NENSA awards are given annually to honor the achievements of our members. NENSA will roll out these award announcements over the course of June and July.
Each year, NENSA recognizes our Eastern Cup Series Champions with the Mike Gallagher award. The award recognizes consistent excellence in the East’s premier race series, with skiers scored on 7 of 8 EC races. The award is named in honor of the late, great Mike Gallagher, who at various points in his life in nordic skiing served as a three-time US Olympian, US Ski Team and US Olympic Coach, a High School Coach, and always, a Vermonter and Champion of New England skiing. A full celebration of Mike’s life can be found on FasterSkier HERE.
Astrid Longstreth (Mansfield Nordic Club and Mt. Mansfield Union High School)
By Adam Terko – Mansfield Nordic Club Coach
If you drive through the tiny hamlet of West Bolton, Vermont on a school district snow day, you might notice a set of ski tracks pressed into the shoulder of the road. A snowmobile or groomer did not make these tracks: Astrid Longstreth did.
And if you find yourself, on a similarly snowy afternoon, on the twisting stretch of the Long Trail near Preston Pond, you might come across a lone skier with two fluffy sheep. This modern day herder with Swix poles for shepherd’s crooks is of course Astrid Longstreth, likely clad in wool layers just like her cloven companions, Minnie and Holda.
And if you find yourself competing in a nordic ski race, you may look back in surprise at how quickly a hard-charging pigtailed racer is bearing down on you. She may have been too polite to yell track, so now she’s barreling-down on you faster than you can get your next pole plant together. That would of course also be Astrid Longstreth, and in this case you are likely the sheep to her border collie racing style.
I am fortunate to not only be Astrid’s ski coach, but also her neighbor. So I am privy not only to her amazing work ethic and racing fire, but to her exploits that show skiing is so much more than just a start and finish line. I’ve driven by ski tracks on the side of our road and knew immediately who made them. I’ve read training log reports of threshold skate intervals one day, and classic skiing with sheep the next.
When you train and race as much as Astrid does, it’s adventures both wacky and wholehome that keep it all in perspective. This is an athlete who just loves winter and being outside, and that takes many forms. For many young athletes, being a racer probably should take more forms. I may coach Astrid as a racer, but she has a lot to teach anyone about being a skier.
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By Ben Theyerl
One of the fixtures of Team New England at Junior Nationals every year is Matt Boobar’s famous “Find your Tribe” activity. In which, everyone takes an exhaustive quiz to find their inner animal, and then finds their like-spirited teammates who get the same result. This March, the Northwoods of Wisconsin were filled with herds of deer, bison, a trio of lone wolfs, and some kangaroos too. There was one group which contained three of us coaches, and a single athlete. The horses. Astrid Longstreth was with the horses.
A few weeks later at SuperTour Finals, a group of us coaches were taking in the last Senior races of the day, when I noticed that Astrid had found her way to the side of the trail with us. Once a horse, always a horse. I don’t think it’s an accident. Since I’ve been in New England, I’ve seen her uniquely pick up more than just speed on her skis. She seems to have a special ability to accumulate wisdom gleaned from our sport, and it’s put her in a mature place of leadership amongst her peers pursuing the sport in New England.
The defining aspect of Astrid’s inner-horse then, is that she at once can be quiet and gentle, while bursting with energy, on trail and off of it.
This year, we saw her gain real confidence racing from the pole position, and be able to chase and hold down a lead of lengths when the nitty-gritty moment of a race comes. Her dynamism as an athlete is only further complemented by her dynamism as a teammate and leader. When Astrid leads out a pack, she tends to bring others along with her, and is the first to turn and recognize the efforts of the skiers she races with when they cross the finish line.
The great confidence we get to take in having Astrid be part of the cohort of our skiers in New England is that she’ll lead by modeling all the things we hope skiers will find in our sport. She loves competition. She also loves everything that comes with the context of competition in our sport. Backcountry days at Sleepy Hollow, leading the efforts to recruit Jessie Diggins to come to Cochran’s Nordic cross every year, and a constant brainstorm for team bonding activities at NENSA’s programs. We get to look to Astrid to provide the steady source of energy for them all, and we’ll be lucky to have her showcasing a very Vermont love of our sport for years to come.
Joey Sluka (Ford Sayre and Middlebury College)
By Hilary McNamee, Ford Sayre Coach
Joey’s skiing development took off like a lightening bolt— in about three years, he went from being a name no one had really heard before to accruing podiums, state titles, getting a spot on a varsity college team, and now the overall Eastern Cup title.
Joey is the athlete and teammate who can be counted on to show up and do the work— whether that’s supporting the team, caring for his teammates or putting in the training to reach his big goals. As Isla Segal, a teammate at both FS and Woodstock puts it, “Joey puts in lots of effort both to be a good skier and to be a good mentor and teammate.” He excels at the simple, but vital parts of being a team leader: elevating morale, ensuring tasks are done and done well, and noticing and welcoming teammates— especially the new, younger or quiet people.
During his gap year, Joey helped us as an informal intern— cleaning klister boxes, stuffing insulation into the clubhouse walls, detailing the “new” van, laminating signs for the BKL practices. Stuff that was unglamorous at best…but he approached everything with a can-do attitude and a desire to give back. And that’s what makes him one of the most enjoyable athletes to coach. He loves training, he loves racing he loves the camaraderie around all parts of skiing. He shows up and he’s eager. Even at times (or at least once), he was so eager to do bounding intervals, that he left the car running for the entire practice.
I think he’s on a great trajectory as an athlete and as a teammate, and if he masters keeping track of all his equipment, clothing, snack bags, phone, wallet… he’ll be a real threat going forward! 🙂
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By Ben Theyerl
The question with Joey Sluka is never about whether he has energy, it’s more about where he is putting it at any one moment. Energy overflows from him, on skis and off of it.
Sometimes, he rides the frenetic wave of a ski race in just such a way that when he crosses the finish-line, it’s akin to watching a surfer spit out of a barrel. The flow, the experience, the push, leaves him with nothing but a burst. At the Oak Hill Eastern Cup in February, he pushed towards the finish-line of the 15 k skate on a course he grew up skiing and knowing for 1st place, and when he reached it, couldn’t help but let out an excited shout which seemed to echo across the Connecticut River and back. When Joey rides the wave, it always seems like he prefers it to be a party. The collective result is an atmosphere which hones in on a shared passion for the sport of skiing which sees others want to find what Joey seems to find in the act of ski racing. Through this model, Joey’s not only built his own success, but those of his Ford Sayre teammates, and of New England skiers too.
Spend any amount of time off the course with him, and you find him in the same mode. Joey’s very puppy-like in his enthusiasm, be it for ski racing, his academics, or what comes next in life. He wants to explore, and explore by hopping in wherever he can.
At REG last year, he showed up with a guitar. When he let me take a turn playing a tune on it, he immediately caught the tune I gravitated towards. “Church Street Blues…Tony Rice!” The great bluegrass flatpicking guitarist. I wasn’t surprised Joey had started down that path in his musical journey. Rice likes to stick to the melody in his lines, knowing that doing the fundamentals right means you’re doing everything right. More so than that though, he doesn’t shirk speed or tempo, but chooses to let it guide him. I showed Joey a couple of little patterns I put into the way I do Rice’s tune, and by the end of camp, he was starting to pick out double-stops and cross-picking patterns.
As a student of everything then, Joey goes about things the same way. Lean in with curiosity, put your full heart into it, and let the wave take you to where you want to go. We’ve seen him do it well at the Eastern Cup, and as he heads to the EISA next year, we’ll be lucky to continue to benefit from the energy he sends out through these mountains and valleys in New England.
By Isabel Seay, Ford Sayre Coach
[Joey] embraces being a student of the sport. He is eager to learn from anyone who offers advice and asks a lot of good questions. And while his goals have grown in the past couple of years, he has able to maintain a playful attitude and this enthusiasm is motivating to his teammates.
