Syracuse University has one heck of a basketball team. The Orange boast famous ex-player Carmelo Anthony and are a number three seed in this year’s March Madness Tournament. In fact, I have them making it to the Elite Eight in my bracket.
But Syracuse’s basketball team is not the school’s only squad competing for a title this March. The Syracuse University Ski Racing Club also gave the Orange something to celebrate during last week’s USCSA (United States Collegiate Ski Association) National Championships here in Sun Valley.
Led by Club President, Skiing Magazine intern, and Long Island native, Ari Cohen, Syracuse University competed in every alpine event. Their team was the second team to qualify from their conference, accomplishing their goal of reaching this year’s National Championships after learning last year that the races would be hosted here in Sun Valley. After training three to four days a week on their relatively tiny home hill of Toggenburg, coming to Sun Valley was something they were itching to do. In fact, only one of their 13 team-members had ever visited here before. “Driving into town and seeing the mountains rising up from the ground, it’s pretty epic,” Ari told us while sitting in the sun on Warm Springs Plaza. His teammates echoed his sentiments and expressed their awe about Bald Mountain.
The Syracuse team trains all season on Toggenburg, a small hill with 600 feet of vertical, two chairlifts and one rope tow, located about an hour from campus. “We didn’t picture this much vertical or this many steeps. The whole mountain is just absurd, you can just lay your skis into the snow and carve away,” one of Ari’s teammates boasted after shredding the afternoon away all over Baldy.
In 2007, the Syracuse Ski Rangers had their best National Championship Club team finish; a respectable 5th place, and this year their goal was much of the same. “We have a pretty competitive conference, the Mideast Conference, so we were hoping to represent our school and that conference in attempt to gain more bids for the Mideast,” Ari said. “We also want to show that the East still has great skiers.”
While they didn’t exactly meet their result expectations as one racer blew out his knee and the men’s team only finished two out of three racers in the final run of Saturday’s Slalom races, finishing at 60th and 62nd place. The men’s team did finish a respectable 12th in GS and 15th in the overall combined. But whatever the results were the Syracuse team said it was an honor to race at one of the nation’s best resorts. And they definitely showed that skiers from the East can still rip.
“While we are all here for the sport and to race, skiing is such a lifestyle sport that this event is 60% about the skiing and 40% about having fun.” Ari told us after he and his teammates had just finished free-skiing for the day. The days previous had been spent racing the epic, Greyhawk top-to-bottom GS course and competing in the under-the-lights dual Slalom–check out the video–on Dollar (“That drop-off jump in the middle of that dual slalom was crazy!” Ari told me about last Tuesday’s event.) So they were stoked to finally check out the rest of the mountain. “Before we came here one of our coaches said that if he could ski anywhere for the rest of his life, it would be Sun Valley. I can definitely see why and I would definitely come back,” Ari said.
The team stayed with their families (almost all of their parents came to watch the races) at the Sun Valley Lodge and spent Fat Tuesday at Whiskey Jacques, celebrated with other racers at the Roosevelt, and reveled in the true ski-town lifestyle. And they said that everyone was friendly and stoked for them to be here.
Except one guy on the chairlift, “He said that he didn’t think it was a big deal that all the college racers were here and that all this pomp and circumstance was for nothing,” one of Ari’s female teammates said. “But by the time we got to the top of the lift, I convinced him it was pretty cool that we were here.” The rest of us didn’t need any convincing, but we’re glad you turned him around.
