Photo by Raychel West of Sydney Kuder ‘25.
The Northwood ski team has been in Valle Nevado, Chile for over a week in a half, and have loved every second of our time on snow and off.
Every ski day in Chile starts bright and early at 6:00 AM. First, the team has breakfast in the dining hall, then gets ready on the hotel’s first floor. A lot happens before we click into our skis; we use a variety of bands and stretches to warm up our muscles before we hit the slopes. Cara Dempsey ‘25 does hip mobility, ankle mobility, and muscle activation with bands before she eats breakfast. I like to use a band for activation and a lacrosse ball to roll out my feet before stuffing them into ski boots.
Once the team is ready to go, we trek outside around 7:15 am. The sun doesn’t rise in Valle Nevado until 7:35, so we load the first pomma while it’s still dark out. I love to lap with Cara in the morning before we jump into the course. We do slow drills to warm up and inspect the course thoroughly before we begin running it. We run the course for about two hours once we’re warm and ready to go. In that time, we get around 5-8 runs in. So far, we have skied four days of Slalom and six days of GS. After running the course, we’ll help our coaches pull the gates and bundle them. Most days we freeski after gate training for about an hour. Valle Nevado this time of year has plenty of snow and a lot of terrain open, making it the perfect hill to explore.
After training, we tune our skis before study hall. Tuning entails sharpening to maintain edge steepness and waxing using paste wax to keep our skis fresh and sharp. Depending on the day’s conditions, tuning can take up to an hour if our skis are dull.
We have dryland some days, where we stretch or do ladder and hurdle drills with our head FIS men’s coach, Seppi Stiegler. If we don’t have dryland that day, we have study hall from 1-3:30. Raychel West runs our study halls, ensuring we’re keeping up with our schoolwork and staying on top of assignments. After study hall, we review our videos from the day with our coaches. Our coaches usually shoot 3 runs of us skiing in the course every training session. During video, we look at our entrance to our turns in the course, and our overall technique while skiing. Our coaches give us feedback on what to work on the next day.
For the rest of the day, we have dinner as a team and relax before bed. Our coaches heavily enforce a very strict bedtime of 9:30 p.m. Because of our early wake-up calls, we strive to get as much sleep as possible.
The ski team has two days left on snow in Chile and can’t wait to make the most of it. We travel back to Northwood on Friday, September 27.
