Coach Erin’s Thoughts on Keeping Athletes in the Sport

Team Birkie coach Erin Moening (BIO) has brought a wonderful personal touch to the team since getting onto the team roster this past spring. Erin has a long background in skiing at a high level even with her young age. In this blog Erin touches on how we can keep our teammates, friends and family in this sport longer and gives us food for thought as to why so many college skiers may not want to continue skiing after college. Additionally, Erin provides insight as to how you and me can support our young aspiring athletes in their pursuit of this awesome sport.

This is a great read! Enjoy.

“I can remember skiing around the Twin Cities Cross Country Trails as a young junior - at Hyland Bloomington, Theodore Wirth, Battle Creek, Elm Creek - and mentally making notes of all the skiers faster than me. Most of them, I knew- you had the legends of Caitlin and Brian Gregg and Matt Liebsh. A bigger band of athletes when the college kids would come home on winter break, where I could usually easily decipher who they were based on ski uniform and who they were skiing with. Rarely was there a name I did not know - emphasizing how small the Midwest Elite Skiing community is. 

There’s a very distinct pipeline in Minnesota skiing that every top skier follows. There’s Minnesota High School League Skiing, which boasts thousands of high school skiers a season. A step up, you have the Midwest Club Teams - which work with 700-800 junior athletes a year. From those teams, around 50 athletes sport the Midwest Junior National Team jackets in March. If you broaden the scope to NCAA skiing, you can point out around 30 collegiate skiers with Minnesota roots in a given year. Last year, ten post-collegiate athletes were skiing on the US SuperTour Circuit or on the World Cup from Minnesota, Wisconsin, or Michigan (for point of my Midwest/Central Region Case Study). What’s the glaring issue with that? Seven of those ten athletes were 25 years or younger. 

This is not a statistic specific to last year or a problem that just the Midwest faces. A small percentage of collegiate cross-country skiers decide to pursue skiing after graduating, and few compete at the top level past 25. 

Like most endurance sports, it takes years of high-level training and experience to peak as an elite athlete. Many cross-country skiers are not considered to be in their prime until their late 20s to early 30s, so if United States skiers are not sticking it out for that long, we are not only losing athletes who could be making US Ski Teams, skiing on the World Cup but losing that elite athlete experience that could be passed down to the next generation. Our regional and national athlete development pipelines suffer when we constantly lose athletes who have experience competing at Junior Worlds, U23s, or NCAAs. 

So why can’t the US keep top cross-country skiers in the sport long enough to reach the age where they might ‘peak’? Cross Country Skiing is a very demanding sport - physically, mentally, financially... I could go on. Sport-focused activities can take up to 8 hours a day - leaving little room for a career or outside hobbies. It is complicated for these athletes to make training and competition financially sustainable, and it can often feel like they are putting their lives on hold to pursue these dreams. 

You look to endurance sports in the US - primarily two of my favorites, running and cycling. Top elite athletes - former successful juniors, collegiate, and professional competitors tend to keep competing longer. It’s much more common to see athletes with full-time jobs training to qualify for Olympic Trials, fit 20-30 somethings crushing local and regional races. You also tend to see more elite training environments- teams that have a wide spread of opportunities, from racing internationally to local/regional competitions. While the US currently has 5-6 ‘elite’ cross-country ski teams, these teams are slim, usually exclusively made up of skiers on the World Cup and attempting to qualify for the World Cup. These athletes are pursuing the sport full-time. If they are lucky, they receive training/racing stipends from their club teams, and if they are even luckier, they receive financial support from the US Ski Team, but support tends to stop there, with athletes sometimes having to pay out of pocket at the end of the season. 

Recently, Team Birkie Ambassadors Jessica Yeaton and David Norris spoke with Team Birkie’s newly established Development Team about their careers as Olympic Cross Country Skiers. While Jess and David’s talk was primarily on the transition from NCAA skiing to Supertour/International skiing, one thing that stood out was their emphasis on making Elite Skiing their lifestyle rather than strictly a career. Jess highlighted her view of US Professional Skiing - the narrow field of vision that athletes have where they can either be 100% about elite skiing or 0% and how the decision each spring, if you were going to give skiing another year, could put a strain on an athlete’s relationship with the sport. Jess and David found that changing their relationship with competitive skiing - adjusting how they train to lifestyle changes, allows them to have a more sustainable approach to Elite Cross Country Ski racing. In fact, despite thinking she would be done with ski racing after returning to school, Jess won the American Birkebeiner against a stacked field during the first year of working towards her doctorate. Jess and David are still ski racing and have their eyes on the Birkie and Minneapolis World Cup while working full-time. While not every athlete can work or wants to work while pursuing success in sport, embracing this gradual transition out of professional support could be the solution to the longevity of US Cross Country Skiers. When you have stories like the continued success of Jess and David, along with Rosie Brennen, whose cross-country success was not linear - you wonder how many others could have that level of success if they had the support to keep at it. 

Keeping more athletes in the sport at a higher level seems like the next step as the US continues to grow as a Cross Country Skiing nation, and I believe, to do that, teams need not to be afraid to change the perspective of what the lifestyle of a professional cross country skier looks like. It’s important to be honest that for it to be sustainable for someone to stay in this sport for a long time, it requires many sacrifices. If top programs can be more open-minded and flexible to support new versions of elite cross-country skiing, there could be a new pool of cross-country skiers. 

There are always going to be challenges that are presented due to not being a mainstream sport in the US (I’m sorry to break that news to you). Athletes and Teams will struggle with funding (go support NNF and your local Elite Teams, such as Team Birkie!), and with more athletes, resources would be spread even more thin. But, if the goal is to grow as a region and country, ensuring that we don’t lose our experienced athletes as quickly, using them as resources, training partners, and community builders will help develop stronger elite communities nationwide.”  

With all that being said - if you would want to support our Team Birkie athletes, there is an online auction going on right now. We would love your support and hopefully you can get a cool item!

Link here: Team Birkie Auction

Thank you so much!