Thirteen years ago, Tyler Currier was exposed to skiing from his older brother at Blue Mountain. He now is practicing everyday for ski cross and is racing around the East Coast.
Currier started skiing when he was three years old at Blue Mountain, a mountain which is over an hour away from where he lives, where his older brother skied, too.
According to Currier, Blue Mountain started a new program called ski cross. “It was huge for us. And I said, ‘That’s cool. I’ll do it,’” Currier said.
Many of the teammates have a very close bond. Currier and his team practice and travel together, but end up competing against each other in competitions.
Ski cross takes up a lot of his free time, as the season goes from November to April and he has practice every day after school for two hours.
“I miss a lot of school. Usually 2-3 weeks per year,” Currier said.
Currier is taking honors and AP classes, and on top of that, he plays lacrosse in the spring. “I’m pretty good at managing my stress,” Currier said.
According to Currier’s teammate Aidan Steffe, Currier is very dedicated to ski cross.
“He puts a ton of time into practicing and preparing for races,” Steffe said.
During his practices, Currier and his team complete small exercises and drills, but since Blue Mountain isn’t very big, their resources for practicing are limited.
“Sometimes we do local skiing to work our legs, or we find a big flat trail and work on turning. It’s just taking what we have, and then figuring out how to push ourselves,” Currier said.
During a ski cross race, four skiers start at the top of the mountain and they go down the hill together at the same time, trying to beat each other to the bottom. A regular season race is anywhere from 20-40 seconds each. “It gets kind of physical,” Currier said.
Since Currier only has one race at Blue Mountain per season, he’s also traveling around the East Coast for races as well.
“There’s some plane travel and plenty of very long drives to mountains in New York, Vermont, and Maine,” Currier’s father, Jeff, said.
Currier’s father is primarily the one who’s getting him to all of his practices and races. “We have been able to balance other commitments to minimize changes to our schedules so practices have not been too hard, but for competitions we have needed to take some days off work for travel during weekdays,” Jeff said.
Currier has also needed to travel out west for races. “At the end of the season I go out west [to] Colorado and Utah,” Currier said.
At the end of the last ski cross season, Currier went to Colorado for nationals. Each race at nationals lasts approximately 90 seconds. And, this past season, Currier placed third.
“That was a pretty big deal for me,” Currier said.