Dartmouth Skiers Win NCAA Championship

John Morton

Dartmouth's recent national skiing title is an inspiration to young student athletes across the country.
I know the birds are singing, the flowers are blooming and last winter's snow is almost gone, but join me for a quick glance back to March, when Dartmouth skiers won the NCAA Championships.

Since 1954, the National Collegiate Athletic Association has hosted an annual championship of the nation's top college and university skiers. Originally, the championship drew only men who competed in either downhill, slalom, cross-country or jumping. A restriction on team size ensured that several members would be versatile enough to ski multiple events, and of those, the coveted Skimeister award went to the top four-event skier.

The competition has undergone significant revisions through the years. In the mid 1970s, following a couple of tragic accidents, the downhill was replaced by a giant slalom. Less than a decade later, the half-dozen coaches who formed the NCAA skiing committee decided to drop jumping from the championship in favor of a second cross-country event, and in the process sounded the death knell for high school ski-jumping programs from Maine to Alaska. In 1983, the NCAA expanded the championship to include women's skiing, creating an innovative, co-educational format, one of the first in collegiate sports.

In the early days of NCAA skiing, a trend was started to recruit European skiers. Willy Schaeffler, the legendary coach of Denver University, warned his colleagues from other schools of the potential inequity which could be created by recruiting European racers who were older, more experienced and nurtured in a culture that celebrates skiing excellence. When his rival coaches discounted his concerns, Willy was said to remark, "Well then, I'll show them how it's done." Before moving on to coach the U.S. Alpine Ski Team, Willy Schaeffler won eleven NCAA titles for Denver University, with the help of a steady stream of European recruits.

This was a problem for several reasons. To begin with, the schools that traditionally competed in skiing included large universities as well as small, private colleges. While the universities representing states with a vibrant ski industry, like Colorado, Utah and Vermont, were able to offer attractive skiing scholarships to potential European applicants, the smaller schools, like Middlebury, Williams and Dartmouth, could offer only need-based financial aid, rather than athletic scholarships. To compound the problem, top American skiers attending the smaller schools would occasionally be lured off campus by the U.S. Ski Team, certainly a tribute to the college's ski program, but creating a painful void on the school's NCAA roster. Meanwhile, the foreign athletes skiing for the big universities were obligated by their scholarship agreements to compete in the NCAA's, which tipped the scales in favor of more European than American skiers on some collegiate rosters. That first co-ed championship in 1983 was won by a powerful team from the University of Utah, which was comprised of four Alpine men, four Alpine women, four Nordic men, and four Nordic women. Sixteen ski racers on the NCAA Championship team, and only four of them were Americans.

An especially enjoyable aspect of the NCAA Skiing Championship, from the perspective of the athletes and coaches, is the event's migration across the nation's snow belt from year to year. Although there is excitement about skiing in Montana, Colorado, and Alaska, there are also additional challenges. Western snow is typically bountiful, but for alpine racers that can translate into ruts rather than the boilerplate they're accustomed to in the East. For the Nordic skiers, the issue is altitude. Courses in Utah, New Mexico and Colorado can be in air thin enough to make the eastern skiers see spots before their eyes. I raced for Middlebury College years ago, and in Steamboat Springs, CO, I experienced firsthand the Nordic "sucking chest wound" at the 1968 NCAA's. It hurt!

I should confess before I continue that I coached the Dartmouth men's Nordic team from 1978 through 1989, and although we had an impressive array of individual NCAA champions and sent more than a few skiers on to U.S. Olympic teams, we were never a legitimate contender for the NCAA team title. All of which makes Dartmouth's recent NCAA Championship so impressive to me. Closer examination of the results reveals that it was truly an all-American (plus one Canadian) team victory, with solid skiing by all the participants rather than spectacular performances by a few. It certainly helped that the event was in the east, so that altitude was not a factor for the Nordic skiers. And no doubt the team's third-place finish in last winter's NCAA's, in addition to an unbeaten record in this year's winter carnival competitions, gave the Big Green the confidence that victory at the NCAA's was finally within their grasp.

Dartmouth's recent national skiing title is an inspiration to young student athletes across the country. Congratulations to Dartmouth's skiers and coaches. You have demonstrated that hard work, both in the classroom and on the snow, can lead to victory.