to have been selected as hosts for the Championships,"says tournament committee chair and women's cross country ski coach Cami Cardenali. "Dartmouth has a long history as one of the nation's top ski programs, and the Championships' return to Hanover is long overdue."
Dartmouth sends the largest contingent from the East, having qualifyed the maximum 12 racers for the championships. The Dartmouth dozen is the latest in a long green line of outstanding NCAA competitors, dating back to Chiharu Igaya '57, who won three individual titles at the 1955 Championships and who won six NCAA championships in his stellar career.
This year's Big Green contingent includes five veterans of NCAA competition: women's Alpine captain Megan Ganong '03, and the men's Nordic trio of captain Brayton Osgood '03, Tom Temple '03 and Andy Hunter '04 all competed at the 2002 Championships at Anchorage; Alpine ace Brad Wall '02 competed at the 2001 Championships at Middlebury. Also competing for Dartmouth this year are women's Alpine racers Emily Copeland '04 and Sacha Acher '06, men's Alpine racers Erik Johnson '06 and Patrick Biggs '06, and women's Nordic racers Sue Kloek '03, Chrissy May '05 and Alison Crocker '06.
Wall missed the entire collegiate season last year, competing instead for his native Australia at the 2002 Olympic Winter Games at Salt Lake City. Wall and Crocker have competed internationally this season as well: Wall skied at the Alpine World Championships in Switzerland last month, and Crocker represented the United States at the World Junior Nordic Championships in Italy in February.
Dartmouth has long been a pioneer in American collegiate skiing. The Big Green is the nation's oldest collegiate ski team and was a participant in the first intercollegiate ski race held in 1914 at McGill University in Canada. Dartmouth was also the driving force behind the first collegiate downhill championships in 1933. Since the NCAA began sanctioning ski championships in 1954, Dartmouth skiers have notched 28 NCAA individual titles and more than 100 All America selections. Dartmouth has won two NCAA team championships, the last coming in 1976.
The teams arrived in Hanover last weekend, and the championships formally opened with a parade of athletes and coaches around the Dartmouth Green Monday night followed by a banquet held in Alumni Hall of the Hopkins Center. It was at that banquet that five Dartmouth skiers were also honored for outstanding performance in the classroom as well as on the snow: NCAA competitors Copeland, Crocker, Ganong ,Kloek and Osgood were named to the NCAA All Academic team. Other Dartmouth skiers named to the team were Peter Anderson '06, Eileen Carey '04, Emily Chenel '04, Scott Meek '03 and Jennifer Mygatt.'04.
Logistical arrangements for the championships have been in the works since 2000, when Dartmouth originally submitted a bid to host the 2001 championships but lost out to Middlebury College. Since then, accommodations for the teams and facilities for meetings, receptions and banquets have been organized by the Hanover Inn, which will also serve as race headquarters. Improvements have been made to the race trails at the Skiway and at Oak Hill; perhaps the biggest facilities improvement has been the completion and dedication of the McLane Family Lodge at the Skiway in 2001. A host of volunteers have been organized to work on-site during the championships, and marketing, promotion and media relations efforts have been underway since last summer.
"For me, the greatest part about hosting the championships has been the number and caliber of people who have come forward from both inside and outside the Dartmouth community to help," Cardenali said. "This is primarily a volunteer effort and, because of the good work of so many people. It is on track to be the best championships ever."
Meanwhile, the biggest and most important ingredient for the championships has been one that has been totally out of the hands of the organizers: snow. But the major winter storms of late December and early January, combined with favorable snowmaking conditions, have layed concerns about the race courses to rest.
"We've worried about snow since day one," says Dartmouth Director of Skiing and men's cross country coach Ruff Patterson, "but we're in the middle of the greatest winter since I've moved east. We're not so worried about it now."
Today's opening events are the men's 10-kilometer and women's 5-kilometer freestyle cross country race. The race schedule also includes men's and women's giant slalom on Thurs., men's 20-kilometer and women's 15-kilometer classical cross country -- mass-start races in which all the competitors leave the starting line simultaneously -- on Fri.; and the men's and women's slalom on Saturday. Cross-country racing at Oak Hill begins at 9 a.m. today and Fri.; Alpine racing at the Skiway begins at 9:30 tomorrow and Sat..
Shuttle bus service to the race venues will be available for spectators. For more information on the championships, including schedules and results, go to the official NCAA Ski Championships Web site, www.dartmouth.edu/~ncaaski/.
