Marin Coletta to race in NCAA Championships; Logan Diekmann skis in U23 World Championships and will compete in the North American World Cup races. Plus, two BSF Nordic Elite skiers qualify for the World Cup races.
Bridger Ski Foundation (BSF) Nordic alum Marin Coletta (Colby College) will return to her home turf to compete in the NCAA Skiing National Championships in Bozeman March 11-14. A junior English Creative Writing major at Colby College, this is her second consecutive trip to the NCAA Championships, and she qualified despite battling illness several times during the season.
Marin started skiing with BSF at age 5 and was a standout Nordic skier, becoming the U18 Junior National Champion for classic sprinting. She was also a BSF Ambassador Scholar for three years.
Qualifying for the NCAA Championship field is a double feat. Not only must you qualify as an individual through a point system during the racing season, but you must also be among the top 3 skiers on your team. Division 1 teams are only allowed to send up to three men and three women in each discipline for the championships. Several other BSF Nordic alums had strong seasons on the NCAA circuit this season, though they are not among the rosters for the championships.
You can cheer on Marin at Crosscut Mountain Sports Center. Details here.
BSF Nordic alum Logan Diekmann (University of Utah) competed on the U.S. team at the U23 World Championships this week. Logan was the second U.S. finisher in both the sprint (44th) and the 15k classic (38th). He will not be competing at the NCAA Championships in Bozeman next week. Instead, he will don the stars and stripes and race at the World Cup races in Quebec City on March 14 & 15 and in Minneapolis on March 17!
Logan grew up skiing with BSF, including a post-grad year after high school, and was the U20 Junior National Champion in the freestyle sprint. He's currently a senior on the University of Utah Ski Team. He was part of their winning NCAA National Championship team in 2019.
The U.S. Ski Team and Minneapolis are excited to host the first Cross Country World Cup stop in the U.S. in twenty years. And BSF is doubly excited to have three hometown favorites to cheer on. Wearing the stars and stripes will be BSF alum Logan Diekmann and BSF Nordic Elite skiers (and husband-and-wife team) Andy Newell and Erika Flowers. Newell is a four-time Olympian and 16-year member of the U.S. Ski Team; he has resided in Bozeman for the last two years. Flowers grew in Bozeman skiing with BSF and raced for Dartmouth College and professionally with the Stratton Mountain School (SMS) before moving back to Montana with Newell. While the ski racing media loves to refer to her as "semi-retired" from professional racing, she's been anything but this season. She has notched several personal best finishes in the North American SuperTour and was third (and the first American) in the American Birkebeiner a few weeks ago. Crosscut Mountain Sport Center's Hannah Cole and Felecia Gesior also qualified for the World Cup.
All skiers qualified for the World Cup based on points accumulated during the 2019-20 racing season.
