The alpine ski team is well underway in their 2015-2016 season. However, the lack of snow has definitely been a challenge. Whiteface Mountain, the team’s home mountain, only has eight of their eighty trails open, and two of the eleven ski lifts running, putting a serious hold on the amount of training the team can actually do.
Two weeks ago, junior Kei Kullberg took over the Here We Go Saints Instagram page, and gave the St. Lawrence community a look into the Alpine team’s trip to Vail, Colorado over Thanksgiving break. Kullberg wrote on the Instagram account that the team was excited to finally hit the slopes after a long pre- season in the weight room. For most of the camp, the team
skied GS which involves skiing between sets of poles (gates) spaced at a greater distance to each other than in slalom. The slopes in Vail will be some of best GS training they will get all year, so the team spent Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday specializing in GS training . To close out the week, the team spent all of Thursday and Friday skiing Slalom. The Saints returned back to Canton after a long week out West, and they are more than ready to compete against Division I schools here in the east.
Sophomore Julia Ristine said “Skiing at Vail this year definitely helped our team gain world class training and also gave us the opportunity to get a jump start on our racing season. Vail is some of the best training we get all year, and being together as a team only brings us closer together.
I think everyone is really fired up and ready to work hard together over winter break in Lake Placid during our training camp.” She also touched on the fact that the lack of snow has made training at Lake Placid a huge challenge. “We were able to work with the mountain for training space this past Saturday, but it is nothing compared to last year. It’s difficult to improve when we’re missing the most important element of our sport: snow.”
The skiing Saints, led by coach Willi Steinrotter, will begin their season before most of us return back to school for the spring semester. They will be racing in the Bates College carnival in mid January, and then at Colby, The University of Vermont and Dartmouth before heading to Middlebury College for the NCAA Regionals at the end of February.