ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — The University of New Mexico ski team just finished a run of three meets in four weeks. Now, the team gets a short break to allow some individual skiers to compete in a pair of national competitions.
The RMISA schedule built in a three-week break to allow skiers to head to Spain for the World University Games. At the competition in Grenada, Spain, three Lobos will compete. Sean Horner and Courtney Altringer will compete for the United States while teammate Juho-Pekka Penttinen will compete for Spain.
Concurrently, former teammate Joonas Räsänen will also represent Finland, but he will be skiing at the World Championships in Vail, Colorado this week. Räsänen will ski in both the individual and team competitions. Current Lobo Patrick Brachner was slated to ski at the World Championships for Austria, but an injury will prevent him from competing.
The Lobos as a team do not return to the meet circuit until February 23-26 for the University of Alaska Anchorage Invitational. That meet is immediately followed the next two days by the RMISA/NCAA West Region Championships, also held in Anchorage.
Last Meet
For the second consecutive year, the University of New Mexico won its own home meet, the Jade Enterprises/UNM Invitational. The Lobos have now won the Jade in four of the last six years.
UNM got a superb showing in day two in the Nordic events, with the men finishing 1-2 in the freestyle and the women getting a second place finish. Overall, the Lobos picked up 579 points, winning by 26 points over the second place Colorado Buffaloes.
Resaland and Cedervärn Earn RMISA Skiers of the Week after Jade/UNM
One has been skiing collegiately for four years. One has been skiing collegiately for four weeks. Both picked up big honors this week after helping the Lobos to a team title at the Jade Enterprises/UNM Invitational. Mats Resaland, a fourth-year senior, and Emile Cedervärn, a first-year junior, were both named RMISA Nordic Skiers of the Week for the week ending February 1 by league officials.
Resaland picked up a pair of top-10 finishes, including his first career victory. In the 10K classical, Resaland finished seventh, just 0.2 seconds ahead of teammate Aljaz Praznik. On Saturday in the 10K Freestyle, he came from behind to lead going into the final turns. Despite a nasty spill on the final downhill portion of the course, he skated brilliantly to a 1.9 second win over Praznik, giving him his first career win after three second place finishes. The win also came in the final home race of his career.
For Cedervärn, she ran just her third and fourth collegiate races, but pushed her top-10 total to four, and now has three straight podiums. She finished second in both the 10K Classical and the 5K Freestyle, the two best finishes on the women’s Nordic side for the Lobos this season.
Both skiers helped UNM to the win, and it’s the second straight week that the Lobos picked up a pair of RMISA Awards. Mateja Robnik and Sydney Staples both got alpine honors last week.
The team has a few weeks off before the final event of the season, the Alaska Anchorage Invitational February 23-26. That’s followed on February 27 and 28 by the RMISA/West Region Championships.
Staples and Robnik Earn RMISA Skiers of the Week After CU Invite
A great week by both Sydney Staples and Mateja Robnik was capped off on Wednesday when they were both honored by the Rocky Mountain Intercollegiate Ski Association (RMISA). Staples was named the RMISA Skier of the Week for the Spencer James Nelson Memorial University of Colorado Invitational. Robnik was named the same for the giant slalom qualifying events, which were also completed in Colorado.
Along with Staples from the CU Invitational, Trevor Philp of Denver earned the men’s alpine award, Mads Stroem of Colorado won the men’s Nordic award, and Veronike Mayerhoffer of Utah won the women’s Nordic honor. Colorado’s Roger Carry earned the men’s alpine award for the RMISA giant slalom qualifiers.
Staples finished fifth in both the slalom and the giant slalom at Eldora, although for Skier of the Week and RMISA MVP points, she was credited with third place (Westminster’s skiers aren’t eligible for the awards). The two fifth place finishes continued a superb sophomore season for the native of Bountiful, Utah. Staples, who entered the season with just one top-10 finish to her credit, now has five top-10s in six races this season. She currently is sixth in RMISA MVP points with 152, 23 behind the leader.
That leader is her teammate Mateja Robnik. Mateja, from Slovenia, finished tied for second and fourth in the two giant slalom qualifiers this season (with the fourth adjusted to third-place points for RMISA scoring purposes). Robnik has not finished lower than fourth in any of the four giant slaloms this season, and she is just three points ahead of Colorado’s Brooke Granstrom Wales and five ahead of Denver’s Monica Hübner.
Myklebust Joins Brachner on Injured List
Just a week after learning Patrick Brachner would be lost for the season, the Lobos took another hard hit when a bad hit of a gate by Karoline Søvik Myklebust turned out to be much worse than a DNF in an RMISA qualifier.
Myklebust was lost for the year with a broken bone in her right foot, putting a crimp in UNM’s national title aspirations. Myklebust was struggling at the time of her injury with four DNFs in six starts. Her two finishes were a 7th place slalom and a 12th place giant slalom.
He’s Back
Aku Nikander is back and will rejoin the squad in time for the Alaska trip at the end of February. Nikander earned All-America honors last year but has missed the opening three meets while attending to matters at home in Europe.
Injury and Illness Have Hit UNM Hard
Along with Brachner and Myklebust, the Lobos have been hit hard by the injury bug, the ol’ illness bug and the not in the country-bug as well. Overall, the following races have been missed in the following disciplines:
Women’s Nordic: 11 (Cedervärn 2, Gnüchtel 2, Sever Rus 3, Nord 4)
Men’s Nordic: 10 (Nikander 6, Wiltz 4)
Men’s Alpine: 8 (Brachner 5, Öster 3)
Women’s Alpine: 2 (Myklebust)
Head Coach Fredrik Landstedt
Head Coach Fredrik Landstedt, himself a former Lobo Nordic skier, is entering his eighth season as the head coach of the Lobo ski team and his 2oth season overall as he served as a student assistant coach and assistant coach before becoming the second head coach in program history the summer of 2007. With Landstedt at the helm of the program, the Lobos have finished fourth, third, third, seventh, eighth, sixth and back to third at NCAA Championships.
During his tenure at UNM (assistant coach from 1990-91; 98-2007 and head coach from 2007-present) he has coached 45 Nordic Lobos to 72 All-American awards and four individual event Nordic team national championships, and one individual Nordic national champion. Since taking over as the head coach, Landstedt has fostered 35 Alpine All-America performers and four individual event Alpine team national championships. He has mentored three Nordic individual national champions in Kristina Strandberg (2000), Jimmy Vika (2003) and Eva Sever Rus (2014). He has been a integral part of the coaching staff for six Alpine individual national champions in Marte Dolva (2002), Jennifer Delich (2004), Malin Hemmingsson (2007, ’09, ’10) and Joonas Räsänen (2013).