Penn Sports Plus: Penn Ski & Snowboard Team

For this week’s edition of Penn Sports Plus we sat down with juniors Iain Kuo and Clare Menzel, President and Media Chair of Penn’s Ski & Snowboard team to discuss the history and success of the team.

Daily Pennsylvanian: How did you get involved in skiing and in the team?

Clare Menzel: I grew up in New Hampshire and I skied my whole entire life, so wherever I go I try to find the skiers. So that’s how I found the ski team, but I have been racing since I was a child.

Iain Kuo: My mom was an avid skier growing up and both my parents like to ski, so our vacation every year was to go out west and find a place in Colorado to go skiing. I snowboard, but I grew up doing it as well and I loved it. When I came to Penn and found out that we have a ski and snowboard team I immediately signed up, which ended up being one of the best decisions I made. I love the people, they are some of my best friends.

DP: How competitive is the team?

CM: It is all competition levels.

IK: It is about as competitive as you make it. We don’t require anyone to have prior racing experience or competition experience, and frankly most people who join the team don’t have that. Some people are more into racing but it is really up to you. We require that everyone try racing at least once and we find that most people love it and continue to give it a shot.

DP: Do you make cuts?

CM: No, we don’t. How team racing works is only the top three members count to the team score. So within the top three it is competitive, but outside that it doesn’t really matter and it’s just for fun because it doesn’t affect the team score.

DP: Do you typically get more skiers or snowboarders?

IK: On average we typically have more skiers. It’s not an overwhelming ratio, but on average we get more skiers.

DP: What was your success last year?

IK: There are 10 teams in our conference and the men’s alpine team - which is the male downhill skiers - took fourth, so they qualified for regionals and in the regular season our women’s alpine team took sixth. But because another team dropped out, they also ended up qualifying for regionals. And we sent two individuals to nationals last year.

DP: What are your specific goals for this year?

IK: We have really been trying to step up team organization and our visibility on campus this year. In the past we have been behind on making sure people know who we are or that we even exist. We put together a brand new website this year, it’s up to date because it had been out of date for a few years.

CM: We made a new Facebook page this year which is my project. It’s trying to post things that skiers and snowboarders care about. We are also trying to screen a lot of ski movies because there is not much we can do for off-season because we don’t do dry land training.

IK: And once we start competing we will be able to share our results with friends and family.

DP: Do you train offseason?

IK: We don’t have regular practices in the off season or pre-season just because it wouldn’t really fit in a Penn student’s schedule to drive up to a mountain on a week day nor would it be in anyone’s budget to pay for that. So there aren’t regular practices but we try to have extreme ski movie screenings and team dinners and that sort of thing in the offseason.