The N.C. State skiing and snowboarding club will be making trips to two new mountains in addition to visiting several familiar ones in the 2014 season.
The club visits five mountains every year, with the trips coming during the first five weekends of spring semester. The last trip is traditionally to Snowshoe in West Virginia, but the club has decided to add a few fresh courses to the schedule this year.
Looking north this season, the club will visit Massanutten and Wisp ski resorts, located in Virginia and Maryland, respectively. North Carolina’s Sugar Mountain and Virginia’s Bryce Resort are also destinations for the club this season.
Club President Brady Bell, a senior in business administration, said that despite the excitement of new courses, the final trip is usually the best of the year.
“Snowshoe is usually everyone’s favorite trip,” Bell said. “A lot of people go, and it is one of the better mountains in the area.”
After the first five trips in the winter months, the club hosts an annual spring break trip to a mountain in the Rockies. This year, the club will travel to Vail, Colo., for five days of action on the mountain.
Skiers and snowboarders of all skill levels are welcome to join the club and lessons for beginners are available at each mountain.
“It really doesn’t matter what level you are,” Bell said. “We have people who race, we have people who do it for fun and then we have people who have never done it before.”
As well as beginners, the club has a strong center of racers on the team. As a member of the United States Collegiate Ski and Snowboard Association, the State ski and snowboarding club competes in racing events at every mountain that it visits.
The racing team is in the Southeast Conference of the USCSA, with other Triangle schools, such as Duke and UNC-Chapel Hill, and schools from the mountains of North Carolina, such as Appalachian State and Western Carolina.
The racing team for the club got off to a hot start in its first competition of the year on Jan. 11 at Massanutten. The four-man squad earned a second-place team finish in the nine-team slalom event, accumulated a combined time of 3:39.37, less than a quarter of a second behind first-place Virginia.
The team also zipped to a fourth place in the giant slalom event, a competition in which Virginia took gold once again. Club member Jacob LaRoe finished in the top three of all racers, finishing only two-tenths of a second behind first-place winner Terry Guttman of James Madison. LaRoe also earned a 12th-place finish in the slalom event.
Austin Oliver, a sophomore in engineering, earned a second-place in the slalom event. Oliver was the only member of the club to qualify for the Collegiate Skiing and Snowboarding National Championships last season. As a freshman, Oliver finished 26th overall in the Men’s Alpine competition.
The club will look to keep up its strong performance this weekend as it travels to Bryce Resort on Saturday.
