NENSA News

Lindsey Masterson, the long-time leader of Dublin XC’s BKL, says that one of the most magical moments of every ski season in Dublin, New Hampshire, is a two part act.

First, the set up: “we start the season with a trail day before the snow comes in,” says Masterson. Then, the payoff: “the adorable moment when we’re out there on skis for the first time, and the kids say things like ‘it looks so different with snow,’ or ‘wait is this the same place we cleaned up!’ Something about the whole experience of trail day transition to snow time is magical.” 

From the youngest members to their Masters then, the guiding spirit of Dublin XC is true. Down in the hills of southern New Hampshire, there’s a group of skiers that work with wonder and creativity year-round; the set-up, so that the pay-off; winter, is full of those things for us all. With that dedicated spirit, Dublin XC has grown from a couple families to a regional hub for everything from Coaches Symposiums to Eastern Cups and College Carnival racing. They are also all contribute to the reason why NENSA is proud to announce that Dublin XC is 2024 club of the year.

Dublin XC started as the extension of cuts and juts through the woods on Beech Hill surrounding the Dublin School, both literally and figuratively. Literally, there was a long-existing set of old-school trails (in style, and in that they dated back to the Dublin School’s founding in the 1930s. Figuratively too, nordic had already cut tracks. Dublin school had a competitive nordic program in the late 40s through the 60s, coached by Nathaniel “Buddy” Bates. In the late 2000s, Nathaniel’s son Brad Bates became the Head of School, and with a generous grant from Dublin School founder’s son Michael Lehmann, who had been part of those Bates-led Dublin School nordic teams, the pair started dreaming big. The full story of how the result, an FIS-homologated 5 k course, came together was reported on by FasterSkier upon its completion in 2016, and can be found here.

Along with a new course came a new community-oriented Nordic Center, founded in 2014, and a group of long-time nordic skiers coalesced into the beginnings of Dublin XC. Early Dublin XC youth programming started with two pairs of siblings, the Bates (Calvin and Lilly), and the Macys (Aggie and Clint), and quickly blossomed to include a Competitive Team with a full BKL club in tow.

Through the club’s growth, a steady presence of leadership has been provided by Coach Kathy Maddock, who set out with a vision to tap into the existing energy around competitive nordic skiing that already existed in Southern New Hampshire, and in turn, “hoped not only raise the level of competitive skiing in the Monadnock area, but in New Hampshire as a whole.”

For Maddock, that included fostering an excellent culture within Dublin XC, but also looking for the opportunity for the club to become the key ambassador for competitive skiing in the region. She developed the popular Dublin XC Summer Camp, looking for opportunities to host New Hampshire high school races and Eastern Cups. The growing snowmaking capabilities matched a base of volunteers that was eager to continue the trend they saw every December, when the large groups of skiers from nearby high school teams like Keene, and farther-flung like Eastern Mass XC, chose to make Dublin their first stop for snow. All of the steps taken to make Dublin a community hub for skiers from across the region has culminated in some special moments. In particular, Maddock indicated that she was proud of how New Hampshire became team champions at the 2023-24 NENSA Eastern High School Championships “not only because many of the racers were DXC skiers, but also because other New Hampshire skiers had been to DXC camps, or used the Dublin Nordic Center as their training grounds, and several of the coaches had coached at our camps, and gone to coaches clinics at Dublin.”

Throughout the process of nominating for Club of the Year, Brad Bates has expressed that “it felt weird nominating our own club.” That Dublin XC seemed a little too new, and a little too small. Ultimately, NENSA is proud to recognize Dublin XC because they are a testament to how strident energy and passion overcome metrics like time and size. Lindsey Masterson wrote that these days in Dublin, “when you stand in the stadium area after the BKL skiers leave the stadium and look up the trails all you see are little ones skiing behind the coaches like little ducklings, falling, and laughing, it echoes through the woods.” A ski program that’s grown from four to seventy skiers means that the chorus of laughs is louder these days, and it’s that scene, more skiers, enjoying more skiing, that is ultimately the lasting impression. 

When you are on the long climb up Beech Hill towards Dublin Nordic Center, and catch a first glimpse of the sweeping trails, you can’t but feel it is the kind of place in New England that was just meant to have a ski trail. Thanks to the hard-work of those at Dublin XC, New England is getting to have that quintessential experience more often than ever before.