WHAT I DID FOR MY SUMMER VACATION

Stifel USST Athletes head south to winter after busy summer sessions

Erik Arvidsson likes to push the envelope. For a World Cup downhiller, that’s no surprise. The 2021 Middlebury grad also enjoys taking on new challenges. This summer, that meant fitting in a six-week internship at BlackRock asset management in San Francisco between training camps.

“You can really only work out for, like, four and a half hours a day,” says Arvidsson. “There’s always this inevitable downtime.” Last summer, he had hoped to take advantage of the same opportunity—offered to USSS athletes by BlackRock in New York and San Francisco—but rehabbing a back injury took up all his time and energy. This summer, however, he had just enough time between camps to go for it.

Arvidsson explains that the internship offered him a challenging and satisfying balance. “Ninety percent of the year, I need to be fully focused on ski racing, but I feel there’s some time in the summer.” Some is the key modifier. Working eight hours a day while keeping up with dryland training left little room for anything else. “It’s very early mornings in the gym, and then late nights in the gym,” says Arvidsson, explaining why he took on the challenge: “It keeps the motivation up for how lucky we are to be ski racers. Also, I want to have a career in something cool when I’m done skiing.”

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OPTIMIZING THE EIGHT YEAR PLAN

American tech star Nina O’Brien is no stranger to the working world. She has spent the past three summers interning in private equity at KSL Capital Partners in Denver. O’Brien has been chipping away at her Dartmouth undergraduate degree, taking classes exclusively during spring and summer terms. The internship opportunity came up when she ran out of courses she could take during the summer toward her Econ degree. “It felt like a productive way to keep learning during the summer,” says O’Brien. Like Arvidsson, fulfilling her work duties without giving an inch on her physical training was all-consuming. It meant early morning wakeups to get to the gym, a full day at the office and then heading back to the gym for an evening workout. Rinse and repeat for nearly ten weeks.

Before heading to New Zealand, where she will be on snow for six weeks, O’Brien said she didn’t feel a bit burned out from the conditioning side of things. Like Arvidsson, the shift makes her appreciate skiing all the more. “I’m so excited to go skiing. I feel like my summer vacation is about to start,” says O’Brien.

ON AND OFF CAMPUS

These are just a few examples of how athlete education is a steadily growing priority for US Ski and Snowboard. “We give out a little over $450,000 a year in tuition reimbursement for athletes,” says Chief of Sport Anouk Patty. “That is significantly more than any other NGB, summer or winter.” As a group, college education varies from sport to sport, with nearly all Nordic skiers being enrolled in or graduated from college. In alpine, too, the list is impressive. Seventy-five percent of the women alpine athletes, and 55% of the men, are in school or graduated.

Increasingly, USSS athletes are opting to pursue educational and athletic goals concurrently. That can mean piecing together terms like O’Brien has done, attending school full-time as Arvidsson did, or doing something in between. It makes for some busy summers. Cooper Puckett, Allie Resnick and Zoe Zimmermann all joined their regular class for “sophomore summer” at Dartmouth, a longstanding tradition unique to the school. From there, they will rejoin USST camps in progress in South America and New Zealand.

Emma Resnick, a rising sophomore at Dartmouth, returned to snow from injury after the spring term. From there, she based herself at the COE in Park City to continue building her strength. There, she shadowed a physical therapist specializing in autonomic nervous system and vestibular system dysfunction at The Kutcher Clinic for Sports Neurology for six weeks. USSS enjoys a relationship with the clinic that specializes in concussion treatment, which facilitated an unconventional opportunity for Resnick.

WHERE SPORT AND LIFE MEET

Says Resnick: “I’m really fascinated by neurology and psychology, especially about how knowledge in these fields can be best used to optimize performance. Concussion rehabilitation specifically is really interesting to me.” She notes that the year-round nature of ski racing can make it all-consuming but also provides unique opportunities. “By optimizing the moments in time that we can learn from experts, whether on or off the road or in and out of the sport, we can learn how to engage on a range of topics and become better people for it.”

Similar relationships have allowed USSS to facilitate Utah internships for athletes so they can train at the COE and the Spence Eccles Olympic Freestyle Pool in Utah Olympic Park. As more athletes attend college and look beyond graduation, USSS has gotten creative and proactive in facilitating their career development. This year, three USSS athletes in three different sports interviewed for the six-week internship program at BlackRock and made the grade. Alterra Mountain Resort’s internship program at its Denver headquarters started in 2022 and is available to USST athletes..

The education help to athletes extends beyond their retirement as well. Last March, recently retired athlete Steven Nyman participated in Tuck Business School’s Next Step program. The immersive, two-week program is designed specifically for military veterans, active duty personnel and elite athletes transitioning into business careers. Since its inception in 2017, many USSS athletes across disciplines have taken advantage of the program Tuck offers to athletes through the USOPC. This year, Patty, a Dartmouth and Harvard Business School graduate, spoke at the session. “It really helps them to think about all the different types of opportunities out there and then develop some basic business skills.”

UP IN THE AIR

Athletes are also taking advantage of a partnership with USSS and Textron Flight Aviation School. Among them is Jacqui Wiles, one of four US Ski Team athlete ambassadors for Textron. Wiles will take her check ride—the last step in earning her private pilot’s license—before leaving for South America. Wiles was first introduced to flight lessons while rehabbing from a severe injury at the COE in 2018. Once in the air, she caught the flying bug. “I love traveling. I love adrenaline. I love learning something new. Learning all the systems and the aerodynamics of an airplane and the feeling of forces— it’s so similar to skiing and riding a motorcycle,” says Wiles.

Wiles started taking lessons and even soloed, but the flight lessons stalled once she returned to skiing. A few years later, fellow teammate Luke Winters took her up for a flight. It reignited her enthusiasm and pursuit, just as the Textron partnership with USSS was starting. Winters also earned his pilot’s license with help from Textron and is now working on his instrument rating. In addition to building on the complementary skills in flying and skiing, Wiles also envisions a future in aviation. “I think it’s important to have passions or hobbies outside of skiing,” says Wiles, “because when things go wrong in skiing, which can happen so much, you need to have these other outside factors that bring you joy too, and that helps you as a person.”

THE PAY-OFF

O’Brien started at Dartmouth with her older sister Audrey, a 2019 graduate. She is on track to graduate next spring from Dartmouth alongside her younger brother Preston. “It’ll be a nice little full circle ending for our family,” she says. She echoes what Arvidsson and Wiles say about the benefits of maintaining outside interests while fully committing to their sport. “I feel like that balance really does make the hard days and seasons feel a little bit lighter because sometimes when you’re only doing one thing, and it’s not going well, that really hurts. It feels heavy. When I have a few other things that I’m interested in or actively working towards outside of skiing in my life, it makes those hard days feel a little bit easier.”