2 former Vail Nordic skiers prep for World Cup debuts
Graham Houtsma and Haley Brewster are living the American dream
Borut Živulović/BOBO
Graham Houtsma and Haley Brewster both started at the same spot — Ski and Snowboard Club Vail — but the Nordic skiers respective routes to the World Cup are remarkably different.
Both stories are testaments to time and talent. But one paints a picture-perfect pipeline progression, while the other is a classic underdog tale.
One goes from Aspen to Alberta. The other, Minturn to Minneapolis.
“I was so far out of the ‘pipeline,” said Houtsma. An Alpine skier until his junior year at Aspen High School, the 26-year-old dropped off the Bates College Nordic team after two seasons.
“It’s like the American dream — if you work hard, you can accomplish all your goals. It’s what everyone wants to do, but very few people actually stick with it long enough to actually do it.” — Dan Weiland, Nordic Program Director at Ski and Snowboard Club Vail
“I’ve definitely had a very unconventional path.”
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On the flip side, Brewster earned a junior national title by 15 and a senior gold medal this January. The 20-year-old has represented Team USA at the World Junior and now U23 World Championships — winning a historic silver medal in the latter age division on Thursday in Planica, Slovenia. The weekend after Houtsma’s World Cup debut in Canmore, Brewster will start at Theodore Wirth Park in Minneapolis, the first World Cup on U.S. soil in over two decades.
“While she worked really hard, she always had that innate gift,” said Dan Weiland, who shepherded both athletes at the start of their ski stories.
“The cool part is that she gets to race her first World Cup at home. It’s hard to think of a better scenario.”
Switching course
Houtsma was a first-grader when he joined SSCV’s Future Stars program. Weiland noticed natural skate-skiing potential right away.
“But he literally could not classic ski,” the former program director said, a fact Houtsma confirmed with a laugh.
“Now you watch him in the classic sprints — he looks like he knows what he’s doing. Graham was a grinder. He wasn’t afraid to work hard. That’s his thing.”
Houtsma’s family moved to Aspen, where the fourth-grader enrolled in Aspen Valley Ski & Snowboard Club as an Alpine skier. Struggling to justify continued participation at the FIS level, Houtsma decided to follow his brother into the Colorado High School League skimeister competition, a dual test of both Alpine and Nordic.
“He said, ‘Why don’t you do what I’m doing,'” Houtsma said regarding his conversion — or re-commitment, rather — to skinny skis.
“I really enjoyed it.”
Houtsma qualified for Junior Nationals as a junior and was convinced by AVSC coach Maria Stuber — now the program director for Stratton Mountain School T2 Team, the domestic squad for Jessie Diggins — to focus on Nordic full-time. It required Stuber, along with Bryan Cook and Travis Moore, to kneel down to teach the raw talent basics most of their athletes learned as 10-year-olds.
After “massive improvements” during his senior-year prep period, Houtsma placed fourth at an early-season Rocky Mountain Nordic Junior National Qualifier in Crested Butte, beating a few college kids in the process. It convinced him to consider NCAA skiing, and eventually, he ended up at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine.
“But after that, I basically went off the radar,” he said, contextualizing his national status — or lack thereof — during those first two years of college racing.
By his junior year, Houtsma was off the team to focus on academics. He kept training on the side, but admittedly, was “not super committed” and only occasionally hopped in a citizen race or Eastern Cup.
Sometimes, the motivation to prove everyone wrong burned brightly. But often, his mind wandered into darker realms.
“I’d think ‘Why am I doing this?'” he recalled, before adding that he always came back to his love for the sport. “I love the highs and the lows,” he said. “I was like, ‘I can’t just hang up the skis.”
When Bates canceled its varsity sports seasons during the pandemic, Houtsma left for Bozeman, Montana, where three-time Olympian Andy Newell had organized a Bridger Ski Foundation program for college athletes in need of race opportunities.
“We saw a ton of potential in him,” recalled Newell, who was “funneled into the development pipeline early” before enjoying a 17-year World Cup career himself. “A lot of talented skiers” miss the conventional path from elite junior status to the top senior level, Newell said.
Houtsma said the location and Newell’s intentionality in explaining the purpose behind training elements provided needed “structure” and a “fresh start.” Houtsma’s confidence blossomed as he chiseled a name for himself in the Super Tour, U.S. Ski and Snowboard’s domestic circuit for athletes to earn World Cup starts post-collegiately.
When Houtsma arrived at Soldier Hollow for the U.S. senior nationals in January, he was on a mission to achieve his primary off-season goal: earn one of the coveted North American World Cup starts. After finishing 11th in the opening-day 10k classic — the skate specialist’s weakest event — he knew it was within reach.
“I was like, ‘I will make this happen,'” he said. “That’s when it really dawned on me. It’s one thing to be like, I want this to happen. And it’s another to be like, ‘I can make this happen.'”
A big jump
Brewster made it happen at SoHo, too.
The University of Vermont junior was the surprise national champion in the 20-kilometer mass start freestyle, which she won a few days after placing second in the sprint event. She also earned starts in Canmore, but her main goal before the season began was to succeed at the U23 Worlds, held at the same time. With a silver medal now draped around her neck, that plan seems to be paying off.
“It doesn’t really feel real yet. I’m hoping it does once I get there,” she said when asked about her thoughts of making a World Cup debut on home soil. “It definitely doubles the excitement that it’s in the U.S. It gives you a lot of confidence in what you’re doing in the off-season.”
Brewster said while her freshman-to-sophomore improvements were linear, this year has felt like a “big jump.”
She credits some of the mental, physiological and technical improvements to an offseason spent in the Mansfield Nordic Club University summer program under the tutelage of Adam Terko and her college assistant coach, Brandon Herhusky. She’s also spent time in the weight room and watching film to correct her “wonky knee” that pronates every time she pushes off. There’s been a targeted focus on removing psychological pressure, and remembering competition is a privilege.
“I think (that) definitely helps you ski faster,” she said. “When you realize it’s something you get to do instead of something you have to do.”
Eating breakfast with Erik Valnes and fangirling over Frida Karlsson
“It’s just crazy,” Houtsma said on a phone call from the Coast Hotel, where the U.S., Norwegian, Swedish and German teams are staying this week. The relatively short skier was astounded by the size of World Cup sprint champion Erik Valnes when he saw him up close at the breakfast buffet that morning.
“You look around and you’re like, ‘that’s Paal Golberg, that’s William Poroma, that’s Frida Karlsson,'” he continued, rattling off Scandinavian stars who, unlike him, have been playing on the P-TEX planks since they were in diapers.
“It’s like, I watch you guys on TV and I’ve studied your techniques for my own and now I’m standing in line getting lunch with you.”
When Houtsma curled up on the couch to watch the World Cup on TV as a collegian, he never thought he’d someday compete against the best on the planet.
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“I was just watching it because I’m a fan,” he said. “In the same way someone would watch an F1 race — in no way would I ever sit in the car next to Lewis Hamilton.”
Weiland said Brewster has an “unassuming” side, too.
“If you would have asked her when she won junior nationals as a U16, there’s no way she would have said, ‘yeah I’m going to go onto World Cup,'” he said.
There was a seminal moment, however. When she was in high school, 2018 Olympic hero Kikkan Randall skated with Brewster’s SSCV squad at Maloit Park shortly after she’d teamed up with Jessie Diggins to win the country’s first gold medal in the sport in Pyeong Chang.
“I think that was a bit of an idolization thing, but also like, ‘Oh wow, she does a lot of cool things, and I want to be able to do those things as well,” Brewster said.
Brewster is excited for Minneapolis because she gets to team up again with Catamount alumnus Ben Ogden, the mustached Vermonter who has been tearing up the World Cup sprint scene the last two years. She’s also pumped to ski around with the athletes she’s only previously watched on the TV.
“I’ll probably still be fangirling a bit, for sure,” she said.
Her main goal?
“Good question,” she answered. “I think, well, mainly to have fun, I guess.”
Like Randall, she’ll also have the chance to inspire American fans who’ve been starving for a World Cup since the Olympic test event in Utah in 2001. Brewster’s message to the next generation is to surround oneself with good teammates and “not compare yourself to others.”
“Your progress is your own and doesn’t have to look a certain way for you to get where you want to be,” she said.
For all the differences between Houtsma and Brewster, one amazing similarity is their foundational message.
“There’s more than one path,” Houtsma said.
Lacking international appearances outside of a brief trial run at the ‘OPA’ (Organisation Ski Associations of the Alpine countries) Cup last winter, Houtsma will don the red, white and blue spandex for the first time — on the biggest stage. It’s no small feat considering the nation’s development model, Weiland said.
“He’s an example of how you can make it in the current system,” he said. “It’s like the American dream — if you work hard, you can accomplish all your goals. It’s what everyone wants to do, but very few people actually stick with it long enough to actually do it.”
Only two born-and-raised SSCV skiers have earned World Cup starts: Sylven Ellefson and Haley Brewster. Noah Hoffman and Kris Freeman also competed for the club, but didn’t come all the way through the program, Weiland noted.
During a recent Future Stars practice, head coach Eric Pepper gathered his athletes in a circle and told them about the recent international exploits of Brewster and Rose Horning (who just got back from the Youth Olympic Games in South Korea). Weiland, clipped into his skis, was standing on the trail within earshot of the huddle.
“Eric described it really well,” Weiland said.
“He said: ‘They started out just like you.'”
