New England Nordic Ski Association

The Home of Cross Country Skiing in New England

NENSA News

2025 Festival Logo & Theme unveiled!

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NENSA is excited to share Quarry Road Ski Club‘s and Quarry Road Trails‘ 2025 BKL Festival logo with you all! We’ll continue to share Festival updates here in Breaking News, through our Trail Tales youth newsletter, and on social media (Facebook and Instagram). You can also keep tabs on the Festival website HERE.

Get ready to brave the elements at this year’s BKL Festival, where we celebrate the power and beauty of winter’s wildest weather! From swirling snowstorms to icy winds, experience the thrill of skiing through the heart of Central Maine at Quarry Road Trails. Bundle up and embrace the adventure as we explore how nature’s fiercest forces shape our world.

Join the Quarry Road Ski Club and NENSA on March 1-2, 2025, for a weekend of skiing, challenges, storm chasing, and wicked winter fun in Waterville, Maine!

The 2025 Festival logo was crafted through a collaborative effort, incorporating design elements contributed by coaches, volunteers, and athletes from the local Quarry Road community.

Rollins Roll 2024: A Climb into the Clouds Together

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On a sunny day, you can’t miss Mt. Kearsarge outside of Warner, New Hampshire. Depending on your direction on I-89, it’s either the first or last bump on the landscape demarcating that part of New England where the grooves, and bumps in the land get a little larger, the town centers get a little smaller, and the woods and waters beckon a little wilder. Kearsarge is emblematic as much as it is part of the landscape. The climb up it is steep like a New England climb ought to be. The summit is prone to be shrouded in the clouds in a way that just seems to make everyone comment that they’ll “burn off” eventually. Kearsarge can create a microenvironment to fill with a lot of what makes the landscape it is a part of special – and so, on Sunday, that’s what NENSA and Kearsarge nordic looked to do.

Take a bunch of skiers camped out at the nearby Dublin School, bring in an enthusiastic group of skiers from across the region, and put them all under the steady leadership of Kearsarge Nordic Coach Kevin Lee’s vision for a climb up the newly paved Rollins State Park hill climb, and it all served to make rollerskiing stand out as part of what makes the New England ski community a special part of the landscape up here.

As conditions go, they were quintessential. The clouds that rolled in on Sunday morning did not in fact, burn off, and instead what they gave way to as the race started mid-morning was a steady rain. That led to a kind of rollerski equivalent for “klister conditions” for the classic hill climb. To get kick on the wet pavement, you really had to be able to “kick” your ski. No doubt, a few racers had the erroneous thought of, “if I would have just packed my high camber rollerskis!” NENSA did get to provide the field with our new fleet of Swenor Alutech classic skis, which by all reports, kicked very well even in the challenging conditions on Sunday.

The top honors in this year’s Rollins climb were emblematic of what has come to make the Rollins Roll a special part of our rollerski landscape in the East. This event especially seems to be able to cut across the age category and disciplines that skiers engage in to just celebrate being together on skis.

In the Women’s field, our up-and-coming juniors showed their combined strength with Ford Sayre’s Lea Perreard coming in with a close fought winning time of 30:30 ahead of Plymouth’s Elli Englund and Ford Sayre teammate Annelies Hanna. The top senior Women’s honors went to Rosalie Wilson (Ford Sayre). In the Men’s field meanwhile, David Sinclair made his return to the Eastern ski scene under the USA Skimo banner to take the Men’s field win in a time of 25:12. He was joined on the Overall podium by the two top junior skiers, as David Northcott from Caldwell Sport and Noah Branchflower from Ford Sayre followed. Matthew Northcott rounded out the junior podium in third, while Sinclair was joined by second place Tim Van Orden (Prospect Mountain) and third place Peter Alden (Ford Sayre) on the Men’s Senior podium.

Arguably the most important honor that was awarded at the conclusion of the Rollins Roll though, came as one of our steady Master’s skiers, Lindsey Klecan, made her way to the top of Rollins Roll. With her support crew behind her, Klecan crossed the finish-line to a round of applause from the race crew at the top of Mt. Kearsarge and then, a special awarding of her second place in the Women’s senior race from Men’s Overall winner David Sinclair.

The passing of the locally sourced Maple Syrup from the skier-to-skier across the entirety of the Rollins Roll field Sunday seemed to be a pass at what makes it a special event each year. Adorned with the mountains, their cloudy summits, rainy August days, and some maple syrup, it all pointed towards a landscape where skiing, and skiing together, is unique. In New England, where nordic skiing is just part of the landscape.

Rollins Roll RESULTS

FULL SET of Rollins Roll PHOTOS

NONH & Maine Rollerski Clinic Recap

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Last Saturday was an exciting day at Fryeburg Academy as we hosted a fantastic learn-to-rollerski clinic in collaboration with Jackson XC! The morning kicked off with an enthusiastic group of young skiers from various clubs across Maine and New Hampshire. For many of these young skiers, this was their very first experience on rollerskis. Despite it being a new skill for them, by the end of the session, their ability and fluidity of movements were impressive—as if they had been rollerskiing for years. 

Our focus was on the fundamentals of skate techniques, where we worked on skills such as balance, agility, athletic body position, and more. Also featured was an agility course designed to enhance their balance and confidence on rollerskis. It was inspiring to see the kids mastering new skills and having fun while doing it.

In the afternoon, we shifted gears and hosted a clinic for high school students and adults. This session was a great opportunity for skiers of varying ages and experience levels to come together, share their passion for the sport, and further develop their rollerskiing abilities. 

We’re excited to see everyone hitting the trails this winter! Events like these truly showcase the joy of skiing and the strong sense of community in our sport. We can’t wait to build on these experiences and continue supporting the growth of skiers at every level.

NENSA Rollerski clinics are geared towards BKL-age children and the parents, caregivers and coaches that support them. Our clinics focus on teaching the fundamentals of skiing, including stopping, turning, basic techniques, agility skills and course, and engaging games. It’s a fantastic way to get ready for winter, connect with the nordic community, and have a blast mastering a new skill. 

If you missed the clinic last weekend, we have a few more opportunities for learn-to-rollerski scheduled in conjunction with our competitive programs this fall before the snow flies, and more information will be available at the below links:

Free Fall Ski Cross Sprints Rollerski Clinic – 9/22/24 – Burlington, VT

The Maine Event Rollerski Clinic – 10/20/24 – Rumford, ME

C2C 2024 Recap: Classic Climb to the Castle Conditions Make for a Great Skate Race

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Right on cue, the clouds rolled in on the summit of Whiteface Mountain. Through the now 17 editions of the Climb to the Castle, many of them have ended how Sunday’s race did, with racers gathered around for a foggy podium ceremony as the wind and cold pretense a different season.

The whole experience of a hill climb is meant to be otherworldly. Especially in these August days, you wind through the perfect early morning glow of the mountains, then wind through steep pitches and hairpin turns until you find yourself in the wilds, the winds, and the wicked accomplishment of roller skiing up a mountain. Coming back down the world feels stiller, and the warm air seems a little easier. To ski into the clouds offers you a temporary communion with the winter conditions that we’ll all look to brave in just a few months. What a wonderful way to spend a late summer morning.

This last weekend’s Climb to the Castle drove home how special that experience can be, and how uniquely Eastern it is too. When we go to Mt. Kearsarge this weekend for the Rollins Roll (registration is open here!), we’ll be partaking in a template that the Climb set for what modern rollerski racing looks like. That comes with a few conditions that we can take for granted, with the most notable being that so many of the iconic mountains in the East have characteristically steep, and paved, roads to their summits. Another is that they seem to re-affirm the need for nordic skiers to challenge themselves while challenging each other. In what other community are the most popular offseason training races only the most challenging parts of the sport?

Short Course Men’s Podium: 1) Jorgen Pirrung (Mansfield Nordic) 2) Alesandro Bucci (Rochester Nordic Racing) 3) William Preece (NYSEF).

All of that was on display this past Sunday, as a competitive and varied field started out from the toll booth at Whiteface and started to make its steady progress to the summit and continue the Climb’s unique tradition.

The Open skate race featured a competitive field with a decidedly international flair. A lead pack of skiers whittled down to six before the last 2 k, when local NYSEF and St. Michael’s college skier Andrew Scanio put an uptick in pace that proved to be decisive. Behind Scanio, the field would start to stretch out, with XC Ottawa’s Edward Southward coming in second place, approximately 20 seconds off Scanio, and GMVS’ Matt McIntosh rounding out the podium in third place. uOttawa Nordique’s Shilo Rousseau skied within the lead pack for much of the race, and handily established a lead in the Women’s Open Skate that lead to victory, while her teammate Anna Sierra Heffernan-Wilker took second place. GMVS’ Mary Harrington rounded out the Open Women’s podium in third place and won the junior category.

The full results from this year’s Climb to the Castle are available on RaceSplitter HERE.

Thank you for NYSEF, High Peaks Cyclery, and the ski community that came out to support this year’s Climb!

Photoset from Nancie Battaglia online HERE.

SMS Camp Day!

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George Forbes photo

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!

George Forbes photo
Jessie Diggins mixing it up in our agility course with some BKL Campers. George Forbes photo.

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!