Shen ski teams won their section titles this season despite struggling with attendance issues and poor ski conditions.
Both, who were state champions during the 2023 ski season, finished second in the state this year.
According to Allison Bach, a senior on the Alpine team, individual results improved for everyone on the Alpine team. Members who originally would finish at something around 20th are closer to or in the top 10. Andrew Cleney, the Nordic team coach, said that he enjoyed watching the improvement made this year.
According to Sarah Macfarlane, a junior on the Alpine team, the Alpine team won every race except for one this year. According to Jacob Perkins, a sophmore on the Nordic team, the girls Nordic team was similar.
“Leading up to states, our girl’s team won or placed very high in pretty much every race, with skier Raquelle Landa repeating an individual Sectional Champion performance and the girl’s team also winning as team for the second year in a row,” Perkins said.
“I really enjoy seeing the growth from the beginning of the season in athletes that start as newcomers to the sport and finish as accomplished skiers,” Cleney said.
According to Cleney the Nordic team got second place in the relay race and second overall. According to Bach the Alpine team placed second at states.
Bach said that she feels like they did the best they could. Perkins said that the Nordic team is mostly happy with their performance in states.
“This year they [the team that won states] just improved so much and there wasn’t anything we could do, the same happened with Nordic,” Bach said.
According to Bach the conditions were not good at states since it was 60 degrees out. This made the snow conditions poor and race suits sweaty. Perkins said that the Nordic team also struggled with warm weather at states, this time 50 degrees.
Perkins said that the lack of snow was a major challenge for the Nordic team. According to Perkins, many members of the Nordic team traveled north to practice on snow during weekends. Cleney said the amount of times the campus had snow for the team to practice on could be somewhere between 6 and 8.
“That’s not a lot over a season that spans from mid November to the end of February,” Cleney said, “We had to travel quite far to find consistent snow to ski on.”
Matthew Moran, assistant coach of the Alpine team, said he hopes to have more players next year. Bach said that this was problematic at the one race the Alpine team lost.
“The one race we lost, that was a couple weeks ago, basically not everyone came to the race because other people had other things going on,” Bach said, “I fell and that was bad because we didn’t have our other people.”
According to Perkins, a challenge for the Nordic team was their small size. Perkins said he hopes the team will have more players next year.
“While we have some amazing skiers now, it’s important that we have a large group of younger people who are eager to get better for the years ahead of them on the team,” Perkins said.
