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Last week, NENSA had the opportunity to join the Stratton Mountain School (SMS) BKL and Junior Camps for a full day of agility, speed and learning. We started off the morning with an agility session with the Bill Koch campers at a nearby parking lot as well as a morning presentation for the campers on why cross-country skiing in New England is awesome (spoiler alert: we had a lot to say on the subject matter!) Some of the SMST2 team athletes skied through the course with the Bill Kocher’s at one point as a part of their cooldown! Other big points we covered included the importance of team, NENSA programming opportunities beyond the Bill Koch League, and most importantly, what makes skiing fun: being with friends, exploring the outdoors, going fast and much more!
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Junior campers arrived in the afternoon to the SMS campus, and the agility set-up in the morning lent itself well to getting the junior camp moving in all the different ways that skiers end up having to move.
Campers skied up from the main SMS campus to the agility set-up, before we did a couple of warm-up speeds 10 sec on, 10 sec off, and played around on the agility features set up from the morning. Then, it was a couple of timed runs to see if skiers could look to improve on the elements.
From slalom through to our off-road ski, the beauty of agility skiing is that it teaches skiers that going fast over the whole of a course can sometimes mean being strategic with where they are putting their speed and power to match the terrain. Sometimes to go slow means to go faster, and timing a couple runs helps mark out some improvement. While we coordinated the timing, coaches Alex Jospe and Matt Boobar ran some skate drills with some campers. Overall, it was a successful session, and then, like clockwork, the rain came and washed all our chalk marks away!
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