Friday's skate at Middlebury was a very good day for our team. We had weird weather - super warm, windy, and intermittent rain - almost winter thunderstorm weather. Our skiers weren't fazed, though, and we posted some great results, highlighted by the Eusden brothers' stellar skiing - 14th for Spencer and a personal-best 41st for Riley. Riley was crushing it - he looked like a whole different skier out there. Got to love first-years - they get better every week. Good skiing on the women's side as well. Hannah was burning it up for the first 5k - V2-ing up hills and holding her own against the top skiers in the 6th seed. She got tired and lost some ground on the last lap, but still a very competitive 30th place finish. Kaitlynn was just behind in 31st - a well-paced effort that saw her gain several places in the last couple kilometers. In the team scoring, the men beat UNH - this means that we've beaten every team except Dartmouth, UVM, and Williams in at least one event this year - gives us a clear goal for Regionals...
Saturday's sprint relay was a bit less successful. We were fired up for the races, and the skiers left everything out there, but we just couldn't hang in with most of the other teams. Not our day, for whatever reason. Lots of good fire, though - everyone was battling hard, and Grace in particular seemed to find another gear, which was fun to see. We also discovered that Sanville prefers to be "yelled at" in short races - this quickly devolved into derogatory comments about the Birkie and other Midwestern institutions, which was fun. Not our typical coaching approach, but it seemed to help him ski faster. Overall, a very fun day in spite of the results.
Meanwhile, the ECT spent the weekend in New Hampshire contesting the final 2 Eastern Cup races. The whole crew raced well all weekend - Steph and Rainer had fantastic skate races, and Mark got back into the action after a nasty illness that kept him sidelined for the past month. James was chasing a berth on the Junior National team - he qualified by crushing Sunday's classic race. New England has more depth than any other region in the country, so this was a great accomplishment. He'll be headed to Minnesota shortly after the end of the carnival season - we're excited to see how he fares!
Lots of photos to follow in a future post, thanks to the great crew of parents who supported the team at both events. Particular thanks to Patti and Gary Lynn for hosting the ECT in beautiful Bow, NH - this trip would have been hard to pull off without their help.
No comments:
Post a Comment