The ski team finished its season last week on a balmy Saturday at Hunter Mountain, battling opponents in the Atlantic Highlands Region such as Lehigh, Rutgers, Drexel, Fairfield and Columbia.
“It’s just been really warm and raining a lot, so the snow has been really bad,” junior president Tess Boyler said. “On Saturday, it was 50 degrees out, so you get the snow that is kind of like mashed potatoes, which is not really great to do racing on.”
This competition weekend followed five weeks of contests at West, Blue, Belleayre, Camelback and Hunter Mountains. The team now awaits official decisions about which sub-teams qualify for regionals held at Blue.
“For alpine men’s and women’s, we’re pretty much guaranteed to go because they take the best six teams and we’ve never finished worse than a fourth-place finish overall,” junior vice president Michael Martirano said. “Our women’s freestyle team is most likely gonna go … basically we’re just waiting on the men’s freestyle side.”
Despite expectations about regional qualifications, the team still has not heard of an official announcement as of Wednesday night. Based on its scores as compared to other schools, Lafayette expects that all subgroups have qualified and are awaiting an announcement on individuals.
The team lost several top-performing skiers after last season when the team went all the way to the national competition held in Mammoth, California. However, the team considers its regular season run to be a successful campaign boosted by the efforts at moving forward.
“This year was kind of a rebuild year … and [the team] came out and put in a pretty good season,” Martirano said.
“I’m just so proud of everyone on our team,” sophomore freestyle captain Grace Gazza said.
Gazza is one of many team members to win individual Atlantic Highlands Region accolades this season as the first-place finisher in women’s freestyle snowboarding. Alongside her is sophomore Katie Neuffer who won women’s freestyle skiing, junior Sebastian Bjorkeson who nabbed third for men’s alpine and junior secretary Lindsay Correll who landed in second for women’s alpine.
“I’m from northern Connecticut, so I grew up skiing at Mount Snow, which is in southern Vermont,” Correll said. “So I raced there just on the weekends from middle school all the way through high school basically.”
Gazza, a Poconos native, shares a similar background to Correll.
“I’ve skied the majority of my life,” Gazza said. “I grew up next to a ski resort, and it’s been great to be able to come to Laf and continue that.”
While awaiting an official announcement about team participation in regionals, the team has celebrated the individual accolades earned this season.
“We had a little award ceremony, and it was really great to see our teammates up there being able to win awards,” Boyler said.
