Sports

Every Saturday at Eaglecrest Ski Area young racers work on mastering slalom gates on a trail known as Sourdough.

They are the Mighty Mites.

Thirty skiers ages 7 to 12 are in the ten-week race program this season. It’s sponsored by the Juneau Ski Club, which coordinates youth ski race programs at Eaglecrest.

Even former downhill Olympian Hilary Lindh, whose daughter is a Mighty Mite, got her start in the program.

“Bib 188 is on the course. Bib 119, Mikayla Neal, is in the start,” Lindh says by two-way radio to the timers, gate judges and referees working the course.

A multitude of parents volunteer for each of the three Mighty Mite races of the season.

“Go Mikayla,” cheers Mike Goldstein, an Eaglecrest ski instructor and father of three racers. He says the youngsters develop good fundamentals for a lifelong sport.

“They become fantastic all-mountain skiers. But it’s really also about camaraderie and team work and it’s about the social interaction that they generate out here on the mountain. Lots of people can attest to it. It’s lifelong friends as well.”

For boys ages 10 to 12, Goldstein’s son Koby came in first. Twelve-year-old Kaelin Quigley was second. They’ve moved up this year from Mighty Mites to Devo, short for development team.  Nine Devos are still eligible by age to race with the Mighty Mites.

Kaelin says they spend every weekend during ski season in a race class.

“We do a lot of drills to get better, so we can get better times on our races,” he says.

In the giant slalom, each racer had two runs that were averaged for the total time.

“I think I went pretty fast,” Kaelin says.  “It felt pretty comfortable.” His total time was one-minute, five-tenths of a second.  Koby’s was 56.88.

Ski fast, have fun

Look all over Eaglecrest on weekends, and you’ll see a lot of seemingly fearless kids on skis and snowboards.

To join Mighty Mites, kids must be 7 years old, able to get on and off the lifts by themselves and ski independently, says coach Mike Satre. He and his wife Sarah grew up racing at Eaglecrest and have coached Mighty Mites for about six years.

Most importantly, Mike says, kids need to be comfortable skiing the whole mountain and “ready to have some fun.” After all, the Mighty Mite motto is “ski fast, have fun.”

“The more laps they get on the mountain, the better they are. We work on edging and balance skills, and we enforce that as we work in all terrain on the mountain, then we do some race specific drills,” Mike says. “And then we have a beautiful day like today and we get to show it off on the race course.”

Sarah Satre teaches second grade at Auke Bay Elementary School and knows the Mighty Mite age group pretty well.

“Going to have some fun today?” she asks 10-year-old Sadie Jenkins as she pushes into the start gate.  “Ready? Go.”

As each young racer slides into the start, Sarah delivers a very clear message:

“Smile and have a lot of fun.”

The Juneau Skating Club held its annual competition for club members, who performed most of Sunday afternoon at Treadwell Ice Arena. Most students were youth skaters, but a pair of adults also skated before judges over the weekend.

All photos by Steve Quinn.

Admit it – you’ve secretly fantasized about being a rollergirl, or possibly just dating one. The skates, the glitter, the fishnets… what more could you want? Maybe watching your friends and neighbors hip check each other at Centennial Hall on a Saturday night. That’s what I did at Skate to the Heart: League Mashup, the Juneau Rollergirls first bout of the year. The teams, Brute Roses and Cupid’s Crushers, entered the  arena ready to win. These ladies know how to rock and they’re looking for new recruits. Roller derby is much more than women skating around in hot pants, they donate five percent of the ticket sales to community non-profits like SAIL. So stop hatin and start skatin!

Before the match 360North commentator (and Excellent Radio superstar) Andy Kline developed a bad case of the Bob Costas pink eye. Don’t get too close people.

Nothing says “don’t mess with the U.S.” like a man on roller skates circling to the National Anthem. The Juneau Rollergirls dare to be that patriotic.

For these roller chicks, it’s all about getting low and backing it up.

Here’s Andy with co-host Patti Kalbrenner demonstrating the way to move your opponent. Use your butt to lean in and knock them off balance.

The truth is, roller derby is kinda complicated. There are lots of rules, and even with detailed descriptions provided in the program, most of us were still scratching our heads. The best way to describe the game is similar to football. There are blockers who devise plays to make room for their scoring player to pass through, while simultaneously trying to block out their opposing team’s scoring player, the jammer. What’s a jammer? It’s the player whose job is to lap the opposing team’s players, who hang out in a big ten foot clump, to score points. You can recognize her by the fabric “helmet panty” with a star on it. As jammer you take a lot of abuse and get tired real fast. Every two minutes or so, they’re exchanged for new jammer.

Here’s MVP jammer April Mayhem whizzing by in her pink sparkly shorts. She so fast it’s a blur.

If you’re not interested in the bumps or bruises there’s still other cool ways you can participate – like these referees Miso Nasty, Rackula, and Sol Grrr. These ladies keep the game rolling.

Ben Lyman and DJ Manu keeping it classy on the microphone. DJ Manu played dub step Bob Marley remixes, while Ben wore Manu’s jacket.

At half time I checked in with teams. Back in the locker room, Brute Roses talk strategy.

Cupid’s Crusher’s have their own pep talk.

Bitter Glitter smiles with her mouth guard in. Gotta protect those pearly whites.

Skara U Knightly showed me her crazy bruise. It looks way gross in real life.

It takes a village to have a great derby bout – and they want you.  Email recruiter@rollergirls.com to learn how to get involved.

The next bout is on March 22 against the Fairbanks Rollergirl All Stars, derby with a “heart of cold.” See you there, Juneau.

The Iditarod Sled Dog race will start from Willow as planned. The Iditarod Trail Committee had been weighing moving the race start to Fairbanks in the last week because of low snow and icy conditions on the 65 miles of trail between Willow and Skwentna.

Iditarod Trail Committee executive director Stan Hooley said it wasn’t a tough decision to keep the start in Willow after race staff had a plan to improve the trail.

“You know, no one would look at the trail as it exists today out of Willow to Skwentna and say, ‘gee, let’s run the Iditarod on this. It’s not good right now,’” he said. “But we’ve got the ability to use heavy equipment to groom and literally build a highway, and that, I think everybody feels pretty good about.”

Palmer based Cruz Construction, a company that has experience building ice roads, has offered to groom the trail with a Pisten Bully and other specialized equipment. Hooley said without that help, the race start would have likely moved to Fairbanks.

He said given what the equipment can do, he doesn’t think there’s any risk to sticking with the traditional route. “To be able to change the consistency of that ice into something that resembles snow on a safe trail is something we’re confident we can do and people will be happy with.”

Hooley said the trail will be in good shape in time for the Willow start on March 3. Seventy mushers are signed up to make the run to Nome.

Swiss skier  Dominique Gisin, of Switzerland, and Tina Maze, of Slovenia, skied the women’s downhill course in 1 minute, 41.57 seconds at the Sochi Olympics.

“Absolutely incredible,” the NBC announcer shouted as the race clock showed the exact same time for the two women.

To the average TV viewer, the Olympics are often about the incredible.  But to an athlete who spends years and years preparing for that Olympic moment, it’s all about the possible.

Juneau’s Hilary Lindh was 18 when she qualified for the 1988 Olympics in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.  She had been on the U.S. Ski Team full time for two years, racing World Cup events in North America and Europe.  She’d already won a U.S. downhill title and the World Junior downhill title.

“Nothing is quite like the Olympics.”

It’s a place where great expectations can turn into big disappointments. For Lindh, Calgary was a place to learn.

“You know people would say, ‘go for the gold,’ ” Lindh recalls.  “I was taking them seriously, when I really had no business thinking that was possible.”

At that point, the best she’d placed in a World Cup event was ninth.   The Calgary Olympics were a lot of pressure for a teenager, and not a lot of fun.

“I just felt like everyone was expecting me to have some miracle thing happen, so I was thinking that might happen. And it’s just not very realistic, so I learned a lot,” she says, laughing.

Lindh says she learned she could enjoy the Olympics, meet other athletes, and still concentrate on her event.

“The other aspect of it was to focus on the actual skiing instead of the potential outcome, and that’s something that served me for the rest of my career,” she says.      

Four years later, she was ready for the 1992 Olympics in Albertville, France.  Hilary Lindh won the silver medal in the women’s downhill, because she says,  she was focused on her skiing and not on the result.  She calls it being “right there in the moment.”

“If there was any distraction with thoughts about what possible results would be, it wouldn’t have happened. You know, the minute you start thinking about an outcome, you aren’t doing your best anymore.”

During that race, Lindh says, winning a medal wasn’t even a thought in her mind. And when she discovered she’d come in second, she had a private moment behind her face mask.

“That split second where nobody could see your face necessarily, and it was just me realizing what I’d done, that was the coolest thing. Before it was an external celebration, it was an internal one.”

In her 11 years of professional racing, including three Olympics, Lindh trained in all events, but concentrated on downhill.  In a sport where races are won by hundredths of a second, she won the silver medal, three World Cup downhill championships, and had 27 top-ten finishes.

She says she had a training plan for every year, aimed at reaching her best performance when it counted the most.

After she retired from professional ski racing in 1997, Lindh completed her bachelor’s and master’s degrees, helped coach future Olympians, and three years ago moved back to Juneau.  She works for the Alaska Department of Transportation, and she and her husband Jodie McCutcheon have an 8-year old daughter.

You can see mom, daughter and a number of other youngsters skiing on weekends at Eaglecrest Ski Area.

She’s a member of the National Ski Hall of Fame and was inducted in the Alaska Sports Hall of Fame in 2009.

Bob Shontz of the National Weather Service tells us what has been happening in Southeast Alaska weather while Barbara Lindh of Eaglecrest Ski Area previews some events — including fireworks — planned for this weekend during their regular Friday segment on KTOO’s Morning Edition.