Racer at Holderness Faculty. Offered by Holderness Faculty
Press Launch offered by Holderness Faculty
As summer season turns to fall, Holderness Faculty’s skiers and snowboarders are already gearing up for an additional profitable winter. Lots of the college’s prime ski racers are at the moment attending a two-week coaching camp in Saas Payment, Switzerland, working gates on a glacier at 11,000 toes.
Given this system’s lofty ambitions, that high-altitude glacier is a becoming place for Holderness athletes to launch their winter buildup.
“Our targets are to proceed to attempt to place a number of youngsters via the nationwide championship program and to proceed to be the perfect within the state of New Hampshire and attempt to be the perfect in New England,” mentioned Director of Snow Sports activities Ben Drummond, who despatched 26 Holderness skiers and snowboarders to nationwide championships final winter.
Holderness is in an ideal place to enhance on that success. This summer season, Holderness Faculty cemented its standing as one of many prime snow sports activities colleges within the nation when U.S. Ski & Snowboard (USSS) renewed the college’s “Gold Licensed” membership standing and invited Holderness to affix its Excessive Efficiency Heart (HPC) Partnership Program, an elite designation that establishes Holderness as an incubator for the nation’s prime younger snowboarding and snowboarding expertise.
“It is a enormous honor for Holderness Faculty and our snow sports activities program,” Drummond mentioned. “It proves to everybody on the market that our amenities and our workers can take youngsters to the very best degree, whether or not it’s making an attempt to ski in faculty or make the U.S. Ski Staff.”
The college’s snow sports activities program and its amenities are unmatched amongst unbiased colleges, producing 17 Olympians and 38 Nationwide Staff members through the years. Holderness first earned its Gold Licensed membership standing—a designation awarded to the highest 7 % of golf equipment nationwide—in 2020 after an exhaustive overview course of to evaluate this system’s rules and practices throughout eight areas of organizational efficiency. Within the years since, this system has solely grown and improved.
Since 2020, a $6 million present to Holderness has supported quite a few snow sports-related initiatives, together with the development of the Mittersill Efficiency Heart at Cannon Mountain, a U.S. Ski Staff coaching venue and residential to Holderness Japanese Alpine racers; the set up of an on-campus freeski air bag soar; and the design and building of a 5-kilometer homologated cross nation snowboarding venue with 2 kilometers of lighted path and a couple of.5 kilometers of snowmaking.
These investments have paid exceptional dividends for Holderness student-athletes. In the course of the 2024–25 college 12 months, Holderness despatched an unprecedented variety of skiers and snowboarders—26 in whole—to nationwide competitions. After USSS officers toured the Holderness campus earlier this 12 months, it turned clear that the college belonged within the HPC Partnership program.
Established in 2017, the U.S. Ski & Snowboard HPC Partnership Program shares data, programs, and processes of athlete growth between its personal Excessive Efficiency Division and the nation’s prime echelon of ski and snowboard golf equipment.
By becoming a member of this system, Holderness will profit instantly from USSS’s cutting-edge data. Holderness coaches and athletic coaching workers will collaborate with different HPC golf equipment and attend quarterly conferences the place main specialists from USSS will share their newest coaching methodologies and techniques for all-around excessive efficiency. By sharing its coaching experience with the nation’s prime ski and snowboard golf equipment, USSS hopes to establish and develop the subsequent era of world-class skiers and snowboarders.
“We’re striving to reinforce collaboration and integration between U.S. Ski & Snowboard and Excessive Efficiency Facilities to create a world-leading Nationwide Athletic Improvement System,” USSS officers wrote of their invitation to Holderness.
“Our focus is to collaborate with the snowsport group for a unified pathway to excellence, constantly be taught and educate all stakeholders, from the athlete to the administrators, and mentor high-performance golf equipment to guide smaller grassroots golf equipment to additional prolong the breadth of data sharing.”
That willingness to share data is prone to profit all Holderness student-athletes, not simply those that compete on snow.
“It’s not simply going to learn our alpine skiers,” Drummond mentioned. “It’s going to learn your complete college to have the Excessive Efficiency Heart and the coaching that our workers will get from these U.S. Ski Staff instructors.”
