The University of Alaska Fairbanks ski team begins its 2024-25 campaign against a familiar foe, rival Alaska Anchorage, in an annual season-opening event, the Nordic Cup, this weekend. However, the Nanooks will do so on an entirely new setup right in their own backyard: the UAF Competition Ski Trails.
The trails were completed on campus, adjacent to the Patty Center, with a 1.25-kilometer sprint loop and another 1.25-kilometer loop addition to create a 2.5-kilometer course option, designed to be spectator friendly.
UAF had previously hosted the Nordic Cup, which rotates between Anchorage and Fairbanks each year, at Birch Hill.
“I don’t think we’re grasping how big of a deal it is actually,” UAF head coach Eliska Albrigtsen said. “We are the only university that has FIS (International Ski and Snowboard Federation) courses on their property, on their campus.”
While there’s some roster turnover, UAF returns several familiar faces who will appreciate the new digs, and brings in some newcomers to push the returnees. The Nanooks have five returners and four additions on the men’s side and six returners plus two additions on the women’s side.
“It’s definitely great to have some fresh blood in,” Albrigtsen said. “They bring this really fun juice to the team, and nothing is a problem for them, which is sometimes a really great reminder to the athletes that have been here for a while that, ‘oh yes, it’s cold outside, but hey, it’s fun to be there out there with the team.’”
The Nanooks lost program stalwarts Christopher Kalev and Mike Ophoff from their men’s team and All-American Mariel Pulles from their women’s team, all to graduation. They do, however, return Kendall Kramer and Rosie Fordham — a pair of multi-time cross country running All-Americans who were also cross country skiing All-Americans in 2023-24 — to the women’s team and 2024 NCAA Skiing Championships participant Ben Dohlby to the men’s team.
All three are members of UAF’s cross country running team. As a matter of fact, all five of UAF’s usual scorers on its program-best women’s cross country team this past fall also ski for the Nanooks. That includes junior Katharine Brigham, sophomore Tabitha Williams and freshman Lucca Duke.
Multiple of them may be able to join Kramer in representing the ‘Nooks at the NCAA Championships in early March if Fordham ends up redshirting, which is a possibility depending on how she fares at the FIS Cross-Country Ski World Cup beginning this weekend.
The spots on the men’s team are even more wide open, with Albrigtsen claiming “every single athlete that is skiing this year and not redshirting has a potential to qualify for the team.”
While some may be concerned about how quickly the Nanooks’ dual athletes can transition from one endurance sport to the next in a two-week span (the Nanook women placed 13th at the 2024 NCAA Division II Cross Country Running Championships on Nov. 23), Albrigtsen anticipates their fitness may be even further along than that of their teammates who only ski.
They’re currently focused on fine-tuning their technique after months away from competitive skiing, which conveniently is also what the incoming freshmen (of which there are four men and one woman) are mostly focusing on.
“They’ve been working all together on developing better technique because that’s usually what the freshmen are weaker in than any of the people that have been on the team,” Albrigtsen said. “So we’re really excited to see how much they already progressed just within those couple months that we’ve had them.”
UAF may need a couple of those first-year talents to emerge on the men’s side if the Nanooks aspire to record their fifth consecutive top-10 finish at the NCAA Championships. It should help their assimilation that half of UAF’s competitions this season will be held in Alaska.
After the Nordic Cup, the Nanooks will meet up in Anchorage following Christmas break for the U.S. Cross-Country Ski Championships beginning Jan. 2 and stretching through Jan. 7.
“We have pretty high stakes in qualifying maybe half of the team to different international trips from those races,” Albrigtsen said. “So if it’s World Juniors, World U23 Championship, World Championship, University Games, those are all the four events that we try to send people to outside of, just like focusing on NCAA racing, and those qualifications will happen there (at the U.S. Championships).”
The Nanooks will then venture to the Lower 48 for a couple of weekends in a row (Utah Jan. 18-19, Montana Jan. 24-26 and Colorado Feb. 8-9) before coming back to Alaska to race at their UAF Invite beginning on Sunday, Feb. 16 and at the RMISA Championships hosted by UAA on Feb. 21-22.
The UAF Invite will be held at both the new campus trails and Birch Hill, which Albrigtsen said is an “incredible area to race at” that UAF wants Lower 48 athletes to still be able to experience in addition to the new on-campus competition trails.
“The NCAA regional championship is in Anchorage, so again, pretty close, and it’s going to be most likely on the same trails as the US Nationals,” Albrigtsen said. “So we hope that our athletes will have a little bit of an advantage skiing on Alaskan snow, because those are the two last races that are qualifiers for NCAA [Championships].”
The Nanooks get to both begin and end the regular season with a pair of in-state invitationals, and Fairbanks fans of the sport will have two opportunities to see high-level competition in a two-and-a-half month span.
It was only a couple of years ago that UAF coaches conceived of on-campus trails. Albrigtsen said she was contemplating how to make skiing a more popular sport in Fairbanks “because so many people ski, but so few people watch it” and thought of the implementation of downtown race courses in Europe.
While the practicality of temporarily replicating that in the middle of UAF’s campus seemed difficult, assistant coach Ben Buck suggested permanent on-campus trails.
Buck, who holds a civil engineering degree, began to map it out, and the coaches put it together with help from former longtime UAF coach John Estle and Jon Underwood, who’s the president of Happy Trails, Inc. The construction of the trails was completed over the summer, beginning June 10.
“It happened so fast we couldn’t really believe it,” Albrigtsen said. “So it is very much a dream come true, but a very short-lived dream because it became reality so fast.”
This weekend’s Nordic Cup begins with an interval start/freestyle technique 10-kilometer race on Friday at 11 a.m. Qualifying for what Albrigtsen touts as a more interactive race, the sprint/classic technique 1.25 kilometers, begins Saturday at 11 a.m. and heats continue through the afternoon.
“People will see small groups of skiers skiing as fast as they can on the smaller course,” Albrigtsen said. “So it’s gonna be just really, really exciting to watch.”
