Hiatus

Welcome back, everyone!  Welcome back to school! Welcome back to the UAA Nordic Ski Team Blog!

Regular blog readers may have noticed that nobody's written a damn thing in this blog for about half a year.  A lot has been going on around here since the latest blog post on March 6, when we were halfway through NCAA week.  Things have been kind of unsettled over the spring and summer, with staffing changes and an enormous budget cut proposed by Alaska's governor. And I've been busy too, trying to catch up with (day job) work that had piled up while I was out having fun with the UAA Ski Team last winter, and then the distractions of summer...

But now we're all back here, and ready to start a new year. I'll take care of some old business now, and then we can all move forward.

The NCAA Championships came to an end, but not before Sigurd was the runner-up in the mass-start classic race.  He skied a really smart race and put himself in position to be on the podium. In the final kilometer, Ricardo Isquierdo-Bernier was too strong for anybody, but our Sigurd did us proud with a strong finish for second place.

Liam Wallace also finished second in the NCAA slalom race!  For Liam, it was part of a trend of improving results that carried him into a spring racing season in which he skied really fast. I'm looking forward to seeing what he's going to do this coming winter!

It's been so long ago that the details are a bit hazy, but the way I remember it, the alpine team was attempting to put together a video thank-you for some Seawolf supporters, and it was clearly amateur video hour at the team house.

Former Skiwolf Mario Roncador came all the way to Vermont to help us, and we appreciated all his help fixing whatever needed to be fixed, including the UAA Seawolf flag.  Thanks, Mario!

Halfway through the men's race. Here are Sigurd and Ricardo (New Mexico) side by side. A couple laps later, they finished runner-up and winner.

Why is the right side of this photo kind of blurry?  I don't know, but I kind of like the effect.

You can probably figure out what's going on here.

Liam's folks came down from Calgary to see him race.  They picked the right one to watch. 

Here's Sigurd, JC and Liam on slalom day.

These little trophies look kind of modest, but they're really tough to win.

New Mexico Lobo coach Aljaz Praznik told me he really wanted to be in the UAA Ski Team Blog, so I've granted his wish here. The Lobos ended up losing their ski team last spring, and we're all going to be worse off because of it.

After the races were over, all we wanted to do was go skiing, and it was nice not to have racing to worry about.

All of us.