NENSA is celebrating our 30th anniversary in 2025. As part of the occasion, we’re gathering reflections from skiers across New England on the people, moments, and values which have defined the NENSA community. This week, we are featuring NENSA Board Member & Ford Sayre Coach, Katharine Call (Ogden).
Your connections to NENSA and years involved.
Katharine Call (KC): I grew up skiing for a NENSA club (West River BKL), and spent all year anticipating the NENSA BKL festival. As I developed as a ski racer, I continued to ski race in New England through high school (SMS) and college (Dartmouth) and then the SMS pro team. I have now been on the NENSA board for 3 years as well, and do some intermittent coaching at Ford Sayre.
Can you share a moment that embodies the spirit of New England skiing?
KC: To answer this question both literally and then a little bit abstractly I’m going to call on a memory from 2013 junior nationals. I was a second year u16 and we were racing in Fairbanks Alaska. One of the other girls on the team had brought blue and green fabric spray paint and white t shirts. We went out on the porch of the hotel in freezing Alaska weather and spray painted these crazy graffiti-style neon colored shirts, boldly proclaiming that we were New England girls.
There’s the obvious aspect of this story that shows New England ski spirit, of course. That particular group of girls had so much of the spirit of New England skiing that we wore our home-made shirts for every occasion all week, embracing the team colors of neon blue and green with arguably too much reckless abandon for the rules of fashion.
To get a little less literal, I think that spray painting those t shirts on the deck of a Fairbanks motel was pretty emblematic of my motivations for skiing in general. It may be sacrilege to admit this here but I’ve never been one of those people with a deep-seated love of the sport. And yet, here I am, cross country skiing has been an ongoing passion project for me in various ways for almost three decades.
I remember talking to teammates on the plane to the first world cups in Ruka and hearing them say how excited they were to finally ski on snow. I’d sit there quietly because I couldn’t really relate. I wasn’t waiting in anticipation anymore, I was already happy because I’d just been excited to hang out with all of them again. It was never about the skiing for me. I liked competing, sure. But mostly I liked belonging to a community that felt wholly accepting of me.
I wore that spray painted shirt around all the time after I got home from Fairbanks nationals, reveling in the belonging (and in how awesome of a look I somewhat mistakenly thought it was). New England skiing sucked me in for life, not because I am obsessed with striding and gliding and the feel of a ski on corduroy. All of that is fine enough, but it’s made 100 times better by the people I’ve gotten to do it with.
Every instance I can think of where I got to feel the love of my ski community was orchestrated by NENSA. I was raised treating the night before leaving for the BKL festival like a Christmas Eve and I once cried myself to sleep over missing an Eastern Cup when I had a cold. Junior Nationals was the highlight of my high school social calendar. When I was racing World Cup but failed to qualify for the Olympics, an Eastern Cup in Lake Placid while all my teammates were in Beijing was what got me out of the funk and brought back the love of the sport.
Now that I’m on the board of directors at NENSA I realize it’s no accident that these events were always so fun and welcoming. NENSA staff works tirelessly to make sure that the whole New England ski community continues to be able to experience the magic of community, in the same way I got to.
We want to hear from you! Send in your NENSA 30th reflections using this form HERE.
