SEASON RECAP: Skiers Find Alpine Coach, Make Small Steps Towards Improvement

Many teams enter their seasons with a checklist of challenges they will have to meet and hurdles they will have to overcome. The Harvard skiing team, however, found itself with a particularly daunting obstacle in its path: as the season began, the alpine squad had no coach.

With former head coach Justin Rouleau having departed for Massachusetts, the Crimson was left to coach itself.

Rather than finding itself adrift, however, the team seemed to come together.

Recruitment, a major problem in previous years, achieved new heights, as a team that had once had trouble finding enough skiers to compete saw its roster swell to 16.

As the new wave of younger players signed on, old and new members alike seemed to recommit themselves, supporting each other rather than relying on leadership at the top.

“Because there isn’t a coach, it almost feels like it’s so voluntary, and also you’re not just accountable to one coach—it’s like you’re accountable to all of your teammates,” freshman Justine Lescroart said.

“We’re not all being dragged along by one person,” she added. “We’re all kind of pulling ourselves along together.”

With a new, dedicated team in place as competition began, nine proved to be the Harvard’s magic number, as the Crimson took ninth place in every event of the season.

Harvard took ninth place out of 13 competing teams at the season-opening St. Lawrence Carnival, a performance it followed with another ninth-place finish at the Vermont Carnival the next week.

Harvard was similarly consistent in the second half of the season, posting ninth-place finishes at the Dartmouth Winter Carnival and the Williams Carnival before closing out the season by finishing ninth at the Winterbury Carnival.

“It’s a step up from 10th place, where we’ve traditionally been,” nordic coach Peter Graves said, referencing the team’s propensity to finish tenth the previous season.

While the Crimson finished reliably ninth and generally near the bottom of the pack, the team noticed improvement over the course of the season that wasn’t necessarily reflected in the rankings.

“I’m really pleased the way the technique has improved—the way the knowledge of tactics have improved,” Graves said. “We, as a core group, even as early as next year, are going to really produce some much-improved results.”

—Staff writer Daniel J. Rubin-Wills can be reached at drubin@fas.harvard.edu.