here - Sugar Bowl Academy

Winter 2014
Linda and Andrew Ach • Susan and Al Adams
John Amster and Colleen Quinn Amster • Anonymous • Anonymous
Anonymous • Nancy and Joachim Bechtle • Ranelle and Jeff Bensch
The Bird Family • Ellen and Julia ‘14 Bjorkman • The Casares Family
Tench and Simone Coxe • Chris and Robin Donohoe and Family
Judy and John Doyle • Lauren N. Dunn ‘15 • The Dyson Family • The Elder Family
The Elicegui Family • Dana and Bob Emery • The Ferguson Family
The Fisher Family • The Fitzpatrick Family • The Francis-Matlock Family
Isaac Freeland ‘13 • The Galloway Family • The Gibbs Family
Thomas Richard Goyne, CPA • The Gray Family • The Hale Family
The Hambrecht Family • The Hammarskjold Family • Janet and Doug Hardy
The Harleen Family • The Harris Family • The Hartley Family
The Hellman Family • The Henderson Family • The Hendrickson Family
Deven and Renée Hickingbotham • Holdrege & Kull • The Hommeyer Family
Kimberly and Bryce Hubner • Kathrin and Bill Hudson • Tracy and Dan Keller
Peter and April Kelly • The James Family • The John Kerby-Miller Family
The Klein Family • The Knorpp Family • The Krehbiel Family
The Larusson Family • The Little/Padgett Family • The Longton-Streett Family
The Marshall Carroll Family • The Mellin Family • Mountain Forge
Karen and Joe Niehaus • THE NIVINSKI FAMILY • Emilie and Doug Ogden
The Omar Family • The Paradis Family • Anne and Michael Parish
The Louise and Arthur Patterson Family Foundation
The William J. Patterson Family • The Peña Family • Graeme and Debra Plant
Daron and Michelle Rahlves • The Reynolds Family • Mark and Jill Richardson
The Riggs Family • Ray and Joan Robinson • Michael and Karen Rodarte
Eugenia and David Ruegg • The Family of Domenic Salvo ‘16
The Schadlich Family • The Scott Family • The Shray Family • The Silk Family
Andrew and Elizabeth Spokes • Sugar Bowl Corporation
Adrianna and Robert Sullivan • The Talbott Family • Cal and Mary Tilden
The Tominaga Family • Truckee North Tahoe Materials • The Tunnell Family
Brad and Michele Turner and Family • The Brooks and Summer Walker Family
Kirby Walker and Paul Danielsen • Leslie Walker Burlock
The Sandy Walker Family • Anita Weemaes and Pieter Weemaes ‘14
Trevor and Karen Wright and Family
THANK YOU FOR BUILDING OUR FUTURE
Sugar Bowl Academy | P.O. Box 68 | Norden, CA 95724 | 530.426.1844 | www.sbacademy.org
SUGAR BOWL by the numbers
93
3,780
donors who made the
new campus a reality
sq ft of new
classroom space
$13
Million
raised in support of our
Build Our Future campaign
2,100
8,767,000
kilometers skied
by SBA Nordic
athletes during
their fall camp at
West Yellowstone
vertical feet skied by SBA alpine
athletes in November
297
hours our 8th grade advisory plans to volunteer
at the Truckee Humane Society this year
58
goals scored by the SBA Staff futsal
team in their five games to date
to which our
49 colleges
10 seniors have applied
4000+
15
2
inches = the size
scissors used
to cut the ribbon
to the new
academic building
84
blocks in the giant
Jenga game located
in the lobby of the
academic building
jumps performed by our
freeride athletes on trampolines
at Woodward this fall for
air awareness training
A LETTER from the head of school
The future starts now.
On Monday, December 2nd, Sugar Bowl Academy students, parents, and
friends poured through the doors of our new academic building—all with
smiles on their faces, many with looks of wonder and surprise, and some
with tears in their eyes.
That day marked not only the completion of a building project, but the start
of our future—a future in which the Sugar Bowl Ski Team & Academy will
become the premier ski team and academy program in the world.
Fifteen years ago, our founder, Tricia Hellman Gibbs, and her supporters,
cut a ribbon at the entrance to our current Old 40 site. On that day, Tricia
had a vision, a dream of a school that would provide passionate, competitive skiers with an outstanding education while
pursuing their Olympic dreams.
Today, Tricia’s vision is alive and well here on Donner Summit. We are inspiring 65 highly-motivated
students and setting the stage for them—all passionate, competitive skiers—to seek and celebrate
challenge with grit, grace, and courage.
In mid-December, not long after we’d moved into our beautiful new facility, I was immersed in a
mountain of work behind my computer. Taking a brief respite from the daily tasks I’m occasionally
consumed by, I began to jot down notes on Corkulous, an iPad app our teachers and students
are currently employing. For the first time in months, I felt like I was able to look beyond the immediate
need of transitioning into our new campus—affording me an opportunity to begin mapping our vision
for the next seven years:
While playing around with that
electronic corkboard, I heard giant
Jenga towers come crashing down,
students congratulating one another on
their recent college acceptances, and
small groups of students practicing for
a debate in our common spaces and
hallways. It was then that it finally
occurred to me that our future has
officially commenced.
Tracy Keller
Head of School
P.S. If you find yourself up on the summit,
we encourage you to stop in for a visit.
3
FALL GOAL SETTING
Among the most important of SBA’s fall
rituals is a school-wide commitment to
goal setting, a process supervised by
Director of Sport Science/Head Women’s
Alpine Coach Katharina Golik and executed
via our Advisory program. Every studentathlete is asked to set a variety of short and
long-term goals built around academics,
athletics and community—those goals
are occasionally revisited and revised
throughout the year with appropriate
coaching and teaching staff.
While goal-setting processes have long
been held in high esteem, we now
have—through decades of metaanalyses—unequivocal evidence showing
people are more likely to accomplish that
which they set out to achieve by simply
having spent time thoughtfully articulating
their goals and the processes needed to
achieve them (i.e. not merely “do 20 pullups by May 1st,” but “do extra 10-minute
pull-up sessions on Mondays, Wednesdays,
and Fridays every week from now until
May 1st”).
In a recent University of Maryland/University
of Toronto article published by Current
Directions In Psychological Science, the
authors used decades worth of research to
articulate the following:
“To regulate behavior during goal-directed
action, a consciously held goal does not
have to be in focal awareness every
second. Typically, a goal, once accepted
and understood, remains in the periphery of
consciousness as a reference point for guiding and giving meaning to subsequent mental and physical actions.”
In other words, the simple process of writing down goals helps us fully comprehend them, helps us understand the processes we
must engage to accomplish them, and helps us guide and bring meaning to all related mental and physical actions henceforth—
even when those stated goals have subsequently moved to the “periphery of consciousness.”
As Sugar Bowl Academy students seek and celebrate the challenges they meet in the classroom and community, on pistes and
trails, and in their lives beyond, they’ll have their goals on said “periphery of consciousness” while fully focused on the plans they
laid to achieve them.
4
THE APP STORE an overview
For Sugar Bowl Academy students, learning happens in classrooms, in vans, on airplanes, on chairlifts, in ski lodges, and in
hotel rooms. We are therefore constantly developing and refining the ways we deliver course content in both physical and
virtual spaces to suit the learning needs of the traveling student-athlete.
The SBA App Store is as diverse as its instructional methods.
Teachers develop instructional videos on a variety of iPad apps, including Explain Everything and Educreations, which are
delivered to students asynchronously on virtual spaces such as YouTube. Synchronous teaching and learning is happening
virtually through teachers’ deployment of Google+ “Hangouts” and Skype sessions. Project-based, collaborative learning and
demonstrated mastery of material is happening in creatively rich, multimedia contexts through the deployment of apps such
as Notability, Book Creator and iMovie. Paperless exchanges of teaching and learning materials are happening on DropBox and
through our Learning Management System, Edmodo.
We are working to maximize the potential of the tools in our student-athletes’ hands while keeping best practices at the
forefront of our approaches. It is an exciting time to be a student and a teacher at Sugar Bowl Academy, and here are a few
of the reasons why:
Book Creator: A platform that allows
users to develop personal narratives or
creative works of fiction with embedded
audio and images. SBA students’ Book
Creator work was on display this fall at
the American Council on the Teaching of
Foreign Languages conference.
Quizlet: Used in a variety of disciplines
as a flashcard generator and study
tool, Quizlet helps students learn
vocabulary in foreign languages by
playing matching games, even offering
pronunciations of each listed word.
Explain Everything: Typically
used for flipped instruction, Explain
Everything allows teachers and
students to make whiteboard-style
presentations with audio and images,
which can then be exported as movie
files to YouTube, Dropbox, etc.
Orbit Architect: Allows physics
students to manipulate orbital
elements (radius, eccentricity,
etc.) and visualize satellite motion
(envisioning Kepler’s Laws of
Planetary Motion).
Educreations: Akin to Explain
Everything, Educreations is used
by both teachers and students
to articulate learning points. SBA
students are often asked to create
their own recordings while traveling,
particularly in math classes.
Mindmeister: A brainstorming
app that allows students to create
connective and reflective concept
maps.
Notability: A 21st century note-taking
app, Notability allows users to record
notes via audio, text, and image.
Corkulous: A cork board application
used to organize and share
information with one another.
5
APPS in action
“In the spring of 2012, as SBA was laying the groundwork for its one-to-one iPad program, we learned that iPad users could
create e-Books of their own using a piece of free Apple software called iBooks Author. I’ve always been intrigued by various
aspects of the writing process, and though I’ve been the editor of a magazine (American Whitewater) for over a decade, I’d
never dabbled in creating a book before. My first project, a reader for a unit on the literature of the Western U.S., was a huge
undertaking, but it turned out to be a very useful tool both for me and students in Foundational Literature. It proved to be great
for kids to have all of their readings for the term in a single, portable device—especially since they were already carrying their
iPads at school, at home, and on the road with them. This year I added a couple of shorter e-Books to my Foundational Literature
curriculum—excerpts from Homer’s Iliad and some background reading on the Trojan War. Not only are these e-Book editions
convenient, but they also allow me to include images, videos, or even
hyperlinks in the text!”
- Ambrose Tuscano, SBA English Teacher
The Coalition of Essential Schools’ conference
Andy and Joanne Knox, accompanied by four students, presented a portion of their Humanities curriculum at the Coalition of Essential
Schools' national educator conference in San Francisco on November 9, 2013. The conference, The Fall Forum, focused on "Making
the Invisible Visible" and drew together educators from across the nation who subscribe to 10 Common Principles (see below) of
teaching and learning that encourage students
to use their minds well and explore topics in an
inquiry-based fashion. Savannah Blide ‘15, Michael
Cooper ’15, Camille Hartley ‘14, and Marc Talbott ‘14
helped participants in the workshop, "Encouraging
and Evaluating Perspective in the Humanities
Classroom," run through a series of simulations used
to both engage students and heighten their ability
to evaluate material. The content for this workshop
focused on the search for independence during the
time of the American Revolution.
10 COMMON PRINCIPLES
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Learning to use one’s mind well.
Less is more, depth over coverage.
Goals apply to all students.
Personalization.
Student-as-worker, teacher-as-coach.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
Demonstration of mastery.
A tone of decency and trust.
Commitment to the entire school.
Resources dedicated to teaching and learning.
Democracy and equity.
To learn more about these principles visit http://www.essentialschools.org/items/4
6
FREERIDE: BIG MOUNTAIN COMPETITION
a spectator’s guide to scoring
In recent years, there has been a tremendous increase in the number
of youth athletes participating in Big Mountain competitions, especially
here in the Far West. As our Freeriders prepare for the season ahead,
looking to see their fall training pay off, we want to arm you with some
insight into what judges look for as they take to the slopes. This is your
Spectator’s Guide to Big Mountain competition.
1: Control
Skiers must demonstrate
control at all times; both
in the air and on the snow.
A strong, compact upper
body while executing an air
feature will always score
well.
Overall points include scores in the following areas:
Line, Technique, Control, Fluidity, Overall Impression
2: Technique
When between features,
skiers have the opportunity
to display their best
technique. Good technique is
demonstrated by shoulders
square to the fall line,
pressure on the front of the
boots, upper and lower body
separation, and pole plants.
3: Fluidity
Speed control in changing
terrain is critical in big
mountain competition.
The more smoothly a skier
transitions in and out of
changing terrain, the higher
his/her fluidity score.
4: Line
The line score is the most
important as it sets the bar
for all other scores. All other
category scores are capped
3 points above this score.
The more features (jumps,
cliffs, etc.) in a skier’s line,
the higher the line score and
ultimately the other categories.
Now that you know what to look for…join us slopeside at the Tahoe Junior Feeride Series Championships at Sugar Bowl on
March 8-9 to cheer on our Sugar Bowl Ski Team & Academy athletes.
7
Echo Mountain a piste less traveled
Sometimes, to get the best of anything, you have to take a chance and roll
the proverbial dice—which is exactly what SBA’s alpine staff decided to
do in its search to make our three-week November camp in Colorado as
effective and cost efficient as possible.
With places like Vail, Copper, Beaver Creek and Loveland offering earlyseason training at high costs for what has recently felt like standing room
only, we gambled on little-known Echo Mountain, perched high above I-70’s
Idaho Springs exit (just 30 minutes from downtown Denver).
At full, mid-winter strength, Echo is around 700 vertical feet of skiing on
just five trails and one chairlift. In early November, it’s one chairlift and what
amounts to about 1.5 trails—and in terms of early-season training, it also
proved better than its bigger, more glamorous neighbors in many ways.
For starters, Echo, home of the Front Range Ski Club, is a private ski area
and, at this time of year, opens for alpine racing teams only. On most days,
when a given team is scheduled for training, it has sole run of the place,
meaning SBA coaches and athletes were the only ones using the lift and
trails during most of our teams’ sessions. Averaging about 15 runs per
2.5-hour training block, our kids skied roughly 225 runs over the course of
15 days on snow. Averaging 40 turns per run, that means each SBA athlete
made around 9,000 turns at our Colorado camp. Sandwiched among
dozens of other teams fighting for lane space at Copper last year, it would
have taken us almost twice as long every day to get the same volume we
had with the mountain to ourselves at Echo.
Echo’s location also allowed us to exploit day trips to other resorts, which,
while keeping the bulk of our training at Echo, is something we might
in the future take still greater advantage of to allow our F.I.S. athletes to
hop on race venues at places like Copper and Loveland in preparation for
competitions on those same tracks.
In addition to the highly focused training setup, we also managed a day-off
trip to Boulder, where our students were toured around the University of
Colorado campus by former U.S. Ski Team athlete and CU alumnus Stefan
Hughes. After our tour of the school, student-athletes explored Boulder’s
majestic, cobble-stone Pearl Street before watching the Buffaloes play the
University of California Golden Bears at Folsom Field. The PAC-12 football
game finished in a 41-21 Buffs victory, bringing CU fans their first home
victory of the season—giving us all a chance to celebrate with Buff Ralphie
in the bleachers at the final whistle.
8
THANKSGIVING, NORDIC-STYLE
a west yellowstone tradition
We’re inching along the darkened streets of West Yellowstone, MT,
looking for the address of our condo. Having left Truckee at 6:30 in
the morning, everyone is feeling the effects of a twelve-hour car ride.
A mix of boredom, exhaustion, and excitement pervades the car.
In the morning, we’ll be on snow for the first time this year. For the next
week, we’ll engage in double sessions almost every day. The conditions
are great up here with cold temps and a good amount of fresh snow.
The elevation is around 6,700 feet, and with reliable early-season
natural snow, the training is ideal.
Since the late-1970s, when the U.S. Ski Team first started coming here,
Thanksgiving week in West Yellowstone has evolved into the place to be
for Nordic skiers across North America.
Our first morning on snow is a classic skiing session. It’s an “Extra
Blue Day,” indicating perfect tracks, Extra Blue kick wax and temps
between the mid-teens and mid-twenties. It’s a little colder than we’re
used to back home, but everyone soon gets into the rhythm of kicking
and gliding. It’s always a challenge, but we have to constantly remind
ourselves to take it slow and easy. No matter how fit you are, no matter
how much time you’ve spent rollerskiing, skiing on snow always feels a
little different. It’s a little more taxing than any of our dryland workouts.
The first part of our week is focused on volume training: lots of slow,
easy skiing. Most sessions are an hour and a half to two hours long
surrounded by lots of food, sleep, and down time. At the end of the
week are the first two races of the season, not to mention
Thanksgiving Dinner.
This year seems especially big in West Yellowstone. With the Olympics
coming this winter, these races are part of the qualification period. All
the elite domestic racers are here, zipping around the trails, testing their
new skis and stone grinds. The trails are packed with people ranging
from nine and ten-year-old children to 60-year-old Masters skiers, and
just about everyone in between. It’s a time to reconnect with people last
seen six months before, at the final races of the season.
The opportunity to see so many friends and people out on the trails
makes the whole week feel like a big celebration in many ways. It is
the first weekend of the domestic race calendar as well as the first
week on snow for many. The skiing is phenomenal in West Yellowstone
again this year, a reminder of why we make the journey every
November. And with so many familiar and welcoming faces, it feels
a lot like coming home for Thanksgiving.
BEYOND THE CLASSROOM
a journey to the roots of celtic music
The Isle of Skye in Scotland is sparsely populated, with one-lane
roads connecting a patchwork of rural villages. For SBA senior
and accomplished violinist/fiddler Camille Hartley, traveling there
this past August meant connecting to the very roots of the Celtic
music she finds so fascinating: For three weeks, Skye and the
campus of Salmore College became Camille’s home, playing
host to a fiddle camp run by Nevada City’s Alistair Frasier.
“As a musician, it was nice to learn tunes in the very place that
so obviously inspired the music,” said Hartley. “There’s so much
more to it when you’re learning a tune that was inspired by a
place you’re in. It’s the root, where Celtic music came from.”
Beyond the opportunity to connect with Celtic music, the fiddle
camp gave Camille a greater appreciation for other vestiges of
Scottish cultural heritage. She participated in Scottish Ceilidh
dancing (unexpectedly, to pop music) and played Shinte, an
ancient Scottish game akin to field hockey, which she found
remarkably lacking in rules. “A couple people got whacked in
the shin pretty hard,” she said.
The highlight, though, for Camille, was the day that the entire
group of 130 fiddlers­—primarily from England and Scotland,
sprinkled with others from places like the U.S., Spain and
even Finland—hiked seven miles to the tiny island town of
Tarshkaveg, where they played a “massive jam session with
dance.”
“Alistair had us face and play to the sunset—all of those fiddlers
playing together over the ocean and mountains was a really
moving part of the adventure.”
Camille will continue to pursue her passion for music in college.
ALUMNI NOTES have you heard?
…Cassidy Cichowicz ‘12, a sophomore at St. Lawrence University, spent the fall semester at a wilderness campus in the
Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York as part of a wilderness immersion curriculum. She and 11 other students lived in
yurts and studied Biology, Philosophy, Ecology, and Creative Writing while living far off the grid and exploring the rivers, lakes,
and mountains of the Adirondacks. She returns to campus at St. Lawrence for the winter term and will be an integral part of
the Nordic ski team.
...TJ Neal ’08 graduated from the University of Oregon in June, 2012 with a double major in Business
Administration-Sports Marketing and Mandarin Chinese. He’s currently living in Beijing, China, working for
a Chinese national digital agency called Netalk. At Netalk, he manages the Arsenal Football Club’s digital
presence in China. This includes the club’s Weibo (twitter equivalent), official website, video, as well as other
social media platforms.
…AJ Habib ’08 recently spent a year with Teach for America where she was teaching Social Studies and
English in Detroit, MI. She’s now working in Gainesville, GA, for the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA)
as a Public Affairs intern for the Chattahoochee and Oconee National Forests and has recently been accepted to a
graduate program at New York University.
A NOTE FROM BRENT TALBOTT ‘10
This past summer, I had the privilege of engaging in a Bates college trusteesponsored fellowship, for which I traveled to Beijing, China, as an intern at
Larkin Trade International (LTI). LTI is a “consulting firm specializing in trade
compliance and business strategy in China and other Asian countries.”
I was tasked with a variety of duties at LTI, including assisting in ChineseEnglish translations, researching a variety of trade laws, and compiling reports
concerning our findings. On larger research reports and projects, I even helped
create a training program for clients focused on ensuring compliance with
American export laws, and constructed reports determining the import laws
surrounding electronic components and how to apply those import laws.
Of course, my Chinese speaking ability greatly improved, too. Living in a
traditional hutong area rather than in an expat neighborhood, my daily,
80-minute commute to the office included three separate subway lines and a
bus­—helping me experience a level of immersion that I hadn’t really anticipated.
Having said that, I also met tons of expatriates from places like Columbia,
Portugal, Spain and Mexico, building relationships with people that led to dinners with a state reporter, a policeman and an
employee of China’s largest tech company.
The trip gave me some of the most memorable experiences of my life: I will return to Beijing!
GOT NEWS?
Alumni we want to hear from you! Please send your news to Kim Hubner at khubner@sbst.org.
11
SUGAR BOWL ACADEMY’S NEW ACADEMIC BUILDING
CLASS OF 2014 COLLEGE ACCEPTANCES
through December 20, 2013
College
SUGAR BOWL SKI TEAM & ACADEMY
P.O. Box 68 | Norden, CA | 95724 | Ski Team: 530.269.7401 | Academy: 530.426.1844 | www.sbst.org | www.sbacademy.org