Colony senior skier to cap season with national competition

MAT-SU — Colony High School senior Greta Jenkins is one of just a handful of female skiers from the Valley to ever be named to the Alaska Junior National Nordic Ski Team.

In the last 15 years, many Valley skiers have competed in the Besh Cup Race Series either for some extra race experience, for fun, or for a chance to secure a spot on the state’s national team. Several have qualified for the team as U20 skiers, such as Colony graduate Sarah Hansen in 2003, Palmer High graduate Kate Fitzgerald in 2006 and 2007, and Palmer graduates Amanda and Kim DelFrate in 2012.

But only one other Valley woman, before Jenkins, made the team as a high school athlete — Tazlina Mannix, from Su Valley High School, who was named a Junior National skier as a U16 in 2002, a U18 in 2003 and 2004, and a U20 in 2005 and 2006.

Next week, Jenkins will compete in the Junior National Championship in Truckee, California, with 14 other young women in her age group (U18-U20). Jenkins was the last in the group to qualify, with 92 total Besh Cup points accumulated in six races.

Soldotna High Schools’ Hannah Pothast, who made the team last year, just missed the cut off this year, three points behind Jenkins.

“It came down to the last Besh Cup race to make the junior national team, and I ended up making it, and I honestly wish that she could go ’cause I know that she’s such a good skier,” Jenkins said, of Pothast, at the high school Region III Championship meet Feb. 14.

Jenkins came in fourth overall with a combined time of 30 minutes, 12 seconds for two roughly 4.5-kilometer races that weekend, less than a minute ahead of Pothast, who placed sixth in the regional meet.

At the ASAA/First National Bank Nordic Skiing State Championships Feb. 19-21, Jenkins finished 26th out of 96 female competitors in combined times.

And that’s been her position for the last three years.

After her 74th-place finish at her first state meet her freshman year, Jenkins made a huge leap her sophomore year, when she finished 26th. When she finished 26th the next year, she thought she’d hit a plateau.

Then she finished 26th this year, and that seemed worse, she said.

“I don’t think this was my best high school season,” Jenkins said after the state meet.

But with changing courses, weather, wax and attitudes, a good performance is probably more about timing than anything else. Though her high school season wasn’t what she hoped, Jenkins said she saw her best Besh Cup season this year with the training she received through Alaska Nordic Racing (ANR), beginning last spring.

With the addition of year-round ski training, however, she had to make some sacrifices.

Volleyball was one of them.

“I wanted to stay in it but I enjoyed skiing just that much more,” she said in an interview Wednesday.

Volleyball and soccer actually came before skiing for Jenkins, as she had participated in those sports with her sisters for years before entering high school — which is when she started racing.

Before that, skiing was simply a family activity encouraged by her parents.

“We didn’t know what we were doing, we were just out there to have fun, enjoy the winter weather and spend some time with each other,” Jenkins said.

Then her older sister Katya inspired her to race when she joined the Colony High ski team.

“Winter’s always been kinda my favorite season, so I love the snow, and I saw just the friendships she was making and how much fun she was having and I was like ‘yeah that would be something I would like to do,’” Jenkins said.

It didn’t take long for her to realize that skiing was also something she wanted to do more than soccer or volleyball.

“I never thought that I was a stellar soccer player, I never thought that I was like, an amazing volleyball player … but with skiing it was different,” she said.

As she watched her best friend and college-bound volleyball player spend hours setting against a wall at home to meet her goals, Jenkins saw what she needed to do.

“I knew that that was the kind of commitment that it took to get good at a sport, but with soccer and volleyball I never took that time or felt overly motivated to take that time to get better,” she said.

So she decided to take her training to the next level. She did as much as she could on her own the summer before her junior year, continued to compete in the winter Besh Cup series, and began training with ANR the following spring.

That’s not to say her athletic career has been all sunshine and snowflakes, however. The time commitment, she said, as well as the mental stamina required, is always a bit of an obstacle to overcome.

“It’s hard to keep the drive that you have at the beginning of the season at the same level or even higher throughout the entire season,” Jenkins said.

Perhaps that will change with time and training. Jenkins plans to ski for the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth, Minnesota, next year under the direction of head coach Chad Salmela, who has coached several skiers to the podium in NCAA Championships in the last five years. He also commentated for Olympic biathlon, cross country skiing and Nordic combined events in 2006 and 2010, and was the analyst for those events in the 2014 Sochi Olympics.

Jenkins said she wants to become “an elite skier,” but values her education.

“I didn’t want (skiing) to consume my whole (college) experience,” she said.

Jenkins plans to pursue a double major in computer science and mathematics, departments which, at Scholastica, seemed more woman-friendly to her than at other schools.

“They had a lot more opportunities for women in computer science, they really encouraged women in that degree where I didn’t see that as much in other schools,” she said.

But that’s not all there is to know about Greta Jenkins. According to her mother, Jenkins was named junior prom queen (princess) last spring and basketball homecoming queen last week. She is also first in her class academically at Colony with unweighted grade point averages.

She will be the first Alaskan to ski for the Scholastica Saints — a fitting mascot for a skier inspired by the 1981 film “Chariots of Fire,” in which the character based on Scottish Olympic runner Eric Liddell says, “when I run, I feel (God’s) pleasure.”

“I think it speaks very well to why I love (skiing) so much, it’s just, being out there, being able to see just the beauty around me that he’s created,” Jenkins said. “He gave me this body and ability and mind to be able to do such a demanding sport, you know, and I’ve been able to succeed (thus) far.”

Contact Caitlin Skvorc at 352-2266 or caitlin.skvorc@frontiersman.com.