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‘Forest Lake 3’ race at NCAA Championships
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Wednesday, 12 March 2008
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Glen Strandberg
Sports Editor
Scan the nation’s sports pages or history books and try topping what just took place in Bozeman, Mont., last week.
Pick a sport, any sport, and find one where three athletes who graduated from the same high school competed for an NCAA title.
At the same time.
That’s precisely what happened at the 2008 NCAA Ski Championships, when Forest Lake High School graduates Laura Edlund (‘04), Sarah Wright (‘05) and Ben Fick (‘06) all qualified in Nordic skiing.
Rangers head coach Deno Johnson made the trip out west to support his former athletes, but beforehand he posed the obvious, almost rhetorical question.
“When was the last time three kids from the same high school made the steeplechase final, or the 800 meters?” he asked, with an intentional reference to a similar, “smaller” sport like track.
“I’m blown away.”
There might be a couple of young men from somewhere in Florida who matriculated to the same college football power, and there was the legendary Dunbar High School basketball team which produced David Wingate and Reggie Williams. Both of them played for Georgetown’s 1984 title winner, but that’s dipping into team sports, and even then it’s still hard to match the Forest Lake 3.
The funny thing is, Edlund thought last week could have and should have arrived sooner.
“I always believed that many of the FLNT2 (Forest Lake Nordic team) skiers had the potential to make it to NCAAs and do very well. I have found it hard to believe that with the high quality Nordic skiers Forest Lake High School has had over the years of its program that it has taken until now for one to make it to NCAAs,” she said via e-mail. “But after skiing with Sarah and Ben in high school, and watching them race after I graduated, it did not come as a shock that they were two of the skiers who qualified this year.”
Johnson pointed out that Andy Elvester (‘97) was the first Forest Lake skier to reach the NCAAs, but now numbers two through four have arrived in a pack.
Edlund, who attends Gustavus Adolphus, qualified from the Central Region; University of New Hampshire’s Wright came out of the Eastern Region; and Fick, a student/athlete at the University of Utah made it out of the Western Region.
Heading into the women’s freestyle, Johnson looked forward to seeing old friends and former teammates renew a healthy rivalry.
“It’s pretty exciting, the fact that Laura and Sarah will be racing against each other again. They haven’t raced against each other in years. The friendship slash rivalry they had was crazy. Every race was seven seconds (difference), four seconds, three seconds, and the winner would flip-flop.”
Johnson also mentioned the high altitude of Bozeman, and after the events were all over he would not be alone.
In the women’s freestyle on March 5, Wright took 25th place, with a time of 19:24.6, while Edlund was 37th at 20:25.3.
True to form, in last Friday’s classic race, it was Edlund who moved up and landed in 18th place at 1:00:56.6; Wright finished in a time of 1:05:42.4, which put her in 35th.
“Racing at altitude is vastly different than racing at sea level out east,” Wright noted over e-mail. “The time it takes to recover after a tough climb can change dramatically at altitude, no matter how fit a person. I was hoping for better freestyle results, but I skied a solid race considering.”
As for Edlund, she had never pushed through a 15k before the NCAAs (the Central Region goes with a 10k distance), but she basically echoed Wright, and hinted at that friendly rivalry.
“Well to start off, the skate race was really difficult. I have not been at altitude to train, let alone race, for three years. So I raced like people do at lower elevations — the ‘go out hard and finish harder strategy.’
“Also, to state the truth, I saw that Sarah only started a minute behind me and it unnerved me a little. The last time I raced against her was at Senior Nationals in January and she blew me away. I guess that was the long way of saying that I was disappointed in the results.”
During the men’s competitions, Fick was part of Utah’s third-place winning team (combining Nordic and Alpine results), and he took 24th in the freestyle with a posting of 32:50.2, and 12th in the classic at 1:05:18.5.
“It’s hard to put into words how hard it is to ski on that team, and to do what he’s done is just incredible,” Johnson said of Fick. “To make it as a sophomore is pretty amazing.”
Despite Johnson’s flattering comments, Fick sounded like he was somewhat satisfied, yet a little disheartened. Half of his thoughts resembled Wright and Edlund, while the other half came from a young man who had trained 650 hours during the year, with that dedication bringing an impressive finale.
“The 24th place was disappointing. I felt like I could do so much better in a skate race. I was not using the right skis and the conditions were slow,” Fick shared.
“Now, the 12th place was excellent! I knew I could do very well in a mass start 20k classic race. I got up in the pack right from the gun and I didn’t let anyone go. There are always a lot of Europeans in NCAA skiing. It was a great result because I was the third fastest American in the race — the rest of the skiers were German, Norwegian and Estonian.”
When Fick, Wright and Edlund weren’t racing last week, the former Rangers were able to catch up and reflect on how extraordinary it was to find all of them in Bozeman.
“I met Sarah and Laura on the ski trails and I talked to both of them,” Fick said. “I haven’t talked to Laura for over a year, and I don’t see either of them except for a few times during the summer or spring. When I finally gave it some thought I realized it was pretty cool to have Forest Lake alums representing all three divisions of NCAA skiing in the country. We all reached the destination we wanted and it matched up to be the same year.”
“The three of us were not only teammates in high school, but also very good friends,” Wright added. “I have a great deal of respect for Ben and Laura, as both athletes and people. We shared successes in high school and we are doing it again, which is very special. It is great to see Forest Lake alums representing every region, and doing it well!”
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