Two Glacier Nordic Club Athletes Named to IMD Junior National Team

At the first major Nordic ski race of the year, several Glacier Nordic Club (GNC) athletes were recovering from early-winter sicknesses, leading to a handful of lackluster performances. Seeking a way to motivate the skiers for the long season ahead, Logan Mowry, the newly hired GNC comp coach, told his athletes that if someone won a Junior National Qualifier race by the end of the season, he’d get a small tattoo of their choosing. 

Now, Mowry must book not one but two ink appointments.   

“I may have underestimated some of the athletes at the beginning of the season,” Mowry said. “I was just looking for any way to start motivating them and get them to bounce back after that first race, and apparently it worked.”

At the Intermountain Division (IMD) Junior National Qualifier (JNQ) Nordic races in Bozeman, held Feb. 18-19, Whitefish’s Maeve Ingelfinger won the classic sprint and the freestyle mass start to qualify for Junior Nationals. 

In the classic sprint, Ingelfinger finished with the second fastest time in the preliminary time trial, and then won three heats to capture the overall victory for the U18/U20 division over athletes from Jackson Hole, Sun Valley and Bozeman. 

Ingelfinger returned the next day to crush the 10k freestyle mass start, gliding away from her competitors to win by a convincing 23 seconds. Her combined point total from the season’s three qualifying races ties her for the top overall IMD ranking heading into nationals.

“Maeve is really starting to shine as a professional athlete, as much as one can in high school,” said GNC executive director Jennie Bender. “Her approach to races, her execution, and her training this year has been so full of motivation and focus.”

Ingelfinger qualified for Junior Nationals last year and “knocked it out of the park,” according to Bender, who said this year has brought on a whole new version of the top athlete. 

“The other skiers look at her and can see the process that got her to the top, which is something I think we’ll be able to replicate,” Bender said. “The whole club is elevated, and it’s been showing. As a team, they’re impressing other coaches and clubs on the circuit.”

Several GNC racers entered the Bozeman qualifier on the bubble of making nationals but needed flawless races to do so. While none of the boys on the racing team qualified, they ended their seasons with solid performances across the board. Ruedi Steiner placed 22nd in the classic sprint, Nate Ingelfinger missed making it out of the preliminary race finishing 31st, and Deneb Linton finished 50th in his first JNQ. 

In the mass start, Nate Ingelfinger and Steiner were skiing the last race of their high school careers and worked their way up through the field over the four-lap 10k course to finish 18th and 27th respectively, while Linton powered through for 46th. 

“This is the other side of the story that we don’t talk about as much,” Bender said. “While we like to focus on the efforts of those who qualify and make it to the next level, those who don’t put in just as much work and tried just as hard, if not harder. It’s hard to watch those results after seeing the work these athletes put in.”

The other high point of the racing weekend was in the U16 girls division, in which Findley Dezzani from Columbia Falls raced to an 11th-place finish in the classic start before turning around and navigating the mass start to eke out a 9th-place finish, locking in enough points to qualify for nationals, her season-long goal. 

The GNC also saw high finishes from some of the younger athletes, including Addie Nerdig (3rd, U12 sprint and freestyle 3.5k), Jessup Hutchinson (14th, U14 spring) and Abby Visnovske (14th, U14 spring). 

The two junior national qualifiers — Maeve Ingelfinger and Findley Dezzani — will compete as members of the IMD Junior National Team and will compete at the 2023 USSA Cross Country Ski Junior National Championships in Fairbanks, Alaska, March 13-16. 

The GNC athletes will have a bit of a leg up on their competition in Fairbanks because Mowry grew up there, and skied for the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, giving him intimate knowledge of the course they’ll be racing on. 

“Going back to my home turf as a coach is really cool. It’s refreshing to be able to share such detailed, ingrained knowledge with my athletes,” Mowry said. “I’ve got so much firsthand experience there, I can tell them exactly which hills to push on, where to hold back and which stretches to make moves to pass people on.”

Mowry said the entire drive home from Bozeman was dominated by discussions of what his forthcoming tattoos would be. While he set parameters for size and location, the design is wholly up to the athletes. 

“They say in brainstorming there’s no bad ideas, but I heard a lot of bad tattoo ideas on that drive,” he said. “I may have to reevaluate my coaching strategy next year.”