here - Sugar Bowl Academy
Transcription
here - Sugar Bowl Academy
Winter 2014 Linda and Andrew Ach • Susan and Al Adams John Amster and Colleen Quinn Amster • Anonymous • Anonymous Anonymous • Nancy and Joachim Bechtle • Ranelle and Jeff Bensch The Bird Family • Ellen and Julia ‘14 Bjorkman • The Casares Family Tench and Simone Coxe • Chris and Robin Donohoe and Family Judy and John Doyle • Lauren N. Dunn ‘15 • The Dyson Family • The Elder Family The Elicegui Family • Dana and Bob Emery • The Ferguson Family The Fisher Family • The Fitzpatrick Family • The Francis-Matlock Family Isaac Freeland ‘13 • The Galloway Family • The Gibbs Family Thomas Richard Goyne, CPA • The Gray Family • The Hale Family The Hambrecht Family • The Hammarskjold Family • Janet and Doug Hardy The Harleen Family • The Harris Family • The Hartley Family The Hellman Family • The Henderson Family • The Hendrickson Family Deven and Renée Hickingbotham • Holdrege & Kull • The Hommeyer Family Kimberly and Bryce Hubner • Kathrin and Bill Hudson • Tracy and Dan Keller Peter and April Kelly • The James Family • The John Kerby-Miller Family The Klein Family • The Knorpp Family • The Krehbiel Family The Larusson Family • The Little/Padgett Family • The Longton-Streett Family The Marshall Carroll Family • The Mellin Family • Mountain Forge Karen and Joe Niehaus • THE NIVINSKI FAMILY • Emilie and Doug Ogden The Omar Family • The Paradis Family • Anne and Michael Parish The Louise and Arthur Patterson Family Foundation The William J. Patterson Family • The Peña Family • Graeme and Debra Plant Daron and Michelle Rahlves • The Reynolds Family • Mark and Jill Richardson The Riggs Family • Ray and Joan Robinson • Michael and Karen Rodarte Eugenia and David Ruegg • The Family of Domenic Salvo ‘16 The Schadlich Family • The Scott Family • The Shray Family • The Silk Family Andrew and Elizabeth Spokes • Sugar Bowl Corporation Adrianna and Robert Sullivan • The Talbott Family • Cal and Mary Tilden The Tominaga Family • Truckee North Tahoe Materials • The Tunnell Family Brad and Michele Turner and Family • The Brooks and Summer Walker Family Kirby Walker and Paul Danielsen • Leslie Walker Burlock The Sandy Walker Family • Anita Weemaes and Pieter Weemaes ‘14 Trevor and Karen Wright and Family THANK YOU FOR BUILDING OUR FUTURE Sugar Bowl Academy | P.O. Box 68 | Norden, CA 95724 | 530.426.1844 | www.sbacademy.org SUGAR BOWL by the numbers 93 3,780 donors who made the new campus a reality sq ft of new classroom space $13 Million raised in support of our Build Our Future campaign 2,100 8,767,000 kilometers skied by SBA Nordic athletes during their fall camp at West Yellowstone vertical feet skied by SBA alpine athletes in November 297 hours our 8th grade advisory plans to volunteer at the Truckee Humane Society this year 58 goals scored by the SBA Staff futsal team in their five games to date to which our 49 colleges 10 seniors have applied 4000+ 15 2 inches = the size scissors used to cut the ribbon to the new academic building 84 blocks in the giant Jenga game located in the lobby of the academic building jumps performed by our freeride athletes on trampolines at Woodward this fall for air awareness training A LETTER from the head of school The future starts now. On Monday, December 2nd, Sugar Bowl Academy students, parents, and friends poured through the doors of our new academic building—all with smiles on their faces, many with looks of wonder and surprise, and some with tears in their eyes. That day marked not only the completion of a building project, but the start of our future—a future in which the Sugar Bowl Ski Team & Academy will become the premier ski team and academy program in the world. Fifteen years ago, our founder, Tricia Hellman Gibbs, and her supporters, cut a ribbon at the entrance to our current Old 40 site. On that day, Tricia had a vision, a dream of a school that would provide passionate, competitive skiers with an outstanding education while pursuing their Olympic dreams. Today, Tricia’s vision is alive and well here on Donner Summit. We are inspiring 65 highly-motivated students and setting the stage for them—all passionate, competitive skiers—to seek and celebrate challenge with grit, grace, and courage. In mid-December, not long after we’d moved into our beautiful new facility, I was immersed in a mountain of work behind my computer. Taking a brief respite from the daily tasks I’m occasionally consumed by, I began to jot down notes on Corkulous, an iPad app our teachers and students are currently employing. For the first time in months, I felt like I was able to look beyond the immediate need of transitioning into our new campus—affording me an opportunity to begin mapping our vision for the next seven years: While playing around with that electronic corkboard, I heard giant Jenga towers come crashing down, students congratulating one another on their recent college acceptances, and small groups of students practicing for a debate in our common spaces and hallways. It was then that it finally occurred to me that our future has officially commenced. Tracy Keller Head of School P.S. If you find yourself up on the summit, we encourage you to stop in for a visit. 3 FALL GOAL SETTING Among the most important of SBA’s fall rituals is a school-wide commitment to goal setting, a process supervised by Director of Sport Science/Head Women’s Alpine Coach Katharina Golik and executed via our Advisory program. Every studentathlete is asked to set a variety of short and long-term goals built around academics, athletics and community—those goals are occasionally revisited and revised throughout the year with appropriate coaching and teaching staff. While goal-setting processes have long been held in high esteem, we now have—through decades of metaanalyses—unequivocal evidence showing people are more likely to accomplish that which they set out to achieve by simply having spent time thoughtfully articulating their goals and the processes needed to achieve them (i.e. not merely “do 20 pullups by May 1st,” but “do extra 10-minute pull-up sessions on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays every week from now until May 1st”). In a recent University of Maryland/University of Toronto article published by Current Directions In Psychological Science, the authors used decades worth of research to articulate the following: “To regulate behavior during goal-directed action, a consciously held goal does not have to be in focal awareness every second. Typically, a goal, once accepted and understood, remains in the periphery of consciousness as a reference point for guiding and giving meaning to subsequent mental and physical actions.” In other words, the simple process of writing down goals helps us fully comprehend them, helps us understand the processes we must engage to accomplish them, and helps us guide and bring meaning to all related mental and physical actions henceforth— even when those stated goals have subsequently moved to the “periphery of consciousness.” As Sugar Bowl Academy students seek and celebrate the challenges they meet in the classroom and community, on pistes and trails, and in their lives beyond, they’ll have their goals on said “periphery of consciousness” while fully focused on the plans they laid to achieve them. 4 THE APP STORE an overview For Sugar Bowl Academy students, learning happens in classrooms, in vans, on airplanes, on chairlifts, in ski lodges, and in hotel rooms. We are therefore constantly developing and refining the ways we deliver course content in both physical and virtual spaces to suit the learning needs of the traveling student-athlete. The SBA App Store is as diverse as its instructional methods. Teachers develop instructional videos on a variety of iPad apps, including Explain Everything and Educreations, which are delivered to students asynchronously on virtual spaces such as YouTube. Synchronous teaching and learning is happening virtually through teachers’ deployment of Google+ “Hangouts” and Skype sessions. Project-based, collaborative learning and demonstrated mastery of material is happening in creatively rich, multimedia contexts through the deployment of apps such as Notability, Book Creator and iMovie. Paperless exchanges of teaching and learning materials are happening on DropBox and through our Learning Management System, Edmodo. We are working to maximize the potential of the tools in our student-athletes’ hands while keeping best practices at the forefront of our approaches. It is an exciting time to be a student and a teacher at Sugar Bowl Academy, and here are a few of the reasons why: Book Creator: A platform that allows users to develop personal narratives or creative works of fiction with embedded audio and images. SBA students’ Book Creator work was on display this fall at the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages conference. Quizlet: Used in a variety of disciplines as a flashcard generator and study tool, Quizlet helps students learn vocabulary in foreign languages by playing matching games, even offering pronunciations of each listed word. Explain Everything: Typically used for flipped instruction, Explain Everything allows teachers and students to make whiteboard-style presentations with audio and images, which can then be exported as movie files to YouTube, Dropbox, etc. Orbit Architect: Allows physics students to manipulate orbital elements (radius, eccentricity, etc.) and visualize satellite motion (envisioning Kepler’s Laws of Planetary Motion). Educreations: Akin to Explain Everything, Educreations is used by both teachers and students to articulate learning points. SBA students are often asked to create their own recordings while traveling, particularly in math classes. Mindmeister: A brainstorming app that allows students to create connective and reflective concept maps. Notability: A 21st century note-taking app, Notability allows users to record notes via audio, text, and image. Corkulous: A cork board application used to organize and share information with one another. 5 APPS in action “In the spring of 2012, as SBA was laying the groundwork for its one-to-one iPad program, we learned that iPad users could create e-Books of their own using a piece of free Apple software called iBooks Author. I’ve always been intrigued by various aspects of the writing process, and though I’ve been the editor of a magazine (American Whitewater) for over a decade, I’d never dabbled in creating a book before. My first project, a reader for a unit on the literature of the Western U.S., was a huge undertaking, but it turned out to be a very useful tool both for me and students in Foundational Literature. It proved to be great for kids to have all of their readings for the term in a single, portable device—especially since they were already carrying their iPads at school, at home, and on the road with them. This year I added a couple of shorter e-Books to my Foundational Literature curriculum—excerpts from Homer’s Iliad and some background reading on the Trojan War. Not only are these e-Book editions convenient, but they also allow me to include images, videos, or even hyperlinks in the text!” - Ambrose Tuscano, SBA English Teacher The Coalition of Essential Schools’ conference Andy and Joanne Knox, accompanied by four students, presented a portion of their Humanities curriculum at the Coalition of Essential Schools' national educator conference in San Francisco on November 9, 2013. The conference, The Fall Forum, focused on "Making the Invisible Visible" and drew together educators from across the nation who subscribe to 10 Common Principles (see below) of teaching and learning that encourage students to use their minds well and explore topics in an inquiry-based fashion. Savannah Blide ‘15, Michael Cooper ’15, Camille Hartley ‘14, and Marc Talbott ‘14 helped participants in the workshop, "Encouraging and Evaluating Perspective in the Humanities Classroom," run through a series of simulations used to both engage students and heighten their ability to evaluate material. The content for this workshop focused on the search for independence during the time of the American Revolution. 10 COMMON PRINCIPLES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Learning to use one’s mind well. Less is more, depth over coverage. Goals apply to all students. Personalization. Student-as-worker, teacher-as-coach. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Demonstration of mastery. A tone of decency and trust. Commitment to the entire school. Resources dedicated to teaching and learning. Democracy and equity. To learn more about these principles visit http://www.essentialschools.org/items/4 6 FREERIDE: BIG MOUNTAIN COMPETITION a spectator’s guide to scoring In recent years, there has been a tremendous increase in the number of youth athletes participating in Big Mountain competitions, especially here in the Far West. As our Freeriders prepare for the season ahead, looking to see their fall training pay off, we want to arm you with some insight into what judges look for as they take to the slopes. This is your Spectator’s Guide to Big Mountain competition. 1: Control Skiers must demonstrate control at all times; both in the air and on the snow. A strong, compact upper body while executing an air feature will always score well. Overall points include scores in the following areas: Line, Technique, Control, Fluidity, Overall Impression 2: Technique When between features, skiers have the opportunity to display their best technique. Good technique is demonstrated by shoulders square to the fall line, pressure on the front of the boots, upper and lower body separation, and pole plants. 3: Fluidity Speed control in changing terrain is critical in big mountain competition. The more smoothly a skier transitions in and out of changing terrain, the higher his/her fluidity score. 4: Line The line score is the most important as it sets the bar for all other scores. All other category scores are capped 3 points above this score. The more features (jumps, cliffs, etc.) in a skier’s line, the higher the line score and ultimately the other categories. Now that you know what to look for…join us slopeside at the Tahoe Junior Feeride Series Championships at Sugar Bowl on March 8-9 to cheer on our Sugar Bowl Ski Team & Academy athletes. 7 Echo Mountain a piste less traveled Sometimes, to get the best of anything, you have to take a chance and roll the proverbial dice—which is exactly what SBA’s alpine staff decided to do in its search to make our three-week November camp in Colorado as effective and cost efficient as possible. With places like Vail, Copper, Beaver Creek and Loveland offering earlyseason training at high costs for what has recently felt like standing room only, we gambled on little-known Echo Mountain, perched high above I-70’s Idaho Springs exit (just 30 minutes from downtown Denver). At full, mid-winter strength, Echo is around 700 vertical feet of skiing on just five trails and one chairlift. In early November, it’s one chairlift and what amounts to about 1.5 trails—and in terms of early-season training, it also proved better than its bigger, more glamorous neighbors in many ways. For starters, Echo, home of the Front Range Ski Club, is a private ski area and, at this time of year, opens for alpine racing teams only. On most days, when a given team is scheduled for training, it has sole run of the place, meaning SBA coaches and athletes were the only ones using the lift and trails during most of our teams’ sessions. Averaging about 15 runs per 2.5-hour training block, our kids skied roughly 225 runs over the course of 15 days on snow. Averaging 40 turns per run, that means each SBA athlete made around 9,000 turns at our Colorado camp. Sandwiched among dozens of other teams fighting for lane space at Copper last year, it would have taken us almost twice as long every day to get the same volume we had with the mountain to ourselves at Echo. Echo’s location also allowed us to exploit day trips to other resorts, which, while keeping the bulk of our training at Echo, is something we might in the future take still greater advantage of to allow our F.I.S. athletes to hop on race venues at places like Copper and Loveland in preparation for competitions on those same tracks. In addition to the highly focused training setup, we also managed a day-off trip to Boulder, where our students were toured around the University of Colorado campus by former U.S. Ski Team athlete and CU alumnus Stefan Hughes. After our tour of the school, student-athletes explored Boulder’s majestic, cobble-stone Pearl Street before watching the Buffaloes play the University of California Golden Bears at Folsom Field. The PAC-12 football game finished in a 41-21 Buffs victory, bringing CU fans their first home victory of the season—giving us all a chance to celebrate with Buff Ralphie in the bleachers at the final whistle. 8 THANKSGIVING, NORDIC-STYLE a west yellowstone tradition We’re inching along the darkened streets of West Yellowstone, MT, looking for the address of our condo. Having left Truckee at 6:30 in the morning, everyone is feeling the effects of a twelve-hour car ride. A mix of boredom, exhaustion, and excitement pervades the car. In the morning, we’ll be on snow for the first time this year. For the next week, we’ll engage in double sessions almost every day. The conditions are great up here with cold temps and a good amount of fresh snow. The elevation is around 6,700 feet, and with reliable early-season natural snow, the training is ideal. Since the late-1970s, when the U.S. Ski Team first started coming here, Thanksgiving week in West Yellowstone has evolved into the place to be for Nordic skiers across North America. Our first morning on snow is a classic skiing session. It’s an “Extra Blue Day,” indicating perfect tracks, Extra Blue kick wax and temps between the mid-teens and mid-twenties. It’s a little colder than we’re used to back home, but everyone soon gets into the rhythm of kicking and gliding. It’s always a challenge, but we have to constantly remind ourselves to take it slow and easy. No matter how fit you are, no matter how much time you’ve spent rollerskiing, skiing on snow always feels a little different. It’s a little more taxing than any of our dryland workouts. The first part of our week is focused on volume training: lots of slow, easy skiing. Most sessions are an hour and a half to two hours long surrounded by lots of food, sleep, and down time. At the end of the week are the first two races of the season, not to mention Thanksgiving Dinner. This year seems especially big in West Yellowstone. With the Olympics coming this winter, these races are part of the qualification period. All the elite domestic racers are here, zipping around the trails, testing their new skis and stone grinds. The trails are packed with people ranging from nine and ten-year-old children to 60-year-old Masters skiers, and just about everyone in between. It’s a time to reconnect with people last seen six months before, at the final races of the season. The opportunity to see so many friends and people out on the trails makes the whole week feel like a big celebration in many ways. It is the first weekend of the domestic race calendar as well as the first week on snow for many. The skiing is phenomenal in West Yellowstone again this year, a reminder of why we make the journey every November. And with so many familiar and welcoming faces, it feels a lot like coming home for Thanksgiving. BEYOND THE CLASSROOM a journey to the roots of celtic music The Isle of Skye in Scotland is sparsely populated, with one-lane roads connecting a patchwork of rural villages. For SBA senior and accomplished violinist/fiddler Camille Hartley, traveling there this past August meant connecting to the very roots of the Celtic music she finds so fascinating: For three weeks, Skye and the campus of Salmore College became Camille’s home, playing host to a fiddle camp run by Nevada City’s Alistair Frasier. “As a musician, it was nice to learn tunes in the very place that so obviously inspired the music,” said Hartley. “There’s so much more to it when you’re learning a tune that was inspired by a place you’re in. It’s the root, where Celtic music came from.” Beyond the opportunity to connect with Celtic music, the fiddle camp gave Camille a greater appreciation for other vestiges of Scottish cultural heritage. She participated in Scottish Ceilidh dancing (unexpectedly, to pop music) and played Shinte, an ancient Scottish game akin to field hockey, which she found remarkably lacking in rules. “A couple people got whacked in the shin pretty hard,” she said. The highlight, though, for Camille, was the day that the entire group of 130 fiddlers—primarily from England and Scotland, sprinkled with others from places like the U.S., Spain and even Finland—hiked seven miles to the tiny island town of Tarshkaveg, where they played a “massive jam session with dance.” “Alistair had us face and play to the sunset—all of those fiddlers playing together over the ocean and mountains was a really moving part of the adventure.” Camille will continue to pursue her passion for music in college. ALUMNI NOTES have you heard? …Cassidy Cichowicz ‘12, a sophomore at St. Lawrence University, spent the fall semester at a wilderness campus in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York as part of a wilderness immersion curriculum. She and 11 other students lived in yurts and studied Biology, Philosophy, Ecology, and Creative Writing while living far off the grid and exploring the rivers, lakes, and mountains of the Adirondacks. She returns to campus at St. Lawrence for the winter term and will be an integral part of the Nordic ski team. ...TJ Neal ’08 graduated from the University of Oregon in June, 2012 with a double major in Business Administration-Sports Marketing and Mandarin Chinese. He’s currently living in Beijing, China, working for a Chinese national digital agency called Netalk. At Netalk, he manages the Arsenal Football Club’s digital presence in China. This includes the club’s Weibo (twitter equivalent), official website, video, as well as other social media platforms. …AJ Habib ’08 recently spent a year with Teach for America where she was teaching Social Studies and English in Detroit, MI. She’s now working in Gainesville, GA, for the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) as a Public Affairs intern for the Chattahoochee and Oconee National Forests and has recently been accepted to a graduate program at New York University. A NOTE FROM BRENT TALBOTT ‘10 This past summer, I had the privilege of engaging in a Bates college trusteesponsored fellowship, for which I traveled to Beijing, China, as an intern at Larkin Trade International (LTI). LTI is a “consulting firm specializing in trade compliance and business strategy in China and other Asian countries.” I was tasked with a variety of duties at LTI, including assisting in ChineseEnglish translations, researching a variety of trade laws, and compiling reports concerning our findings. On larger research reports and projects, I even helped create a training program for clients focused on ensuring compliance with American export laws, and constructed reports determining the import laws surrounding electronic components and how to apply those import laws. Of course, my Chinese speaking ability greatly improved, too. Living in a traditional hutong area rather than in an expat neighborhood, my daily, 80-minute commute to the office included three separate subway lines and a bus—helping me experience a level of immersion that I hadn’t really anticipated. Having said that, I also met tons of expatriates from places like Columbia, Portugal, Spain and Mexico, building relationships with people that led to dinners with a state reporter, a policeman and an employee of China’s largest tech company. The trip gave me some of the most memorable experiences of my life: I will return to Beijing! GOT NEWS? Alumni we want to hear from you! Please send your news to Kim Hubner at [email protected]. 11 SUGAR BOWL ACADEMY’S NEW ACADEMIC BUILDING CLASS OF 2014 COLLEGE ACCEPTANCES through December 20, 2013 College SUGAR BOWL SKI TEAM & ACADEMY P.O. Box 68 | Norden, CA | 95724 | Ski Team: 530.269.7401 | Academy: 530.426.1844 | www.sbst.org | www.sbacademy.org