Monday, April 22, 2013

Mammoth Invitational


Every year I try ski my last day of the season at Mammoth Mountain, in California. While other mountains are shutting down operations for the season, or should be shutting down from poor snow coverage, Mammoth is different. The mountain boasts 100 percent open terrain, cold temps at night, lots of April sun...and it's in California. This makes for a perfect time to host the Mammoth Invitational, a 3-day fundraiser benefiting the Mammoth Lakes Community Fund, which provides funding for educational and athletic programs for the local youth. The participants, mostly from LA, are paired up with a professional skier as a coach, and compete in numerous activities from a biathlon to an alpine ski race to casino night.


The pro alpine race can get rather serious (Dave Chodunsky got me by three hundredths for the overall...damn him), but with about 13 ways to "win" each event, having a good costume can be just as important as having a fast time. As one of the pro coaches, my job is to make sure my group is having a good time, and maybe teach a thing or two about ski technique. This being my third year volunteering at the event, I've worked with groups that wanted to train gates and do one-ski drills during a snow storm, and others that simply wanted someone to go big mountain skiing with.

This year's group, the Go Go Glacier Girls, were definitely into matching outfits and having a good time, but also happened to be some of the best skiers at the event. Armed with some, shall we say, loud team clothing options, we skied all over Mammoth for two days and had a great time at the accompanying events.

I was a little hesitant to wear this costume, and really felt that I could have taken the title without my technicolor fur leggings (the headdress was gone by the time I got to the top of the lift)...

But if this is what the winner's team is wearing to banquet night, then I'm not so sure I lost after all, haha, nice look Dave!

With World Cup victories, Olympic medals, or X Games golds are all represented within the pool of coaches at the event, the opportunity to be included with the amazing group of other athletes and professional ski coaches is humbling. I hope to continue working with the program in the future, and can't think of a better way to spend time giving back to the sport that has provided me with so much. Here's to a wrap on the ski season!

Oh hey Glen Plake, nice bus

Monday, April 8, 2013

Final Four



Here's to the nerds.

Especially those that win awards, like tickets to the Final Four. The NCAA, in an effort to promote their student-athlete objective, recently established an award that honors the top GPA earner in each sport. The prize: two tickets to the Final Four men's basketball tournament. As I am almost 5 years removed from my college career, I never had the opportunity to win this newly created award (that, and my freshman fall econ grade quickly put an end to this ever happening to me). However, Andreas Haug, a good friend from Norway and current student at Colorado University, was in fact the winner of this prize, boasting an impressive GPA of 3.98 and a starting member of CU's 2 national skiing championships in the last three years. And as a displaced Norweigan, he needed an energetic friend who had an intimate knowledge (or at least a baseline) of basketball knowledge and enjoyed big time competitions. Guess who he asked...

That's right, this weekend Andreas and I enjoyed all that was Bracketville in ATL. Outdoor concerts from Zac Brown Band to Ludacris, watching a basketball game with a capacity crowd at the Georgia Dome, and lower bowl tickets to two a night of great competition, the trip was all that we could have hoped for. Big time collegiate sports are alive and well.

A lot of the fun for me was the ability to play tour guide to Andreas, as he had never before been to the South, and didn't really follow basketball. I prepped him throughout the week with video clips of everything from Lil' Jon to the ESPN documentary on the Fab Five. By Saturday night he actually knew some of the college basketball greats being honored at halftime (as a newly minted Michigan fan he booed Christian Laettner) and had eaten meals of chicken and waffles to catfish.

I'm really hoping that Andreas keeps his grades up this year, and most importantly that that he needs a tour guide to next year's Final Four in Dallas. Andreas and I were remarking that skiing has allowed us to travel the world and experience so many different things that we would otherwise never be a part of. This certainly fell into that category.