Lobos Qualify Full Team to NCAA Ski Championships

INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. — The University of New Mexico was one of seven NCAA teams to qualify the full complement of twelve skiers for the 2017 NCAA Skiing Championships, hosted by the University of New Hampshire.
 
The Lobos join four other RMISA schools, Alaska Anchorage, Colorado, Denver and Utah with full complements.  Dartmouth and Vermont from the Eastern Intercollegiate Ski Association also qualified 12 skiers, and Montana State just missed, qualifying 11.
 
For the Lobos, they qualified Patrick Brachner (1^st), Vegard Busengdal (1^st) and Rob Greig (2^nd) for men’s alpine, Katharine Irwin (2^nd), Karoline Søvik Myklebust (2^nd) and Sydney Staples (3^rd) for women’s alpine.  They also qualified Arnaud Guyon (1^st), Aljaž Praznik (2^nd) and Petteri Vaherkoski (2^nd) for men’s Nordic and Brenna Egan (1^st), Krista Niiranen (1^st) and Kati Roivas (2^nd) for women’s Nordic. 
 
For Praznik, this is actually his fourth time qualifying for the NCAAs, but in 2015 and 2016, he missed both championships due to an illness.
 
The Lobos finished fifth in their most recent meet, the RMISA Championships.  UNM came in fourth three times this season and fifth twice.  The Lobos have two national championship contenders in Vegard Busengdal, who won the RMISA slalom and had seven podium finishes during the season and eight top-5 finishes, and in Krista Niiranen, who had a win and five podiums on the season.
 
Other alpine contenders could be Patrick Brachner, who had a top-5 finish this eason, along with Karoline Søvik Myklebust (two top-5 finishes including a third place podium finish) and Sydney Staples (a second place finish).  In Nordic, Arnaud Guyon has a third place finish on the season and Kati Roivas was a First Team All-America last year, coming in second in the 15K classical, although she has been battling an injury.