Jack Kroll ‘25 on the HS128, Photo by Nancie Battaglia.
At Northwood, ski team members train almost every day of the week. That said, they are not skiing without a purpose. Tuesdays through Fridays are training days, and the weekends are usually packed with competitions. Training so rigorously can affect your mental health. Any day can be a good or difficult day on the mountain. The drills become repetitive, and there are pros and cons to this.
Skiers can become confident in their skills with this much training and start to really take off. They start to gain confidence and feel good mentally. Skiers can also focus on the negatives, and their mental health can become poor. Athletes may start to become mentally fatigued. Skiing is an escape from the rest of their problems for some. For others, skiing can feel like a never-ending chore.
Jack Kroll ’25. Photo by Mr. Michael Aldridge.
Jack Kroll is a ski jumper here at Northwood and has a lot of experience with the mental side of skiing. “Ski jumping is an extremely mental sport,” said Kroll. One of my coaches once told me that ‘ski jumping is 90% mental and the other 10% is in your head.’ It is a sport where it takes a long time to make small changes. You can work for an entire season on a couple of minute details in your jump, and it will not click. It is super-frustrating when this happens, and I have learned that you must just push through it. Then one day, maybe a year later, everything will click, and you will have the best jump of your life. It is a mental grind 24-7,” added Kroll.
“A piece of advice I try to live by is to never quit on a bad day, which my mom used to tell me,” Kroll said. “This is my biggest takeaway from the mental part of ski jumping. You just must keep going.”