Park girls Nordic battled hard at the state meet on Feb. 14 and 15 and ended up in fifth overall with a total of 16 teams. The team was ranked third going into the two day race that was held at Giants Ridge in St. Louis County.
Senior captain Addison Chenvert said it was helpful to have encouraging and energetic teammates. She said one specific teammate who stood out to her was senior co-captain Jersey Miller, who placed 12th overall.
“Jersey Miller stuck out to me during the race. She had such a good race that day and she always comes in with such a positive attitude and in the most competitive way too, which is just perfect for what you need at state,” Chenvert said. “She’s always so excited for everyone else, but also for herself, and it’s such a cool thing to watch.”
Head coach Doug Peterson said the team’s successes took an extreme amount of effort and dedication, and the team has utilized their practice times everyday for the past several months.
“We just tried to get on the snow every day that we possibly could since Dec. 1,” Peterson said. “We did that and saw positive results from it.”
Junior Nora Lindeman said skiing at state comes with changes from skiing at a normal meet, and these changes can be a bit unsettling.
“We weren’t allowed to go out and ski on the course so we had to run all of our warmups instead of skiing them, which is what we usually do,” Lindeman said. “That was different and definitely threw off my routine a little bit.”
Chenvert said the team is going to be losing a large number of seniors next year, which will be a big change. Despite this, she said she is still confident in the team’s abilities.
“The team will be losing seven seniors from the girls team, and 16 seniors overall. It’ll be a really big change because we are one of the biggest classes,” Chenvert said. “They’ll do just fine because they’re all very independent people and they all know everything about Nordic that they’d need to know, but it will be a change to now have such a big presence.”
Lindeman said she went into the meet wanting to enjoy herself, as it was her first time skiing at a Nordic state meet.
“For myself, I just wanted to go out there and ski and have a good time and not worry too much about what place I was or how my times compared to my times from the rest of the season,” Lindeman said. “I did my best, but I didn’t want to put too much pressure on myself.”
Peterson said he was impressed with many competitors having personal bests, and that as a coach, that is always exciting to see.
“We had a lot of personal best stuff. When you look at people making 30 place jumps, it’s really impressive,” Peterson said. “A couple of our skiers out there did make those jumps and that was really impressive.”
