A strong start for the Nordic 2021-2022 season!

Almost a month ago, the Woodstock Nordic high school ski team started off with their first race of the 2021-2022. This year the team has grown immensely in size to over 20 athletes.

We conquered our home field at Knox Meadow in a skate race on December 28th. Overall the Varsity boys came in third and the Varsity girls in second. I took fourth while Victoria Bassette took second place. Izzy Cellini in 14th, Sophomore Farren Stainton came in 15th place, Freshman Lucy Drebitko with 18th, Ella Stainson with 16th. We thought that we would hopefully be racing for the next few weeks leaving up to SVL championships

But boy were we wrong. Due to various scenarios and lots of cold weather, for the last few weeks races have been canceled left and right which leaves us scrambling to keep training.

Even in training though we’ve been having a lot of fun; this year with our growth in the team we have been able to do so many more fun activities, like super competitive capture the flag and fun L1 distance skis.

Our training has been working in three week sets with Volume, Lower Volume and Distance weeks, we are training in two-three week sets until we start to taper off our training for highschool states on the 24th and 28th of February, but until then we will continue strength training at the highschool, intervals and over distance skis. My favorite part of training is definitely the over distance skis, you are usually going at a slow pace and you can have really good conversations.

This year we also have a lot of newcomers who have either never skied before or haven't skied frequently before. It has been so rewarding watching their skiing skills grow. With three months of training, most of it on snow, it's honestly been really cool watching teammates grow as athletes; most of them couldn't even skate three months ago and now they are plowing ahead of the entire team.

Even as a teammate I think it's the most rewarding part of skiing. Just watching people fall in love with the sport is so cool to watch and then seeing them be able to go out on their own... there's something about it that makes my heart really full.

This year I'm so happy to see so many new and old faces and I am also really excited to continue racing with this team and the support has been great too.

We have an awesome support system from our coaches, Maddie Leopold and Jeremy Read who have been helping all of us with our training! Our team just in general is super supportive. We have some really awesome cheerleaders out there! I look forward to watching our team grow in strength and at states this year!