Clayton Fuller ’25. Photo by Mr. Michael Aldridge.
Individual sports are such an interesting genre. All the pressure sits on the athlete – it isn’t divided amongst a team. The idea that it’s “all you” makes it easy for people to follow a specific athlete and not have to pledge their allegiance to one team. The other part of individual sports is that all the preparation for competitions and races falls, yet again, on the athlete. This isolated aspect sees many individual sport athletes have extensive, ultra-detailed rituals on game or competition day. This is no different for Northwood Freestyle skier Clay Fuller ‘25.
In skiing, it’s normal for athletes to have to wake up in the early morning hours to start their day. So, Clay explained to me how his prep for competition day starts the night before. “Normally, I wake up between 2:00 a.m. and 6:00 a.m., depending on where I’m competing. So, I always make sure to get to bed at a good hour to get enough sleep. Then, registration opens at 8:30 a.m., and the comp could go until 3-5:00 p.m.”
Athletes compete in skier cross, one of Clay Fuller’s ’25 specialty events. Photo: USASA.
On top of the early schedule, Clay also has a specific pre-comp ritual. “Yeah, so my only ‘ritual’ that I do is I have a handshake I do with my coach. The handshake is called a ‘tracer.’ ‘It’s 3 hand slaps and then a fist bump. For me, I do it aggressively to hype myself up. And on comp-day, I’m usually listening to East Coast hip hop; my favorite artists recently have been West Side Gunn and Joey Badass. My favorite comp song is 327 Pray for Paris.”
I asked Clay about how he gets out of performance slumps and shakes off bad performances, and he offered an interesting angle. “Skiing is all a mind game. I have had days where I couldn’t even slide a rail to the end and broke many poles over tricks. The best lesson I learned is that progress isn’t linear. A great example of this was the other day. I was working on a new trick called a cork 1080 (one flip with three spins). During my training that morning, I got extremely close to landing the trick, but I had to end up calling it a day before I could bring it to my feet. The beauty in that though is that more progress was made in that day than if I did land the trick, because now I’m not only learning from my past mistakes of why I didn’t land the trick, but I’m hungry to go back tomorrow and pull it off.”
