Our “Signature Stance:” How USSS’ National U16 Camp Sets the Tone for the Next Generation of American Skiers
Words by Ben Theyerl
Babe Ruth. Ted Williams. David Ortiz. Andy Newell.
Ahead of a set of Classic rollerski starts at last week’s National U16 Camp, US Ski Team Head Coach Matt Whitcomb recalled a sight, often absent from tv broadcasts, which held him in anticipation for some fifteen years. “No matter what was happening when a [World Cup] race was about to start, when they said ‘set,’ Andy Newell would lock into his ‘signature stance,’ and he was just ready to take on whatever was going to happen out there.”
Every ski coach reaches for metaphors, and, in an understated nod to his being the Head Coach of the American ski team, Matt turns to baseball often. When describing Julia Kern’s journey, he talked about watching a skier learn to “hit for contact, and see singles turn into triples, and eventually home runs.” When stressing the importance of comfort and purpose in team-building, he cites a single stat, “no matter how many home runs they hit, major leaguers invariably hit more at home than away. We need to build a home field advantage too.”
Naturally then, Whitcomb’s image for how he wanted his audience – forty-one of the nation’s best junior cross country skiers – to take on what comes beyond the start line was a batting stance. A key posture showing that not only does one know how to play the game, but that they have an attitude and idea about how they want to play it too.
Enticed to develop their signature stance, the next generation of American skiers showed repeatedly that just like Andy Newell, they are ready to take on whatever is going to happen out there in the world of cross country skiing.
Now in its sixteenth edition, the USSS National U16 Camp serves around fifty fourteen-fifteen year old skiers drawn from across the country every year. The 2026 edition played out over the past week in the Olympic environs of Lake Placid, New York, organized by longtime program stalwart Paul Smith, Head Coach of the New York Ski Education Foundation (NYSEF).
Supported by a Pillar Project grant from the National Nordic Foundation (NNF), the skiers often pay little out of pocket beyond a plane ticket to attend.
The U16 Camp serves as one-step beyond an introduction to national-level skiing for every skier who participates. While Junior Nationals is a first chance to race skiers from across America, the National U16 camp is the first place juniors work together as American skiers.
To extend the baseball metaphor, the National U16 camp is when skiers get to step into the batter’s box of the national development system. What and how skiers experience the National U16 camp is the American ski community’s “signature stance” on how its next generation will take on the sport.
What that stance looks like in action fits the dynamic of cross country skiing. It comes in part by pushing advances in ski technique out at the grassroots, granular level, and in parts by pushing forward on big, collaborative, philosophical pushes about the ski community itself. Example of the former: During a classic technique session, Matt Whitcomb stressed that pushing running as a component of classic striding technique from the start is now essential for skiers to be competitive on the World Cup. Example on the latter: When Olympic silver medalsist, and camp alum, Ben Ogden took the trip across Lake Champlain to spend a day at camp, he cued in on its vital function of casting a wide net around who and where skiing is happening across a continent.
The basic formula of the U16 National Camp isn’t any different than any other ski camp. The training sessions are plucked from well-tread ideas. Technique days. Strength tests. A couple of shared intensity sessions. A time trial. The inflection of those workouts though, percolates from a different source than most.
Dreamed up by a group of Junior Ski coaches led by longtime Sun Valley Ski Education Foundation (SVSEF) Program Director Rick Kapala, the Camp was and is an expression of grassroots collaboration between people who deeply care about the community young people form through skiing. Even as the Program has moved officially under the leadership of US Ski and Snowboard, the key idea remains: if talented, bright kids see that there is a continent full of peers who love skiing just like them, they inevitably will start to think, and work, and play together.
Camp Director Paul Smith succinctly summed up the U16 Camp’s animating success in a pre-camp Staff Meeting: “it’s one of the projects we all agree works, because they all agree to work together.”
Viewed one way, the reason the U16 National Camp works is that, more so than any other development project, it is a Camp, in the true etymological sense. Stemming from the same latin root as campus, a “camp” literally means a level field. Put into a verb, to camp quite literally means to level the field.
In Lake Placid, that meant skiers from who formed a love of the sport in disparate, frozen little worlds of nordic skiing suddenly lit a fire together. Pushing each other in sprints, and in fun moments too, through a week focused on skiing. It also meant that the entire US Ski Community – Olympic medalists and World Cup coaches among them – came to the camp in the same mode. Ben Ogden’s luggage may have included two surprisingly weighty Olympic silver medals, but for a night at least, he had the same lackluster dorm pillow as the generation dreaming of their own when their heads hit them at night.
The power that the U16 Camp has developed then, is twofold. 1) It peels away any abstraction about what it means to dream big in the sport of skiing. When Ben Ogden, Julia Kern, Matt Whitcomb, Bryan Fish, and a community of leaders in the sport engage with skiers as skiers, they show that the simple innovation transforming American skiing’s success has been American skiers all along. 2) By making the dream of American skiing camp incredibly accessible – in tone, and crucially, financially via a major grant from the National Nordic Foundation – the Camp sets a tone for a community which cares for each other, plays, and works, and dreams together.
Still, a continent’s worth of skiers is hard to bring together.
Which is why, at the end of the 2026 edition of the National U16 Camp, USSS Development Director Bryan Fish called the forty-one athletes present to huddle together. Kids from Vermont to Alaska put shoulder-on-shoulder, supporting each other literally, if only for a moment. Like a great clubhouse manager, Fish put on his rallying cap. “In eight years, we have an Olympics right here, in the United States. The statistics say that at least one, if not more, of you will be there. Let that sink in.” Then, as a break, he turned to the only place he could. “USA on 3…”, and in the “USA” which echoed out into the Adirondack mountains were the realized dreams and new hopes of an entire generation of American skiers, ready to hit it out of the park.