Fast Times at CVA
Skiing is mandatory. Broken bones are part of the curriculum, and you still have to pass trig.
Ski Magazine
10.04

"Pressure"
Sitting at the starting gate
All eyes focused on every detail
Knowing what is to come
And what you have to do
Pressure is the starting gate
By Liz

It's 10pm on a weeknight in remote, rural Maine, and 16 year-old Liz Thompson is packing. "It's pretty amazing to watch," says her mother, Teri, overseeing the operation. "She has her ski bag, her clothes bag, a bag with her 4 pairs of skis, her book bag –- which will probably weigh more than her ski bag –- and her food bag. Well, I take care of that last one."

These days, it seems, all Liz Thompson does is pack. And unpack, and zip into her rose-and-thorns themed racing suit and ski. The poised and supremely self-assured Thompson is one of the top skiers at Maine's prestigious Carrabassett Valley Academy (CVA), the private, skiing-intensive high-school at Sugarloaf Mountain that counts Olympians Bode Miller ('96) and Kirsten Clark ('94) as grads. In other words, Thompson's one of the best racers, her age, out there. In slalom, she's number one in the East, ranked 6^th in the U.S.. In the FIS ranking system, used to rank skiers world-wide, you enter at 15 years-old with 990 points and the fewer the better; a year into it, Thompson now has 51 points in slalom, and 73 for giant-slalom. This weekend in March, she'll race against other 15 and 16 year-olds in the newest stepping stone to the U.S. ski team, the JIIs at Whiteface in New York (and a good 8 hours drive from Carrabassett Valley). Right after, she'll drive two days with her coach to Ontario for the NorAms, the North American championships. In total, she'll be MIA from school for nine days.

"It's a lot of racing, but more you do it, the easier it becomes," Thompson says with typical, unforced nonchalance. "When I was younger, there were fewer races so I got nervous because they were my only chances. Now that I race every week, I think: so I messed up? Well, there's always next week."

But in these weeks, Thompson's fate as a competitive skier –- and the fates of many of the other 104 ambitious student-athletes at CVA –- will begin to take shape. Scattering to races from January to March, CVA's teenaged alpine racers from Thompson on down (as with CVA's snowboarders and free-style skiers) have to face down not just unfamiliar slopes but slim odds. "The reality is that one person, and only one person, from every birth year will make it onto the development team for the U.S. Ski Team, which isn't even the U.S. Ski Team," says Zach Brandwein, 17 and fellow alpine racer at CVA. For the CVA students, the winter months "are the dark ages," he says. "When you live in the dorms, you freak out. It's tough. Everybody knows what everybody's going through. You might have a support network, but in the end, the person you've got to rely on is yourself."

Thompson, at least, has her mom, who lives with her in a cozy, rented basement apartment on Sugarloaf Mountain. (About one third of CVA students are day students.) But supporting Liz's talent has effectively split her family in two. Teri runs the office at Saddleback Ski Mountain and commutes 45 minutes each way to work. Liz's older brother RJ was a CVA student for three years until he transferred to public school in Rangely, also 45 minutes away. "He's a great skier," Liz explains. "but he just wasn't serious about it anymore." And Teri adds, "and the pocketbook said ŒO.K.'" Now, RJ lives with their father, a ski instructor, in the family house in Rangely. When I ask Teri when she gets to see her husband, she laughs. "Liz, when do I get to see your father?" Teri asks. Liz shrugs, "I don't know." Finally, all packed, Liz munches a chicken sandwich in the hour before sleep. There are two bedrooms, but one is Liz's and the other is for her ski-tuning bench. "I sleep on the couch," admits Teri. "This is her place. I just come and take care of her. It's what moms do."

Tonight, her mom is Liz's support network. Tomorrow, it'll be her coach and the next day, as with every CVA student eventually, Liz will be alone at the starting gate. But from November to March, four out of five school days, CVA students leave school, suit up, and bus it up to Sugarloaf to train for close to four hours. The starting gate is the whole point. "Some kids come to CVA and they're not passionate about skiing," Liz says, matter-of-fact, heading to bed. "They don't last long. They can't handle it."

*

If CVA's main building looks like a swinger-era ski lodge, that's because it was one. "This place used to be called The Capricorn," says Rick Bisson, head of public relations for CVA (and father of two current CVA students). "My family would come up and stay here when I was a kid in the Œ60s. I remember drinking Shirley Temples right where we're standing." The Capricorn's first floor has since been converted into CVA classrooms, with a computer and a library area, but the open, wooden-beam and hearth dining area hasn't changed. Neither have the rooms upstairs, now the boys' dormitory. Carpeted in heavy brown shag, each room has a first floor and a loft-space for bunk beds, heaps of clothing, guitars, and the occasional "Beers of the World" poster. ("We've got to take that down," says Bisson.) Each room sleeps four. Girls stay in another former lodge, the Lumberjack, annexed up the road.

But on entering CVA, the first thing you notice isn't the style of the place, the rugs, or the glass case crammed with medals. It's the wall just to your right in the lobby. This is CVA's wall of fame. Six photographs stretch across the stucco, all CVA alums: Bode, Kristen, U.S. Ski Team freestyler Brenda Petzold, Canadian Olympic snowboarder Mark Fawcett, US Snowboard Team Olympians Seth Wescott and Jeff Greenwood. In 2002, CVA had six athletes in three different Olympic sports. Every day, relaxing between classes in the lobby couches, Liz and the other CVA students sit beneath these photographs, the heroes of the place. On a neighboring wall, are headshots of all the current CVA students. Professionally, these worlds might be miles apart, but here it's a matter of feet. At CVA, the Olympians are just kids from Kingfield, from Raymond, from Franconia Notch who ran the same slopes, slept in the same beds, and snacked from the same salad-and-cereal bar a few years back. The unspoken message: great skiers are made, not born, and they're made here.

The U.S. Ski team, the summit of the sport for alpine racers, recruits freshman and sophomores in college, but has begun looking for standouts during their sophomore and junior year of high-school at the JIIs and beyond.  With that kind of scrutiny, serious weekend skiers don't stand a chance against kids who ski everyday. "The competition's become more organized, more specific, and more intense," says Scott Hoisington, the head men's Alpine coach at CVA. "You can't just go to public high school in the east and race. It won't work in today's athletic environment." As the sport combs for younger talent, ski academies have become a critical, if costly, first rung on the ladder. (One year at CVA is $28,000, though the school offers scholarships.) Make that the second rung; the first would be skiing pretty much as soon as you can walk, as Liz did.

There are a handful of other outstanding academies in New England –- Burke Academy and Stratton Mountain School in Vermont, to name two -- but few boast CVA's track record of launching talent into the upper echelons of the sport and schools. "98% of our kids go to college, and we've had kids at Stanford, Brown, Dartmouth, MIT, CalPolyŠ" says John Ritzo, CVA's headmaster. "Some may take a year off before going to ski competitively, but eventually they all go." The other main draw is Sugarloaf itself, whose famous "Narrow Gauge" trail is one just two FIS-certified downhill racing courses in the east. (The other is at Whiteface, NY.) The whole phenomenon of high-school "ski academies" is about three decades old and began in New England, where ski-town public schools couldn't accommodate the uniquely complicated training and traveling schedules of competitive skiing. "At public high, you take a week off and your teacher has 25 other students to deal with," says Hoisington. "She's not going to take the time to catch you back up." Out west, local ski clubs are stronger, resort town schools are more understanding, and snow sticks around for longer, so there's less need for academies, though a crop of schools like Rowmark Academy in Salt Lake expects that to change.

CVA itself began as an outgrowth of the Sugarloaf's ski club in the late 1970s. Weekend trainings grew into a month-long tutorial for teenagers. When Burke Academy opened its first "winter session" in 1970, "some of the best Maine kids started heading to Vermont," says Ritzo. "Parents said, ŒWe don't want our kids to have to leave the state to ski.'" They joined up with King Cummings, the owner of Sugarloaf at the time, and founded CVA in 1982. The first classes were held in the basement of the Sugarloaf chapel. The Capricorn was purchased and converted to a school in 1983. Since then, the school's mandate has diversified just as the sport has; of the 105 current students, they split into thirds: one-third ski alpine, one third ski free-style, and one-third snowboard. A small, popular and strictly non-competitive "ALPS" program, just four years old, travels to France for a month for big mountain skiing.

At the height of the winter season, there is no "after-school" skiing at CVA. There is just "pre-ski" and "after-ski" school. Classes run from 7:30am to 9:30am. Then, the students head to the mountain until the afternoon. Lunch is peanut-butter and fluff sandwiches and "Go-gurt" on the mountain (and "bread ends" offered gratis by the friendly deli on the slope). Classes resume at 3pm and last until 5pm. Dinner follows, along with a mandatory study-hall for those can't maintain a TK average. Mondays are all academic days and Fridays are mostly skiing days. When they travel, teachers send packets of classes material and tests for the coaches to proctor. Math teacher Dave Koenig even filmed calculus tutorials and burned them on CD-ROM for them to take with them. "Some students are terrific and some horrible," Koenig says. "With trigonometry, it's hard because a coach might ask, ŒHave you done your homework?' but they have no clue what it's supposed to look like, so it could just be junk written down."

Because of these gaps, classes run six days a week during the fall and spring off-season –- to make up for the lost class-time. Meanwhile, students weight-train, mountain-bike, play soccer and baseball to maintain peak condition.

It's a high-pressure environment, but "the earlier they learn about that, the better they will perform," says coach Hoisington. "Still, we do need let them have a break and be kids." The school tips 75% boys-25% girls, a figure that reflects the sport and puts girls in the pole position socially. While dating happens, the school is so small and isolated ("We're two hours from everywhere," I was told) that anything more takes some savvy. "Girls can stay in the boys' dorm until 9:30pm, but they can only go on the bottom floor – not the top – and they have to keep the door open," says Chelsea Trenholm, a CVA first-year whose brother graduated in 2003. "And guys can't go into girls' rooms. Ever. At Lumberjack, even though we have a little chill area with a TV, the guys don't want to go there because it's a long walk." The pickins are slim, says junior Jamie Bisson. "These guys are like our brothers. We know them a little more than we want to." Still, there are a few couples, says Liz (whose own boyfriend is traveling). "But everybody knows about everything. You can't do anything secretive. You can't go out on dates. I guess you just hold hands and spend more time together than usual."

Other activities are not quite as wholesome. The week I was there, two teenaged free-riders who wandered into the lobby drunk were coming off a week suspension and into 30 hours of "community service": vacuuming the building's endless rugs and dusting the pipes by hand. Humiliated, with vacuums strapped to their backs, they work for hours. "You guys look like Ghostbusters," first-year Trenholm says, relaxing in the lobby. They shrug. "It's the same old story I guess," Trenholm explains. "It gets boring up here. People want to do stuff."

*

Midterm report cards are out and the alpine team academic advisor Amy collects her athletes in CVA's basement rec room. It's "after-ski," so the exhausted students spill over the ping-pong table and comfy if ratty couches. BET channel is on the television, with the mute on.

"Setting big goals leads to...?" asks Amy. "Anybody?"

"Big goals?" says one of the kids half-entranced by the jiggy on BET.

"No. It leads to success," says Amy. She reviews some CVA matters: if you've got a car, don't drive yourself up to the mountain. Take the school bus like everybody else. An ESP and Hypnosis show is coming to school next month so start getting excited. The spring "slush games" – sports in school's muddy field – are back on.

"Proper rest and good habits equals what?" asks Amy.

"Success!" says Liz.

This answer isn't just a platitude at CVA; success is the result of a test that you take almost every week at races, one that keeps getting harder and harder and whose results are utterly public. Twice a year, students take the U.S. Ski team fitness test – a check of their "ski-related" skills in vertical jumping, box jumping, and hex jump. The results, a ranking of every CVA student, are posted publicly right outside the rec room. One kid, for example, could do 115 vertical jumps in 90 seconds. ("I asked him how he did that," says PR-director Bisson. "He told me, ŒIt's all about pacing.'") The point being: just passing isn't good enough. When three of his top skiers came back with "sub-par performances" on their last race, coach Hoisington wrote a Post-It note on the team bulletin board for everyone to read: "Attitude controls motivation. Motivation controls performance. Performance controls success."

The irony is that all the mottos and mantras may not mean much when your key piece of equipment –- the teenaged body –- is out of control. "The biggest challenge for them is to not get frustrated by the ups and downs of their years," says Hoisington. "If you race against one kid and you beat him every race and then one time you don't, you don't know what's happening." Injuries –- deemed "mucho owwie" -- are par for the course. For a school project, Trenholm created a pie-chart for the school, showing that 8 students suffered concussions, 7 tore their ACLs, and "skier's thumb" is common. But the danger is less the initial injury than a youthful eagerness to get back on the slopes prematurely and compounding the damage; Injured for a month a half with a busted knee, Trenholm then broke her elbow running a rail when she returned. She'd be out for the rest of the season.

"You going to put that on your pie chart?" her math teacher joked.

"Don't go there," she answered, arm in a sling, wincing and waiting for her parents to get her to the doctor.

By comparison, Thompson's worst injuries have been bruises up her arms and shins and a bad bloody nose, all from smacking the racing gates. The challenge for her has been resculpting her body position. "I used to ski with my hands down by my butt," she says. "But if my hands are down, my hips are twisted and my ski loses its connection to the snow and I can't make an arching turn. It took me three or four years to get my hands up where they were manageably high. But you have one habit one year and another the next -- it changes all the sudden, so it's really up and down."

During her daily training on Sugarloaf's groomed, corduroy snow, her coach Gray watches Thompson take a handful of practice runs. "She's not real rigid and hard when she gets into trouble," he says. "She has this wonderful ability to be soft on her skis and just let them take her down the hill." Nearby, the College Carnival races are taking place, including racers from Sierra Nevada College, Colby and elsewhere. (A CVA junior, doing a ceremonial "forerun" of the course, clocked the second-best time, 1:12, in the slalom race.) When she's done for the day, Thompson skis over to the Carnival score chart to see the times. There are a huddle of times around 1:20s, and a number of D.N.F.s –- "Did Not Finish" (from a crash or missed gate), the racers' worst case scenario. If you DNF the first race, you don't get to race your second.

What would her own time rank?

"It all depends on the course," she says. "I don't judge them."

"She's very humble," the PR-director Bisson tells me later. "She probably would have clocked 1:01." The best time of the race.

That humility extends to her own plans for the future. When you add up CVA's tuition (even with her scholarships), the costs of racing (Thomspon's trip for the hotel and food comes to $1145), and her summer, month-long trainings in New Zealand with Coach Gray, "college isn't looking good," says her mom Teri. "We spend more on ski equipment than on the family car." Her brother RJ will enter Southern Maine Vocational school to try out becoming an electrician. Right now, Liz is hoping to ski in college, somewhere in New England. But, as she says, "I don't think the U.S. Ski Team is something I see in my future." The reality is: one in every birth year. "There are just so many steps to get there and it's easier to concentrate on what's in front of you than three or four years out.

*

The following Friday, during the JII slaloms at Whiteface, Thompson got her arm caught between two panels of a racing gate and was D.N.F. In the giant slalom, two days later, she fell and also classified D.N.F. "It happens," says Gray. "When you get to a race like that, there is nothing to be gained from skiing down hill conservatively. You've got to try and push yourself. And on that day, Liz pushed herself. I was very pleased."

At the NorAms – her first time skiing at that level -- she did well. She had told me she was just going for the experience anyway, so "there was less pressure." But then, a week later, at a FIS race in Quebec City, she had her best result of the year in giant slalom, racing against Canadian Ski team members. Ups and downs and ups. These may be the trickiest individual sports: high school, college, life. "It's hard," Thompson told me, "some people keep improving and some people stop –- even if the dedication is there. Even if you love it a lot. It's just what happens. But I really hope I keep going."