Noble and Greenough School

The Nobles Alpine Ski Program
The program consists of boys’ and girls’ varsity and JV teams. We compete weekly against seven other ISL schools, each squad vying for the league championship in this season-long competition as well as participating in the highly competitive Class A New England Championship field.

The team
The team usually numbers 13 girls and 13 boys, with seven of each gender racing varsity and five racing on JV. The strongest four finishers’ place points are added together and counted to determine team placing in the varsity race and each school’s top three finishes are counted in the JV event. At the New England’s (NEPSAC’s), each varsity team enters it’s top five racers in both GS and SL and counts its top three finishers in each event, standings again determined by adding the three placings together.

Philosophy and expectations
Improving one’s racing, working hard while also having a lot of fun are three of the most important missions of our program. Along with these goals is the priority to develop a consistently strong work ethic, approach and attitude to one’s skiing and racing. Given that we are both altitudinally and latitudinally challenged in eastern Massachusetts, we feel that we offer an incredibly focused, productive and successful program nonetheless; it is open to accomplished free skiers looking to learn how to race as well as to those who have already raced for many seasons and are looking to get more on-snow time during the week.

Preseason training and New Year’s camp
Before the snow flies, the team works out with the strength and conditioning coach, spins, plays soccer, field hockey and Ultimate. We do tucks, we review ski tuning practices, we hold the Wall Sit Championship of the World and we do snowdances encouraging Ullr to come to New England early and often. The on-snow portion of the season usually kicks off with our New Year’s camp at Waterville Valley. The team spends 3 days on snow, freeskiing, doing drills, and training in gates. Then we return to school and everyone is ready for the race season to begin.

In season training
In a typical week in January and February we will train Monday evenings at Nashoba Valley and/or Pat's Peak.

On Tuesdays, the team stays on campus and does a rotation consisting of a cardio workout, video review and ski tuning. Afterwards, there is an optional team dinner at b.good (or some other very high-end establishment) each week and the kids that go are usually back on campus by 6:15.

On Wednesdays, we race each week at Nashoba, leaving campus at 2:00 and returning by 6-6:15. These races start between 3:00-3:15 depending upon the week.

Most Thursdays and Fridays we train at Blue Hills in the afternoon. On those days we will return to campus by 5:45 and those participating in organized USSA race programs on the weekends are exempt from Friday training. The two Fridays before the long winter holiday weekends are also no practice days for the entire team.

Results
In 2013 the girls won the ISL championship for the ninth time in the last ten and finished as the runner up in the Class A New Englands. The boys finished a very close third in the ISL in 2013 and scored a 5th place finish in the Class A New England tournament.

Coach
Fred Hollister has been teaching at Nobles and coaching the ski team for the past 19 seasons. Fred raced USSA at Mad River during high school and continued to race on the alpine team at Bowdoin (when they still had one…) for all four years he was there, captaining the team his senior year.

Alex Green raced for Dartmouth and graduated in 2007. Since then, Alex has been working for Reebok and she and her husband currently live in Boston.