Utah holds slimmest of leads at NCAA Champs halfway mark

By Published On: March 12th, 2015Comments Off on Utah holds slimmest of leads at NCAA Champs halfway mark

WILMINGTON, N.Y. – It was GS day at the 2015 NCAA Championships at Whiteface Mountain, but by the looks of the scoreboard and high attrition rates in both the men’s and women’s races, it might as well have been slalom. Of the 34 starters in each race, only 24 managed to finish both runs, meaning every finisher scored valuable team points for their efforts.

At the midway mark of the event, the University of Utah has taken control of the lead by the very slimmest of margins, with only nine points separating the top three schools and 49 points between first and fifth. The University of Colorado is a close second, four points back, and the University of Denver third. With 10 skiers failing to finish both the men’s and women’s races, none of the schools in the lead managed to secure six scoring athletes on the day.

Spring conditions (for Whiteface, at least!) and round, technical sets challenged the nation’s best collegiate skiers to stay on their feet. Former Slovanian World Cup skier Mateja Robnik from the University of New Mexico put her rough performances at past championships behind her to win the opening run and hold onto the lead to claim her first NCAA title in her senior appearance.

“I haven’t had really good experiences at NCAAs. I was known as a good skier in GS, but I made a lot of mistakes last year and the year before. So this is a relief for me and a great pleasure to win here in my last year – senior year – in college skiing,” said Robnik. “I was very nervous (before second run), and I tried to relax. My assistant coach gave me a massage on my shoulders which really helped, and I did all my (pre-race) procedures of warming up. Once I got in the start gate I felt really good.”

Denver freshman Monica Huebner of Germany and junior Kristine Haugen of Norway, the defending champion from the past two seasons, rounded out the podium in second and third, respectively. Meanwhile, Utah profited in overall scoring by the fourth and fifth-place finishes of Kristiina Rove and Chloe Margrethe Fausa.

“The University of Denver Ski Team is great, we always have a good time and I really enjoy it being here,” said former German national team athlete Huebner. “We tried our best, and Mateja did pretty awesome in the first run. It was really clear because I know her from Europe and she’s always been the better GS skier of us. So I knew unless she made a big mistake, she would get it.”

New Hampshire’s Lisa Wedsjoe was the top Eastern skier in sixth, and Dartmouth’s Lizzie Kistler in eighth was the fastest American ahead of Colby’s Sierra Leavitt and Mardi Haskell in ninth and tenth. The tables certainly turned in the men’s race with a pair of Division III skiers rising to the top.

Middlebury’s Rob Cone, a former U.S. Ski Team development athlete, was top-ranked on the EISA circuit in GS with three victories this season and proved his results were no fluke even against the best of the West. After sitting fourth following the first run, Cone laid down the fastest second run of the day to overtake Croatian Sebastian Brigovic of Denver, a 2014 Sochi Olympian, for the win by 0.43 seconds. Cone’s Panther teammate and former Burke Mountain Academy classmate Chris McKenna turned up the jets on the second run as well to move up from fifth into the final spot on the podium.

“I just used the training I had for the past couple of weeks and the preparation and ideas I had from not really making it down two weeks ago. So I’ve just been preparing with the mindset that I could really do it and nail the entire course, and that’s what happened on the second run for the championship,” said Cone, who was shut out on the hill at the EISA Regional GS. “I was confident after the first run. I didn’t really have a complete run top to bottom that I enjoyed. So I knew that if I could just put it together that I could have a great second run. … The program (at Middlebury) has really been building. We have a great group of GS guys … and we’ve got them for a couple more years, so we’re just excited to have that kind of confidence in the team.”

One might say it runs in his blood, as Cone’s victory marked the first time an athlete from a Division III school claimed an individual skiing title since 2009, when his older sister Lindsay won the GS at Sunday River as a member of the St. Lawrence University Ski Team.

The Middlebury Panthers won team scoring in the men’s race ahead of Denver, who was led by Canadian Trevor Philp. Philp, who has had nothing shy of a dizzying season between collegiate racing, the World Cup, and the FIS Alpine World Ski Championships, finished fourth.

The races return to the Nordic venue on Friday for the men’s and women’s mass start classic events at Mt. Van Hoevenberg.

 

Team Scores

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Results

Women’s GS

Men’s GS

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About the Author: C.J. Feehan

Christine J. Feehan is a USSA Level 300 coach who spent more than a decade training athletes at U.S. ski academies - Burke, Sugar Bowl, and Killington - before serving as Editor in Chief at Ski Racing Media through 2017. She worked for the FIS on the World Cup tour for three years and then settled into her current home in Oslo, Norway.