One of NENSA’s finest traditions is presenting the John Caldwell Award. This award annually recognizes a single individual, or entity, which embodies the spirit, dedication, innovation, and pride of John Caldwell. NENSA is proud to announce that Zach Caldwell, owner and operator of Caldwell Sport, longtime polymath within the US ski community, John’s nephew, and NENSA’s first Program Director, is the recipient of the 2026 John Caldwell Award.
In the introduction to the *NEW* Cross-Country Ski Book (published in 1987), John Caldwell boasted that he was a “proud member of the AAABCCIE (which stands for the Association of American Authors of Books on Cross-Country in English)….our membership (of two) has yearly meetings to look over the field, so to speak.”
His trademark knowing Caldwell wit belied a sense John had about American skiing then. At time of writing in the 1980s, a generation of John Caldwell’s pupils at the Putney School, including Bill Koch, Martha Rockwell, and his son Tim Caldwell, had already achieved unlikely Olympic and World Cup medals. To do so, they had taken on the decidedly American role of being an earnest sponge for knowledge from all corners of the world. The famous Norwegian Oddvar Bra came to Putney to teach striding. Rex mantyranta wax and the marathon skate were both imported from Finland. Caldwell, though, had started to form a new belief. For New England, and American skiing to truly come into its own, it needed to homegrow (or more to his nature, homebrew) its experts. On training. On racing. On program development. On waxing. On skis.
John Caldwell started to look down the line. Or rather, down his camera lens, from the top of an old ski jump in Putney, where an unassuming pioneer on every one of those fronts was skiing along. “The skier happens to be quite good technically,” John Caldwell wrote. “And patient as well.”
That skier was John’s nephew, Zach Caldwell.
The occasion of John’s passing in February has had NENSA standing back and admiring all the branches of the sturdy tree (no doubt, a sugar maple) of the ski community he built. In the same sugarbush, another branch of his family tree seems to be an appropriate place to look to honor his legacy in this particular time. Zach’s contributions to NENSA and nordic skiing are ubiquitous to the point where we don’t always call them to mind. But, just as Zach kept “Uncle John” in the ski community’s life via his video dispatches from Putney, the moment where John’s passion for the ski community is being actively transformed into a legacy seems an appropriate occasion to honor NENSA’s first Program Director, and a vital force which has kept on through not just the organization’s history, but the growth and development of New England skiing, and the sport of nordic skiing writ large.
Zach Caldwell is a self-described “Putney kid” who raced the New England junior circuit before attending and racing at Middlebury College. His graduation coincided with his Uncle John’s homegrown project to institute an independent organization for skiing in New England, and Zach was hired as the first employee of a newly formed NENSA in 1995. Over a six year stint alongside NENSA’s first Executive Director Fred Griffin, Zach built the basic architecture of New England skiing as we know it today. A non-exhaustive catalogue of contributions include: the Eastern Cup, a Coaches Education program, Elite and Devo Teams, the JRL points system, integration of Eastern High School and U16 (then J2) Championships and Junior Nationals into a singular junior program. The NENSA logo.
“Zach was my daily partner in crime in the early years of NENSA” says Fred Griffin, “He coupled a fertile imagination with a willingness to take chances and a wide range of hands-on skills.” Griffin adds that his fondest memory of Zach came from the end of his time with NENSA: “[Zach] told me he was going to buy a truck equipped with ski-grinding equipment. ‘I’ll take it from site to site,’ he said, ‘then grind people’s skis from home during dryland.’ ‘I think I can build up a business.’ ‘Forget that,’ I said. ‘That idea will never work.’
The idea transformed into Caldwell Sport. Founded in 2002 as a grinding business, the Caldwell Sport business has grown and transformed to be by parts, and whole, the one-stop shop of homegrown expertise which John Caldwell envisioned. Alongside his longtime partner Amy, Zach has built Caldwell Sport into a definitive source of ski technical expertise for the North American continent, and beyond. Zach has formed partnerships with national federations and wax and ski companies which have formed the basis for an entire community’s understanding of the technical equipment used to pursue the sport. All the while, Zach’s also sustained athlete mentoring practices for Putney kids and World Champions alike, working with longtime US Skiing stalwarts such as Kris Freeman, Noah Hoffman, Tad Elliott, and his cousin Sophie Caldwell Hamilton.
The steady presence Zach has brought to American skiing through his three-decade career is summed up in a single word: curiosity. As Kate Northcott puts it, “Zach is brilliant. He has an insatiable, curious mind that is always searching for new information, analyzing data and philosophizing about how everything fits together.”
For all of his tangible accomplishments, Zach’s great contribution to skiing is better captured as a mode. He is skiing’s great “This is water” inquisitor, after a a well-known David Foster Wallace commencement speech which starts off with a didactic little parable-ish story:
“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”
By continuously pointing towards awareness of what is real and essential about a life in skiing, Zach relentlessly teaches others to observe and partake in the technical aspects of the sport which otherwise can escape their grasp. To New England juniors, to Masters, and to Olympic skiers alike, he reminds us over and over about the unique beauty of the sport while pushing knowledge of it forward for us all: “This is water.” Or rather, with Zach, “this is snow.”
Forty years on from being his Uncle John’s model for the new fangled skate technique at the old home place in Putney, the likeliest place to find his nephew is still defined by that new-old paradox. On any old winter day up and down Vermont, you’ll find Zach at an old haunt, and on the cutting edge.
