February 06, 2015 – SMS Head Coach Sverre Caldwell gave us his thoughts on athlete performances so far at the 2015 FIS Junior/U23 Nordic World Championships currently underway in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Two of his Stratton skiers, Ben Saxton (USA) and Katharine Ogden (USA), have been logging strong results.

How do you prepare an athlete for the world stage?
Sverre Caldwell: For both Ben and Katharine, their big goals were to ski well at Junior Worlds and U23’s. So..we set up training with this in mind. The trick is that they have to ski fast enough early so they will qualify, but we don’t want them peaking early. Katharine pre-qualified for WJC’s by skiing really well in WY so she was able to train through Nationals and try to set herself up to feel good at Worlds.

We try to keep the training plan pretty simple and straightforward. For instance, Katharine knows that she will feel good if she is tapering down from some solid volume. She also knows that she needs to hammer pretty hard the day before the first race in order to wake her body up.

We try not to get too hung up on the Worlds part… My favorite quote is “Everything is practice until the Olympics”…The goal is to get to the start line feeling good and being psyched to be there. Then have a simple plan that you know works for you and go do the best that you can.

In your view how important is the mental aspect of the sport?
SC: The mental aspect is really important. You need to believe in yourself and be excited to compete. There are way too many people out there who are so afraid to fail, they don’t dare try to suceed.

Do you see a shift in US skiers believing more in themselves…?
SC: Gosh, yes… I work mostly with Juniors and I laugh because they have seen USST skiers doing well and they expect that 10 years ago we were lucky to have anyone score World Cup points, now we are bummed if we do not have 4-5 women scoring points in any given race. Katharine gets to train quite a bit with our SMS T2 team. I am sure that it helps her confidence when they ski well in WC races.

The sport is maturing in North America and Scandinavia-Europe – what further changes are you hoping to see?
SC: The sport has done a good job of having more exciting race formats etc.. I am sure that they will continue to play around with the schedule and formats. I would like to see more races in the US!