Led by junior Andrew Willoughby, the Oregon club alpine ski team saw five of its men finish in the top 30 on the second day of racing this weekend at the Northwest Collegiate Ski and Snowboard Conference’s third regional qualifying event. That number was a slight improvement over the first day in which only four men made the top 30 at the meet in Silver Mountain Resort, near Kellogg, Idaho.
Results from the first day do not carry over into the second and final day. Qualifying was held only for giant slalom, one of two disciplines open to skiers at West regionals.
Willoughby, a first-year member with the team, was the top Oregon skier on both days, finishing sixth (total time 1:47.31) and second (1:41.95), overall.
“I just charged down with a lot of energy and put it all forward,” Willoughby said about his second day.
“He’s one of the top skiers in the conference,” senior Dean Fagan said. “He can win on any given day, definitely.”
Only two women competed for Oregon at the event. The ladies, like their male teammates, saw second-day improvements. After failing to place on the first day because of a second-run DNF (did not finish), sophomore Cora Terjeson rebounded the next day, finishing with a total time of 1:54.90, good for 17th place on the women’s side.
The lack of depth on the women’s team, however, has hurt its placement in conference standings this season. Through three qualifying events, the women’s squad, with only four members, is ninth in the 10-team conference, ahead of only Oregon State.
“I think the girls, they’re getting better,” junior Gordon Levitt said. “Our women’s team is not as large as in recent years … We’re not as competitive with the women’s team as we once were, but it just changes year to year like that.”
Meanwhile, the men’s team is in the middle of the pack for conference standings at fifth place with 74 points — 10 behind fourth-place University of Idaho.
Though every team in the conference will attend regionals (organized by the U.S. Collegiate Snowsports Association) at Bogus Basin, near Boise, Idaho, later this month, team standings still matter because they determine skier order. Specifically, the order entails that the top-ranked skier on the top-ranked team skiing first and so on, with the lowest-ranked skier on the lowest-ranked team skiing last. Ideally, competitors want to make their runs early, when the course is in its best possible condition. The final team standings also determine the conference champion.
The three best times among each team’s top five-ranked skiers count toward the team’s overall time at an event. Teams then receive points based on their placement in the final overall time standings.
Whitman College currently sits atop the men’s standings with 111 points, six points ahead of second-place College of Idaho, whose women’s team leads the women’s standings by nine points over second-place University of Idaho.
Silver Mountain proved to be a formidable giant slalom venue for the competitors, with the first seven gates placed on the steepest incline of the course.
“It’s an exciting race because you just don’t know if anyone is going to crash at any moment on that steep portion,” Levitt said. “It’s exciting to see people pushed to their limit.”
This weekend the ski team heads to Oregon’s Hoodoo Ski Area, where the fourth regional qualifying event will take place. This time, skiers will compete only in slalom, the other discipline held at regionals.
“My confidence is bubbling right now,” Willoughby said. “I hope this week goes by really quickly so I can get back up there and hopefully win one of the races.”
Hoodoo is also where Oregon holds its practices every Tuesday and Thursday. As a result, the team expects to have a leg up on the competition, but not in a “home-course advantage” sense. Because course set-up is different for each run, competing skiers, including Oregon’s, won’t know the layout until pre-run inspections. Instead, Oregon feels its edge is the close proximity of the ski area, which sits approximately an hour-and-a-half drive northeast of Eugene.
“It’s cool to be closer to home, for sure,” Levitt said. “(You) sleep in your own bed the night before, and you don’t have to travel so much, so you’re not tired.”
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