Q&A: Pete Vordenberg – energetic coach has high hopes for U.S. cross-country

Ski Racing editor Don Cameron talked recently with new U.S. head cross-country coach Pete Vordenberg. A former NCAA champion and longtime assistant coach, Vordenberg has one of the most talented American cross-country teams in decades, and the team has been toiling hard all summer and fall. Here’s a few tidbits from Vordenberg. Read the November issue of Ski Racing magazine for more Q&A with Vordenberg.

Ski Racing: What are some of your goals this season?
Pete Vordenberg: For the team, I set three goals this year, and the No. 1 goal is that we take major steps toward becoming the fittest people in the world.
    Another goal is to have continuity, continuity of the program and continuity of the staff so that the athlete knows what to expect, can settle in to a routine and a system of training and preparation that is going to be here and seeing them through. In the past, there’s just been too much, the program will come and will go, nobody can really rely on what the ski team is going to do, and staff will come and go, so that’s what we’re going to aim to stop … to have this staff with us as long as possible and not start anything that we can’t maintain for at least eight years, and when we do name an athlete to the team, as long as they’re doing the preparation necessary, that we’ll see them through the ups and downs. If you kind of trace the path of most successful athletes, at least in cross-country and probably in other sports, very few just get better and better year after year.
Ski Racing editor Don Cameron talked recently with new U.S. head cross-country coach Pete Vordenberg. A former NCAA champion and longtime assistant coach, Vordenberg has one of the most talented American cross-country teams in decades, and the team has been toiling hard all summer and fall. Here’s a few tidbits from Vordenberg. Read the November issue of Ski Racing magazine for more Q&A with Vordenberg.

Ski Racing: What are some of your goals this season?
Pete Vordenberg: For the team, I set three goals this year, and the No. 1 goal is that we take major steps toward becoming the fittest people in the world.
    Another goal is to have continuity, continuity of the program and continuity of the staff so that the athlete knows what to expect, can settle in to a routine and a system of training and preparation that is going to be here and seeing them through. In the past, there’s just been too much, the program will ad and going, ‘What am I doing?’ And we can’t let those years derail our best athletes, and I know that in the past that has happened. … We’ve had plenty of talented athletes in the U.S., and we have a great team of talented athletes and many good athletes coming up. The system has to support those athletes. That’s our job.
    Partnership would be a third major goal for this season. Partnership involves building partners within cross-country skiing and outside and within the U.S. Ski Team and outside of the ski team. I really want to become more involved in the fundraising department. If they have a ski ball going on, then I want a cross-country skier there to help out. If the media department needs something, then I want to be able to get that for them as quickly as possible. Outside of the sport, I want to build much closer relationships with the industry, especially the industry in the U.S., and probably the most important partnerships we can build is with other clubs and other teams in the U.S., especially development-oriented teams. We’re here in Lake Placid right now, we have our camp, but in conjunction with our camp, we have a team from Sun Valley, we have the Central Elite team, and next week NENSA, the New England elite junior team. Not just the athletes but the coaches, so that we can all start to work together a little more closely and the coaches of these young athletes can see what our athletes are doing and thereby have a much better idea of what they need to be doing with their athletes so that when their athletes reach the senior level, they’re prepared to do what our athletes are doing for training. Obviously, their athletes get to interact and train with our athletes as well. I think that we’ve taken really good steps in this direction, but we have a long way to go and the U.S. cross-country community is still too fractured.
    
SR: Touch on a couple of the new faces readers can expect to see this season.
PV: We have an equal number of men and women on the team. That wasn’t by design. When we sat down and looked at who we wanted to be on the team, it ended up being more equal. Last year we had no women on the team.
    Leading the women’s team is Kikkan [Randall], and she’s a dynamo. She’s a great leader, a really bubbly, inspirational person, and also one of our top athletes. Other than her, we have a lot of younger, up-and-coming women, many whom are still in college. The two women who trained with us in Park City were Liz Stephen and Morgan Arritola, and these are absolutely some of our top up-and-coming athletes. It’s been great to be able to work with those girls this summer and see them make improvements all through the summer. That’s what we’re really doing is every day hammering at this thing. It’s a sport which requires a lot of patience to get good at, but at the same time, kind of on the short term, impatience, where you’re just itching to get out their and get better every day. It’s really fun to have young athletes around that have that attitude. And they really do get better every day. So that’s really fun.

SR: What are Liz and Morgan’s relative strengths?
PV:  Morgan is an aerobic machine. She works incredibly, is extremely efficient aerobically. She can go really fast and stay aerobic. As of right now, that’s really her strength, her aerobic capability. For cross-country skiing, that’s huge. Liz is probably a little bit more balanced aerobic and anaerobic as far as her strengths go, but the strength of both of these athletes is that they’ve trained very well for the past four years and they’ve been developing a really good base of training. As far as being a young athlete looking toward success in the future, that’s the key, to set yourself up to be able to train like you need to train as a senior athlete. They are both doing that, are very well-prepared athletes.

SR: And the men?
PV:  On the men’s side, the youngest person on the team is a kid named Matt Gelso, and he’s from the Far West region, from California. He’s an incredibly talented kid. I noticed him at the national elite group camp. We hold these regional camps … I noticed him at these camps. When we were giving a lecture or anything, he was always in the front row, hand in the air, always had something to say or a question to ask. Over the past four years, I’ve seen this kid get better and better. He was the kid that was out their trying the hardest at all these camps. Last year he was 17 years old at junior worlds and placed 16th, which is really good for somebody that young, but more importantly I’ve seen him in the summer being the guy who
is trying the hardest. It paid off in the racing, but what I’m looking for in a young athlete is a kid who is out there working his ass off, and that was this kid.
    
SR: What are the three things you’re looking forward to the most this season?
PV:  I’m looking forward to the first race, both the first sprint race and for the first distance race. No matter how we do it, it’s like, ‘OK, now we’re into it, now it’s on.’ I’m looking forward to that. I don’t really know what I’m looking forward to after that. I really feel like I have a day-by-day outlook. I’m psyched for each training session. It’s so fun to work with the athletes and work with them every day. That’s the most fun part of this whole deal.

SR: Some of the college athletes with the national team are now back training with their college coaches. How does that work?
PV:  That’s another example of the partnerships we wanted to build, allowing people to work with a college program or a club coach. The team is a circle. Within that circle there’s space to move around as an individual, but to be on the team you still have to be within the guidelines of the team. So a college athlete can work with their college coach, can be at a specified number of camps but doesn’t have to be at all of them. The idea is that then that athlete can have an influence on the rest of their college program and the athletes and the coach there, and can work with that coach. Then when the athlete gets out of college, they can more easily make the transition into the U.S. Ski Team.