By Andrew Dampf, The Associated Press

SAINT-DENIS, France — American-born Palestinian runner Layla Almasri realizes the weight of responsibility that she and her team carry at the Paris Olympics.

It’s about far more than merely competing.

“I think I can speak for all eight of us here at the Olympics,” Almasri said after competing in the 800 meters Friday. “We’re definitely diplomats for our people as well as athletes.”

It’s a role that’s reinforced every time she turns on the TV or looks at her phone and sees images of people struggling in Gaza during the Israel-Hamas war.

“Every single time. It’s really difficult to see,” Almasri said. “Mothers with my mother’s face on them. Children who look like me when I was a kid. It’s heartbreaking. And it almost feels like I was just hit with a strike of lightning, of luck, to be able to live somewhere where I don’t have to face the things that they’re facing.”

So it hardly mattered that Almasri finished last in her heat and 48th of the 49 finishers in the 800 heats — ahead of a competitor from Kosovo.

“I wasn’t even looking at the clock,” she said. “Just soaked in the moment. The crowd was really what I was focused on. And of course (I had) the best view in the house watching that race. Right on the track.”

After her father left Nablus for Colorado, Almasri was born and raised in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Last year, she earned a master’s degree in health promotion from the University of Colorado Colorado Springs, where she’s now an assistant coach for the women’s cross-country team.

She grew up eating Palestinian food and always has felt connected to her father’s homeland.

“It’s in my blood and it’s in my heart,” said Almasri, who won a bronze medal in the 1,500 at the Arab athletics championships last year.

Almasri first visited Nablus two years ago.

“It was beautiful,” she said. “It was home. All my cousins, all my aunts and uncles are there. So I just immediately fit right in.”

Palestine Olympic Committee president Jibril Rajoub has said about 400 athletes of varying levels are estimated to have died since October. The war began after Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, killing approximately 1,200. The war has killed more than 39,200 Palestinians, according to the Health Ministry, which doesn’t distinguish between combatants and civilians in its count.

Perhaps the most prominent Palestinian athlete to die in the war was long-distance runner Majed Abu Maraheel, who in 1996 in Atlanta became the first Palestinian to compete in the Olympics. He died of kidney failure earlier this year after he was unable to be treated in Gaza and could not be evacuated to Egypt, Palestinian officials said.

“We have a guy I raced with last year who’s been stuck in Gaza,” Almasri said. “He’s very talented and he’s still in Gaza.”

The attention on the Palestine team has been big inside the athletes village.

“Everybody wants a pin. We’re stopped for photos in the dining hall constantly,” Almasri said. “It’s really incredible to see how many people are really surprised to see us and happy to see us.”

There is no extra security for the Palestinians.

“Fortunately, we don’t need it and we don’t have any,” Almasri said. “We’re really lucky to have such a positive environment to be in.”

Have the Palestinians crossed paths with members of the Israeli team?

“We see them, but it’s just business as usual,” Almasri said. “We’re focused on ourselves and we’re sure they’re focused as well.”

In April, Durango’s Christopher Blevins was just minutes from the finish of the opening mountain bike World Cup race of the season in Mairiporã, Brazil. With less than half a lap remaining, the 26-year-old sprinted into the lead and managed to ride to the win two short seconds ahead of his competition. He raised his arms and punched the air in celebration of his second-career World Cup Cross-country Olympic victory that would help him secure a spot on Team USA’s roster for the Paris Olympic Games. 

The U.S. mountain bike squad is composed of three riders from Durango — including Blevins, 22-year-old Riley Amos, and 25-year-old Savilia Blunk — a town with a rich cycling culture that has fostered world class talent for decades. Haley Batten of Park City, Utah, is the fourth and final rider who will represent the USA in the Parisian singletrack. 

“Durango has meant everything to my success and trajectory on the bike,” Blevins said as he made his final preparations for the Games. “Result-wise and where I am as an Olympian but also just how much I love the bike. I think that’s what I’m most proud of and what Durango’s provided.” 

Blevins began his life as a bike racer at age 5. He racked up multiple age group national titles as a BMX racer before cracking his skull and suffering permanent hearing loss as a 10-year-old. Despite initial hesitation from his parents, he began mountain biking with the Durango Devo program and started racking up even more national titles. 

The Devo program, co-founded by coaches Chad Cheeney and Sarah Tescher, is known for instilling a passion for riding bikes through a fun-first approach of practicing riding skills, going on adventures and building fitness. 

Cheeney was an early coach of Blevins when he picked up mountain biking after his early BMX years, and Devo encouraged Blevins and his cohort to develop a love for the bike that is evident in Blevins’ riding style and videos of him showing off quirky moves, such as kissing his front wheel or hopping his bike up a flight of stairs. 

“I saw him a few times on the big screen and wanted more,” Cheeney said after watching Blevins in the Tokyo Olympics in 2021. “He is so stylish on the bike. I bet he made some fans smile.”

As he got older, Blevins explored racing on the road and secured strong results in Europe, but ultimately decided to focus on mountain biking ahead of the Tokyo Olympics, where he finished 14th. That same year, he won the inaugural short track World Championships in Italy and his first World Cup in Snowshoe, West Virginia.

Originally from a small town in Northern California, Blunk came to Durango in 2018 to attend Fort Lewis College, and she still bases out of the town when she’s not racing or training in Europe. Riding for the Fort Lewis College Cycling Team and training in Durango fired Blunk’s passion for the bike, improved her riding skills and shaped her career trajectory. 

“Coming from a small town where mountain biking wasn’t an everyday sport, to Durango, where overnight I was surrounded by talented riders and people pushing me to become better, I improved so much as a rider just by having people to train and ride with that both challenged me and gave me confidence,” Blunk said. 

Blunk got her first international racing experience as a junior racer and steadily climbed through the under-23 ranks and into the elite field. Last year, she rode to a career-best fourth place at the Snowshoe World Cup, and bested that with a second-place performance in Brazil this year. 

The sole American rider for the French Decathlon-Ford team, Blunk appeared in a commercial for the automobile manufacturer last year. 

She’s been preparing for Paris in Girona, Spain, where she is focused on training, recovery, sleep and nutrition. 

“Mainly it has been a quiet process of lots of suffering on the bike and finding the perfect balance of tension and freshness to get my best performance at the Olympics,” she said. 

Like Blevins, Amos also grew up in Durango and came up through Durango Devo, the same program that produced Vuelta a Espana victor and Tour de France stage winner Sepp Kuss and 2016 Olympian Howard Grotts. In his junior years, he was coached by Todd Wells, a now-retired, three-time Olympian who is a mainstay of the Durango cycling community. 

Along with lessons about fitness and training, Amos said Wells gave him a broader appreciation for the elite athletic lifestyle. 

“No matter how hard things get, no matter how shit your race was, or how much you are suffering in the moment, you never know how many more of those you are going to get,” Amos said in a recent Instagram post. “Being able to be a professional mountain biker is the greatest job in the world plain and simple, the days you are pushed to the breaking point are always rewarded if you stay committed to the process and are willing to learn and improve.” 

Amos got his first glimpse of international success in 2021 when he won a World Cup in the U23 category in Austria. This season is his final in the U23 ranks, a category designed as a stepping stone for younger riders before they enter the elite field, and Amos has not been wasting it. He has been undefeated at the World Cup races, with the exception of one second place. 

Amos opted to skip the most recent World Cup in France, instead flying home to Durango to recover from a stomach bug, spend time with family and train at altitude. He acknowledged the importance of his home community in the social media post. 

“My community is the reason I’m here,” Amos wrote. “Without (Durango Devo) and my little town in Colorado, I would have never found this path. The amount of fun I’ve had growing up exploring the outdoors on my bike with my best friends showed me what life is about. 

“Cycling gave me a chance to be something that mattered, to give me purpose each day and simplify the world around me. I had so many cycling mentors growing up, and I constantly strive to take a small piece from their process and incorporate it into myself. I’ve always had a stronger wheel to chase, and I’ve always lived to surprise those better than me.” 

Shortly after that first U23 win, Amos posted an Instagram picture of VeloNews magazine with Batten and Kate Courtney on the cover. The two riders were wearing Team USA jerseys, set to race at the Tokyo Olympics.

“I haven’t been just watching cycling, and getting to see so many people of different sports pour their hearts into competition has been really inspiring,” he wrote in the Instagram caption, from inspiration to an Olympian three years later. 

Blevins and Blunk said that the Paris course will be fast and less-technical than some of the World Cup courses that they are accustomed to. This may lead to tight racing with riders staying together for much of the race, similar to the first race in Brazil that Blevins won. 

While Blunk based in Spain and Amos in Durango, Blevins has been training in France in recent weeks. He caught COVID earlier this summer, but has been feeling stronger and stronger, he said. 

While Blunk and Amos will make their Olympians debut, Blevins (along with Batten) are heading back to the Games for the second time. 

“I think it’s a different experience now,” Blevins said. “First of all I’m older, I’ve got more experience and really want to fight for the medals this time. It’s also different in the way where we don’t have COVID and I can actually be a part of the community a bit more, watch some events after. That’ll be really special, and I’ll be having my family there as well.” 

While these three athletes are all in their 20s, Durango has a long legacy of cycling. The town of just over 19,000 has had a representative in each Olympic mountain bike race since the sport was added to the schedule in 1996. Before Blevins, Grotts rode in the Rio Games and Todd Wells in Athens, Beijing and London. 

The inaugural UCI mountain bike World Championships were held at Purgatory Resort in 1990, and the Durango-Silverton Iron Horse Bicycle Classic has rolled on for more than 50 years. In recent years, Team Segment 28 (named after the final segment of the Colorado Trail that finishes in town) has been established to help young riders develop into elite racers. On the road, the town is represented by Kuss and Quinn Simmons at the WorldTour level, both beginning their bike careers as mountain bikers. 

“It’s amazing that we have three Durangoans in the Olympics,” Blevins said. “It means a lot to carry on that legacy.”

By Graham Dunbar, The Associated Press

PARIS — What was expected to be a simple coronation of Salt Lake City as the 2034 Winter Olympic host turned into complicated Olympic politics Wednesday, as the IOC pushed Utah officials to end an FBI investigation into a suspected doping coverup.

The International Olympic Committe formally awarded the 2034 Winter Games to Salt Lake in an 83-6 vote, but only after a contingent of Utah politicians and U.S. Olympic leaders signed an agreement that pressures them to lobby the federal government.

The International Olympic Committee is angry about an ongoing U.S. federal investigation of suspected doping by Chinese swimmers who were allowed to compete at the Tokyo Games despite positive drug tests. The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) accepted Chinese explanations for the tests, and U.S. officials are now investigating that decision under an anti-conspiracy law passed after the Russian doping scandal at the Sochi Winter Games.

President Thomas Bach wants to make sure WADA is the lead authority on doping cases in Olympic sports, especially with the Summer Olympics headed to Los Angeles in 2028. The IOC added a clause to Salt Lake’s host contract, effectively demanding that local organizers — including Utah Gov. Spencer Cox — push to shut down the investigation or risk losing the Olympics.

“That was the only way that we could guarantee that we would get the Games,” Cox said after the announcement. If the U.S. does not respect the “supreme authority of WADA, the governor said, ”they can withdraw the Games from us.”

Even in the world of Olympic diplomacy, it was a stunning power move to force government officials to publicly agree to do the IOC’s lobbying.

U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee Chair Gene Sykes said some officials and athletes from other countries are worried that the anti-conspiracy law would allow the U.S. to arrest or subpoena Olympic visitors.

Some officials “have been very anxious about what it would mean to the sports figures who came to the United States, somehow they were subject to uncertainty in terms of their freedom of travel,” Sykes said. “And that is always concerning to people who don’t understand the United States.”

The capital city of Utah was the only candidate after the IOC gave Salt Lake City exclusive negotiating rights last year in a fast-tracked process.

The campaign team presenting the bid on stage to IOC members included Cox, Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall and Alpine ski great Lindsey Vonn. Back home, a 3 a.m. public watch party gathered to see the broadcast from Paris.

The clause inserted into the contract requires Utah officials to work with current and future U.S. presidents and Congress “to alleviate your concerns” about the federal investigation into doping.

WADA’s role is under scrutiny for accepting a Chinese investigation that declared all 23 swimmers were contaminated by traces of a banned heart medication in a hotel kitchen. Evidence to prove the theory has not been published. The implicated swimmers won three gold medals in Tokyo, and some are also competing in Paris.

The case can be investigated in the U.S. under federal legislation named for a whistleblower of Russian state doping at the 2014 Sochi Winter Games. The IOC and WADA lobbied against the law, known as the Rodchenkov Act, which gives U.S. federal agencies wide jurisdiction of doping enforcement worldwide.

“We will work with our members of Congress,” Gov. Cox told Bach and IOC voters ahead of the 2034 vote, “we will use all the levers of power open to us to resolve these concerns.”

The head of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, who has often publicly feuded with WADA, Travis Tygart, said in a statement it was “shocking to see the IOC itself stooping to threats in an apparent effort to silence those seeking answers to what are now known as facts.”

Salt Lake City first hosted the Winter Games in 2002. That bid was hit with a bribery scandal, which led to anti-corruption reforms at the IOC.

Future U.S. Sen. Mitt Romney was brought in to clean up the Games, which went off well despite tightened security. The Games were the biggest international sports event hosted by the U.S. following the Sept. 11 attacks five months earlier

Utah Gov. Cox confirmed Romney is already involved in the lobbying demanded by the IOC.

It is an Olympic tradition for lawmakers and even heads of state to come to an IOC meeting and plead their case to be anointed as an host city.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair made key interventions at past IOC meetings to secure Olympics for their countries. U.S. President Barack Obama’s visit to Copenhagen in 2009 did not help in Chicago’s losing cause for the 2016 Summer Games that went to Rio de Janeiro.

For its second turn, Salt Lake City will get almost 10 full years to prepare — the longest lead-in for a modern Winter Games — amid longer-term concerns about climate change affecting snow sports and reducing the pool of potential hosts.

It will be the fifth Winter Games in the U.S. Before Salt Lake City in 2002, there was Lake Placid in 1980 and 1932, and Squaw Valley — now known as Olympic Valley — in 1960.

In a separate decision earlier in Paris, the 2030 Winter Games was awarded to France for a regional project split between ski resorts in the Alps and the French Riviera city Nice.

That project needs official signoff from the national government being formed, and the Prime Minister yet to be confirmed, after recent elections called by President Emmanuel Macron. He helped present the 2030 bid Wednesday to IOC members.

Hours later, the member list included Sykes, the USOPC chair, who became a full IOC member with an 82-3 vote.

The 2024 Olympic Games kick off in Paris in just a few short days, and, as usual, Colorado will be well represented.

How well, you ask?

Colorado will have more athletes in these Games than 168 entire nations sent to the last Summer Olympics. We’ll have more athletes than states with twice — even three times! — as many people. We’ll have more athletes competing just in track and field than Nebraska and Kansas combined are sending. (Ha Ha!)

Relative to our population size, we’re one of the greatest Olympian factories in the country.

Below are eight stats and charts that prove this. Feel free to steal them to wow your friends.

These charts are based on the list of 592 Olympians that the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee released last week. We relied on the hometowns that athletes provided for that list — so don’t throw rotten tomatoes at us if your favorite Colorado athlete isn’t included here. And there likely are some who won’t be.

Mountain bike racer Savilia Blunk, for instance, lives in Durango. But the USOPC lists her hometown as Inverness, California, where she grew up. Tennis player Rajeev Ram, meanwhile, was born in Denver, but the USOPC gives his hometown as Carmel, Indiana, where he lives now.

And then there is Colorado-raised, Boston-based basketball player Derrick White, who isn’t on the list at all because he was only added to the Team USA roster as an injury replacement after its release.

What we’re saying is that what is already a great state for producing Olympians could be even greater if we ran the data just a little differently. And that’s some trivia definitely worth dropping at your next happy hour.

STEAMBOAT SPRINGS — It’s a windy spring day at the Steamboat Springs High School athletic field, and though the bruised sky over the ski resort in the distance threatens snow, most of the varsity boys’ lacrosse team members are wearing T-shirts and tank tops under their jerseys. A chorus of “Chuck!” erupts on the field as senior Charlie Reisman, a defender with a thin build and loping gait, scoops up the ball.

Reisman had never picked up a lacrosse stick before this season, making the unusual decision to try out for a new sport during senior year. But picking up new sports is kind of his thing: He is graduating with a total of 15 varsity letters in six sports — soccer, football, golf, basketball, track and lacrosse. 

He also spent his elementary years learning to ski, mountain bike, surf and ski jump, for which he was ranked third in the nation. Multisport athletes like Reisman would be exceptional in any generation, but they’re increasingly rare in the current culture of early specialization, which pushes kids to pick a single sport at a young age and play it year-round.

Youth sports clubs send parents a strong and perhaps calculated message: Specialize early, or your child will fall behind. But there’s a growing murmur among the parents and coaches: Is specialization actually good for our kids?

Each year, 60 million kids in this country register to play a sport — and because elementary schools often don’t have the funding to have school-sanctioned sports, pay-to-play youth sports clubs have become an estimated $30 billion to $40 billion industry. The clubs tout early specialization as the best way for kids to get ahead, citing college scholarships and even fueling dreams of playing professionally. They push kids to separate into recreational and elite leagues as early as 7 or 8 years old, and charge parents who buy in roughly $10,000 per child per year on some year-round programs.

The reality, however, is that among the 60 million kids who play organized sports in the U.S. 70% quit their sport entirely by the age of 13, according to a 2024 American Academy of Pediatrics study. Of the kids who don’t quit, fewer than 2% will play a sport at the collegiate level, and only 2% of those will become professional athletes.

Avoiding burnout in a trend toward specialization

The trajectory of early specialization goes something like this: As the family’s investment increases, so does the pressure on the child. The time and travel commitments increase, which mean fewer family dinners and vacations, less time for unstructured “free play,” and less down-time for recovery or hanging out with friends. The rigorous practices with repetitive drills and movement increase the risk of injury nearly twofold.

Then, eventually, the sport that started as a fun and healthy pastime becomes a job. And kids don’t want to have a job because, well, they’re kids.

Reisman has witnessed the burnout first-hand: “I met this kid when we were 12, and we became best friends,” he says. “He played on this really high-end team year-round and would travel all over. And by the start of his senior year, he quit. He was good, but he was so sick of it.”

The trend to specialize can also hurt kids who choose not to. Kids with parents who can’t afford the high cost or heavy time commitment, kids who are late bloomers, and kids who are simply not good enough are left behind on recreational leagues as their friends advance. This can be demotivating, sending a message that these kids aren’t getting anywhere with this sport, which can lead them to give up entirely.

By contrast, there are a host of benefits that come with allowing kids to play multiple sports at a lower level at least until they reach puberty. Research demonstrates that multisport athletes have a greater chance of longer athletic careers and better overall motor and athletic development. Research also says multisport athletes tend to be more motivated, more confident, more creative — and have more fun. 

The reason is simple: Different sports teach different skills, and these skills are transferable.

According to Brian Harvey, a longtime hockey coach in Steamboat and the announcer for many high school varsity games, kids who come from multisport backgrounds are instantly recognizable on the ice or on the field. 

“They’re more coachable, they get the team dynamics, and are just more coordinated,” he says.

Reisman says multisport exposure gave him fresh perspectives on strategy and execution across the board, inspiring him to make unique plays and find unexpected solutions on the field. He credits his creativity as a reason why he was chosen for three all-state teams — including his new sport of lacrosse — in his senior year.

“It’s a ripple effect,” he says. “Golf can help with your mindset strength, and that can help in any other sport you play. Soccer has helped with my vision in basketball and made my passing better than others. Basketball has helped me in lacrosse to be one step ahead of other defenders who just play lacrosse. Being a football kicker, with those clutch moments, helps with any other clutch moments, whether it’s a golf shot, a penalty kick or a free throw.”

“I learned to be willing to fail”

Luke DeWolfe, athletic director at Steamboat Springs High School, believes playing multiple sports also teaches kids important skills they can take off the field, too. Skills like leadership, cooperation and grit.

“If kids do three sports, they’re probably not going to be exceptional at all of them,” DeWolfe says. “They’ll have to work through adversity. They’ll have to learn what it means to not be a star athlete and to just be a teammate, which prepares them for the real world.”

Reisman echoes this idea, saying he arguably learned more important life lessons as a bench player on the basketball team, where he frequently played only when his team was either up or down 30 points, than he did as a star player on the soccer team.

“I learned to be willing to fail, which is a big one,” he said. “I might be the best at something, but I learned that’s not the most important thing. If you can be a supportive bench player, that can help the team so much.”

Playing multiple sports at a lower level to help create better well-rounded athletes seems logical enough, but it may even make kids who are truly gifted excel in their single sport later on. This is an important message for kids who may be among that 2% who could play at the collegiate level and beyond, because they face the most pressure to specialize. Their parents, guided by conventional wisdom and youth sports clubs, are led to believe, “If my kid is gifted, I have to take the single-sport path.”

But for the overwhelming majority of sports, not only does the evidence show that early specialization fails to help kids reach elite status, but just the opposite. Resisting that pressure, even if it means playing at a lower level, may eventually make them better at their single sport than they would be if they had specialized early.

According to Tracking Football, an independent statistics website, 90% of 2022 NFL draft picks were multisport athletes in high school. Pete Carroll, the former coach for the Seattle Seahawks, spoke frequently about the value he places on multiple sports in an athlete’s background, believing it to be vitally important in the development of a competitor. It’s not just in football, either — some of the greatest professional athletes of all time — like Wayne Gretsky, Alex Morgan, Tom Brady, Abby Wambach and Steph Curry to name a few — all credit their multisport backgrounds as key to their single-sport success.

“I did a reverse of what these specialists kids are doing”

Though he’s years away from having the opportunity to play on a professional level, Reisman demonstrates his solid multisport foundation on the soccer field, with a maturity that lifts up the whole team and makes him immeasurably more valuable as a player. Because he knows the importance of teamwork, he resists the urge to play as an individual.

“Most teenagers, especially teenage boys, will take the shot on goal if they have it,” says Harvey, the longtime varsity soccer announcer. “Whereas Charlie, when he’s got a teammate who’s wide open who can touch the ball in the net, he’s going to pass it. He had almost as many goals as he had assists, and some of his assists were better highlights than his goals.”

Colleges have taken notice, offering Reisman a host of soccer scholarships next year across the country. But after careful consideration, Reisman decided to play one more year of soccer during a post-graduate year to up his game for playing at the collegiate level.

“I did a reverse of what these specialist kids are doing,” he says. “I can now narrow down and focus on one sport and get better. These other kids have been spending 10 months a year on soccer, and I’ve been doing it for four months, so when I go to 10 months, I’ll be able to improve so much faster.”

From team sports to individual competitions, nearly all athletes who train at altitude gain advantages, studies show.

Athletes seek out high-altitude training to limit available oxygen so their bodies will feel a boost when competing at sea level. That’s one benefit provided by the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, at 6,350 feet of elevation.

A December 2018 study by researchers and an NFL data analyst found Denver professional sports teams had an outsize home field advantage compared to their competition.

The Denver Nuggets and Utah Jazz posted the first and second best home-court advantages in the NBA while the Colorado Rockies and Denver Broncos were also found to have distinct home-field advantages, the study found.

But not everyone has an advantage. While baseball hitters see their balls fly farther, pitchers have a rougher time keeping balls in the park and throwing curve balls that rely on denser air. 

This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.

Summit Lynch has a full schedule this week at the 2024 United States of America Snowboard and Freeski Assocation National Championship at Copper Mountain: The 12-year-old Colorado snowboarder qualified for all six disciplines at the nationals in Summit County. 

Lynch participated in the opening ceremonies Saturday and kicked off his six-round campaign Sunday, finishing 17th of 46 in the giant slalom race. He is scheduled to race slalom Monday and boardercross Tuesday before moving on to the freestyle disciplines he’s better known for later in the week: slopestyle, halfpipe and the rail jam.

While he’s aiming for the podium in boardercross and each of the freestyle events, he’s also after the overall points prize for his age division. Lynch competes in the boys 11-12 age bracket, and jokes that he is already 11 years into his snowboarding career.       

“I don’t even remember my first time snowboarding — I mean, I was 1 year old — but there’s videos of my dad first getting me into it and every video I’ve seen is of me loving it from the first time I ever did it,” Lynch said. “I’ve wanted to do it all, ever since.”

Like his father, Geoff Lynch, and mother, Mary Kendig, Summit is a snowboarding super fan. He grew up in Nederland and now splits time between his dad’s place there and his mom’s place in Steamboat Springs. 

If you’ve ever been to Copper Mountain to watch pro events like the U.S. Grand Prix World Cup or Dew Tour, or to Aspen to see the Winter X Games, you’ve probably spotted Lynch in the fan corral at the bottom of the course, studying every athlete’s every move, cheering wildly, then asking for autographs. Sometimes they pose for selfies with him or hand him their competition bibs as a souvenir. 

Lynch hopes to be giving them a run for it in those same contests in a few years, wearing a contestant’s bib and standing on podiums with his idols. 

“I first got interested in competing when I was around 7 or 8 years old, because we were going to all the US Open, World Cup, Dew Tour and X Games events in Colorado, and I’d always had a view of the riders competing on the world stage and immediately knew I wanted to do that for myself,” Lynch said. “I think seeing other people do these incredible tricks in person makes it feel more real, like, ‘I could be able to do that someday.’”

There’s one role model whose career Lynch says he most hopes to emulate: Red Gerard, the 2018 Olympic slopestyle gold medalist, two-time Dew Tour slopestyle champion, and 2024 X Games slopestyle gold medalist who also recently competed in the 2024 Natural Selection Tour big mountain snowboarding events and who has won multiple awards for his innovative backcountry video parts. 

Gerard, who grew up in Silverthorne, is now teammates with Lynch on the Burton Snowboard team (a new sponsor for Lynch as of December), and has been mentoring the young rider. 

“I just love his style of riding,” Lynch said. “I’ve been watching his videos and watching him in contests since I was really little and he’s always been that guy who I’ve wanted to ride like. I think Red’s career shows that if you can do well in everything, you’re a great snowboarder. I want to be more than just a kid who can huck off a jump or spin onto a rail then spin off of a rail, or just go racing through the gates.”

Gerard won the Olympic slopestyle gold medal when he was 17 at the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Games in Korea. Lynch (who will be one year shy of the 15-year-old age minimum to compete at the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Games in Italy) says he hopes to follow a similar trajectory when he’s Olympics-eligible at age 18. The locations for the 2030 and 2034 Winter Olympics will be announced this summer, but the French Alps are in line for 2030 and Salt Lake City for the 2034 Games.

USASA Nationals is the gateway to eventually get points to go to the International Ski and Snowboard Federation, or FIS, Futures Tour, then the FIS Revolution Tour, then, beginning at age 15, to get points to go to the FIS World Cup stage, which doubles as the Olympics qualifying series. 

“To get through to Nationals you have to go through the regional events: your best three scores in each discipline count,” Lynch said. “We were traveling all over the place to get the points to go to Nationals, especially since I was trying for all six disciplines, so I was pretty stoked on qualifying for everything. It was really tough.”

It will even be tougher this week, and Lynch says he’s keeping his expectations in check. 

In 2023 he qualified for just two disciplines at Nationals, finishing 10th in slopestyle and 22nd in giant slalom. In the Rocky Mountain Region he competes in, he finished the 2023-24 season ranked first in giant slalom, fourth in halfpipe, fifth in boardercross, sixth in rail jam and slalom, and 11th in slopestyle. 

To win any of them this week now that he’s at the top of the age bracket, he’ll have to get through fierce competition including one of his Rocky Mountain Series rivals, an Eagle County local who has been dominating.

“Regionally, there’s one kid, Elijah Stroker, who pretty much wins everything in slopestyle, rail jam and halfpipe,” Lynch said. “He’s my age, so I compete against him every year. I recently beat him for the first time, in a rail jam, and he definitely pushes me to that next level of riding and progression.”

USASA marketing and partnerships director Tricia Byrnes says USASA Nationals pulls the top third of all amateur competitors in the United States, based on points earned at over 500 annual events at 115 different ski resorts across 30 USASA regional series, including three in Colorado: the Rocky Mountain Series Lynch competes in, an Aspen Snowmass Series, and a Southwest Colorado Series. 

“Every single athlete that is on the U.S. Freeski and Snowboard Team now or in the past got their start at one of our regional series and came through Nationals, the Futures Tour and the Revolution Tour before going on to the World Cup or Olympic level: that’s the pipeline,” Byrnes said. “So, Shaun White, Chloe Kim, Travis Rice, Jeremy Jones. … For every top U.S. snowboarder you can think of, this is the beginning for all of it.”

Byrnes, who competed in halfpipe as an Olympian at the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Games and still holds a record 15 World Cup halfpipe wins, is part of that USASA history.

“I went to the first-ever USASA Nationals in 1990 and I won it,” Byrnes said. “Ross Powers, Jana Meyen, Shannon Dunn, Chris Klug … all the people I later went to the Olympics with, we were all out there competing when we were kids. So this event has a long legacy, dating back to even before the Olympics: USASA was creating future Olympians even before snowboarding was allowed in the Olympics.” 

As Lynch ponders the impact he might make on that legacy as this week unfolds, he says he knows he’ll have an uphill climb to make the podium or earn points toward the overall prize. He doesn’t have a racing-specific board or boots or a racing suit like many of his slalom and giant slalom competitors, he’s 30 pounds shy of some of his peers in the boardercross field, where weight makes a difference, and the competition is especially stiff in slopestyle and halfpipe.  

“My favorites are probably slopestyle and rail jam and boardercross because they’re the most exciting for me and they’re the ones I’m best at,” Lynch said, noting that his boardercross coach is two-time Olympian and two-time world champion Mick Dierdorff.

Lynch credits some of those fundamentals to training with the Steamboat Springs Winter Sports Club, which boasts it has trained 100 Olympians who have brought home 18 medals. His coach Sasha Nations, head coach for the SSWSC Juniors Team, has helped train Gerard, two-time Olympian Chris Corning of Silverthorne, and dozens of other top-tier Colorado snowboarders as they were coming up.  

“I just love how Summit shows up to training every day,” Nations said. “He’s super positive, he’s super coachable, he loves snowboarding, and he goes for it.”

She said she sees in a spark in Lynch that she has come to recognize.

“I’ve had a hand in developing quite a few athletes who are now X Games athletes and have gone on to be Olympic athletes, and it’s really fun to work with somebody like Summit at this young age where you can see their stoke, you can see their potential, you can see their dreams,” Nations said. 

Her biggest fear for an overachiever like Lynch?

“What I see as my biggest job is making sure that these kids don’t experience burnout, because keeping that same stoke level through training and the whole lifecycle of an athlete is really important: ‘How do we keep them engaged? How do we keep them safe? How do we keep them in sport?’”

She says she sometimes can’t believe how mature Lynch’s approach to snowboarding and competition is.

“I have a good feeling Summit will succeed because he just loves to snowboard, and he wants to do it all, and because his dad is so into snowboarding and he’s helping Summit find that love for it in a healthy way by helping him understand the history of it, in out of contests,” Nations said, “and showing him you can find passion for every part of snowboarding, from riding pow with your mom or dad or your friends to racing or doing slopestyle or halfpipe, or whatever aspect of it you’re into.”

Nations says she loves working with young riders at the junior development level, and sees the USASA contests as a pure-fun stepping stone to the higher-stakes Olympic and pro-level side of snowboarding.

Nations said she sees the 2024 USASA Nationals as a transition year for Lynch, his last year in the U12 age brackets; at 13 he’ll be eligible to compete in the USASA Futures Tour (operated in conjunction with the US Ski & Snowboard team), and then the FIS Revolution Tour, before leveling up to the World Cup tier when he hits 15.

“So he is right on path with where he should be, and has a great opportunity this week to go out and have a lot of fun at this huge event where the vibe is terrific,” Nations said. “This is where it all starts.”

As if the six disciplines Lynch will compete in at Copper Mountain this week aren’t enough, he’s also an accomplished banked slalom racer — he took second at the Slash and Burn Banked Slalom at Steamboat last week — and competes in big mountain freeriding contests on the Rocky Mountain Freeride Tour, part of the International Freeskiers and Snowboarders Association (IFSA) Freeride World Tour Junior Series. 

Immediately after USASA Nationals, he will head over to Breckenridge for the 2024 Freeride Junior National Championship, April 7-14, his first time qualifying for the event. 

He is trying not to put too much pressure on himself there, either. 

“I think the one main thing to remember is that snowboarding is all about going out and having fun,” Lynch said. “It’s not all about competing, but competing and doing well is also a lot of fun. You just have to stay true to the sport, keep it fun, keep it stylish. I have some big events coming up but it’s best not to take any of it too seriously.”

STEAMBOAT SPRINGS — It’s pitch dark, temperatures are in the teens and Eric Schissler is out in his front yard, spraying, of all things, a hose. He’s not watering his begonias; those are long gone. Instead, he’s flooding the homemade ice rink in his front yard, complete with lights, 6-inch-high boards and goals. He acts as the Zamboni. 

This story first appeared in The Outsider, the premium outdoor newsletter by Jason Blevins.

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During a slow start to the snow year, like most of Colorado experienced this season, building it is easier. Cold temperatures mean easy freezing and lack of snow means easy shoveling. But you need both; this season it stayed warm, complicating matters. But the end result is always worth it, he said, creating an outdoor playground for the neighborhood kids to hone skills — and more importantly, burn up energy — all winter. 

“Last year was brutal because of all the snow,” said Schissler, who co-owns the Bella Vista Estate vacation retreat south of town and earned his ice-clearing chops spending three winters maintaining the outdoor ice rink on Evergreen Lake during high school. “But this year has been just as tricky because of the warm temperatures.” 

His trick: “You have to get the snow off of it right away, or it will insulate it and turn it into slush. So, every time I snow blow the driveway, I snow blow the rink.” 

New build-a-rink systems like those from EZ Ice and Nice Rink also help, with the kits including liners, boards, lights and more. For his 50-by-25 foot EZ Ice rink setup, he paid about $3,500, but “everyone always upgrades.” And he’ll probably buy a new 6-millimeter liner every year, instead of patching holes. But it’s worth every penny and hour of shovel time.

“It’s been a total game changer for my 5-year-old,” he said. “He has a huge passion for it now. It’s all he wants to do.”  

While no figures exist for exactly how many homespun outdoor ice rinks pop up around Colorado each winter, the trend is growing, as parents burn the midnight oil to make rinks for their kids and others. Maybe it’s not booming by Canadian standards, where backyard rinks are more common than Tim Hortons doughnut shops, but it’s growing nonetheless. 

“I have quite a few buddies who make rinks in their backyards every year,” said Mike Campanale of Avon, a local hockey coach who also plays in the Eagle town league. “The kids love them and are on them all the time. There’s no better way to instill a passion for the sport.” 

Public outdoor ice rinks 

If your next-door neighbor has jumped on the ice rink wagon, so have Colorado’s mountain towns and resorts. While ski areas from Telluride and Beaver Creek to Snowmass and Steamboat have all added skating rinks to their wintertime amenities, mountain towns themselves have also hopped on board, flooding parks and snowblowing local ponds and lakes for skating. The results bring not only another amenity to communities but also revenue.  

One region embracing it is Summit County, whose Dillon Reservoir typically hosts the annual PBR Colorado Pond Hockey Tournament every Presidents Day weekend. But just like backyard dads, organizers of events like that must deal with the whims of nature. On Feb. 2, just three weeks before this year’s event, a piece of snow-clearing machinery fell through the ice, forcing Dillon officials to cancel the tournament, saying “recent weather fluctuations and unforeseen environmental factors … led to deteriorating ice quality.”

No matter. Just like he would on the ice, event organizer David Janowiec of Erie-based event management company The Recess Factory, pivoted, moving the event to Georgetown Lake in the town of Georgetown just a 25-minute drive away, even bringing on Cabin Creek Brewing as a a last-minute sponsor. 

“They welcomed the tournament without any hesitation, which is quite incredible in such a short time period,” he said, adding the lake has been hosting ice activities such as ice racing since the 1970s and currently has “17 inches of some of the clearest ice in Colorado.”

Dillon typically offers an outdoor rink open to the public all winter, and Silverthorne has another on 5-acre North Pond. But the tournament is the real moneymaker for the region, drawing hundreds of teams (many in costumes) from all over the country. 

“It’s one of the nation’s largest outdoor hockey tournaments,” Dillon communications manager Suzanne Phillipson said. “We’re excited to host it every year, and it’s one of our main wintertime events.”  

The tournament began on a tiny, two-rink pond in Frisco in 2009, drawing 30 teams. It then moved to Silverthorne’s North Pond, where it hosted the tournament on 18 rinks, before moving to Lake Dillon three years ago. The past two years tournament officials built and maintained 24 rinks and capped its teams at 300, with another 180 on the waiting list. 

“We opened the sign-up list on March 1 last year and sold out March 1,” said Janowiec, who tries to play on a team every year. “We’ve sold out every year.”  

Still, it took a while for Denver Water, which owns the reservoir, to approve it. 

“They weren’t open to it for a long time,” said Janowiec, of the utility-owned reservoir where swimming and water-contact sports are prohibited. “Then the town talked to them and got approval for their Nordic trail, and then we went to them jointly about this. It’s been a great location for it.” 

While his company also organizes the Leadville 100 event for Lifetime Fitness, he said this event is even bigger. With each team consisting of six players, plus extras as well as family members and friends, he estimates it brings nearly 4,000 people to Summit County every year — all over an already busy Presidents Day weekend. The town doesn’t track the tournament’s economic impact, but Phillipson said she knows it’s substantial.

“Plus, they all ski,” she said. “It’s a huge event for the town.”  

Janowiec said it lures people from nearly every state. 

“It’s so much better than a pond hockey tournament in Minneapolis,” he said. “Who wants to go there in the winter? Here, it’s a great resort destination surrounded by incredible mountains with plenty of lodging and great skiing. People have a blast. And Georgetown will be great as well.” 

25,000 people skated Evergreen Lake last year 

Evergreen Parks and Recreation special district runs a booming skating operation on Evergreen Lake downtown. Lake House manager Krista Emrich said more than 25,000 people skated on the lake last season. The lake usually has about a two-month season, from late December to the end of February. 

“It’s hard to predict,” she said. “Every year is a little bit different. This year we were holding our breath to get open by New Year’s Eve.” The weather gods cooperated, and the lake had more than 1,500 people come skate on New Year’s Eve. Last year, she added, they saw “a few thousand people every day on the weekends.” 

While low snowfall years make clearing the ice easier, Evergreen Lake needs snow to create the banks for its 16 hockey and two additional recreational skating rinks. And hockey, she said, is a big draw, from pick-up games to tournaments. This year the rink hosted its 13th annual Evergreen Lake Pond Hockey Tournament Jan. 20-21, with 48 teams from across the country.

 “It’s probably a pretty even split between free skaters and people playing hockey,” she said of the rink’s overall use, “but hockey is definitely getting super popular.” 

And whether it’s skaters with sticks or working on their triple lutz, the rink brings in substantial revenue. Participants pay $20 per outing, which includes rentals if needed, for the entire day. The funds support a Zamboni and tractor, an old-fashioned, hot chocolate-serving lodge, and a highly trained ice-maintenance crew who measures the lake’s 9 acres of ice daily (minimum depths, she said, range from 16 inches for the Zamboni to 12 to 14 inches for the tractor).

“I don’t know what else you can do all day long for $20 anymore,” Emrich said. “It’s a marquee attraction during wintertime for sure, right in the center of town with a path around the whole lake.”   

Another iconic skating rink is 5-acre Keystone Lake at Keystone Resort’s Lakeside Village, which joins the resort’s Dercum Square rink in River Run Village. Bordered by a lodge with skate rentals and new Rathbone Taproom, it’s one of the largest, Zamboni-maintained outdoor skating rinks in North America. 

Vail Resorts doesn’t share visitation and usage numbers, but spokeswoman Sara Lococo said, “It’s a super popular and unique activity for our guests and a great way to recreate outdoors after the ski day.” As with Dillon and Evergreen, Keystone has embraced hockey tournaments as a way to pad the bottom line. It hosts the 9280 Pond Hockey Tournament (named for its elevation) every third weekend in January, filling beds, restaurants and dental offices.   

In Eagle, the whole town gets involved, with a group of volunteers known as the “Eagle Ice Dads” building and maintaining two free ice rinks in Town Park in front of the Centennial Stage, complete with lights and fire pits. The town rinks date to the 1930s and hosted local adult and youth hockey leagues until the indoor Eagle Ice Rink opened in 2003. Its ringleader is Andy Clark, whose company Alliance Moving Systems helps foot the bill for materials and storage. A job box is filled with free, donated gear to use. 

“The town is super receptive, providing the park and water,” Clark said, adding that the rinks are usually open from Christmas until the end of February. “But it’s always been volunteer-driven. It’s a nice marriage. The volunteers have all the equipment and put in the time, and the town has the location, water and other amenities.”

Clark estimates more than 250 kids showed up for opening day, their parents more than happy to see them release their pent-up energy.  

Clark admits the countless hours of flooding, layering and shoveling is a labor of love. He estimates his team of volunteers puts in upward of 1,000 hours every year to make it work. But it’s all worth it, he added, to see the kids skating.

“They love it,” he said. “We’re selling kids on the love of hockey, instead of its competitiveness. They’re learning that if you put your skates on, you win.” 

Like a hockey player skating up and down the ice, the movement has trickled up and down the valley.

“There’s a lot of effort in the valley going into building rinks outside,” said Clark, adding he’s advising someone looking to build an outdoor rink in Vail where the current rugby field is located. “The problem is getting the right protected location, foundational support and conditions to build it. My advice: Create a volunteer group because it takes a lot of time and expense.” 

Other outdoor rinks in the Eagle River Valley include one in Minturn at the Vail Ski and Snowboard Academy spearheaded by local Kyle Forte, who runs a hockey development company; another 50-by-100-foot outdoor rink in Gypsum; two outdoor rinks in Edwards just south of Battle Mountain High School, championed by local hockey aficionado Tom Boyd; and Nottingham Lake in Avon, where Clark used to stage an annual pond hockey tournament.  

Over in Carbondale, outdoor hockey is going gangbusters as well. Established in 2021, the Colorado Extreme Hockey Association is dedicated to nurturing youth hockey in the Roaring Fork’s midvalley region. It’s in the second year of its outdoor rink two miles east of Carbondale near the Roaring Fork River. The infrastructure for its first rink, in operation for the inaugural season at Crown Mountain Park in nearby El Jebel, was moved to serve as a rink at the Garfield County Fairgrounds in Rifle.   

Extreme’s current rink system, consisting of one refrigerated rink and a second sheet of natural ice, is located on 40 acres the association purchased. The effort was led by former Division I collegiate player and entrepreneur Sheldon Wolitski, whose mission is to bring hockey to those who may not otherwise have access to the sport. The plan is to turn it into an enclosed arena while keeping the outdoor second sheet.  

“There’s plenty of demand here for it,” said the program’s director of hockey, Carlos Ross, who moved from Buffalo, New York, to implement Wolitski’s hockey ambitions for the Roaring Fork Valley. “There’s been a huge boom for it here and we’re trying to build it up even more.”   

He added that the association has more than 350 young people enrolled in its programs, with 70 playing competitively through USA Hockey. The biggest problem, he said, is parents saying their kids can’t skate on weekends because that’s when they go skiing. “I’m from Buffalo,” he said. “Weekends are when you play hockey. But it’s heading in the right direction.”  

And there’s nothing better than skating outside, Ross said. “To be able to skate outside in a place like this is truly amazing,” he said. “And it makes the kids that much better.” 

Ross credits the success of the Colorado Avalanche as helping build his and other programs, with their association even hosting an Avalanche alumni game and skills clinic in December that drew more than 1,000 people while raising money for their organization. 

Bringing it home 

Still, there’s nothing like the freedom of a backyard rink, where you can lace up the skates under a full moon or rising sun or even halftime of an NFL game. Just ask the Colorado Pond Hockey Tournament’s Janowiec, who builds a backyard rink for his friends and kids, Avery, 12, and Jacek, 9, every year in Erie, complete with a full bar (with hot chocolate for the kids), TV, couch and lights. “They absolutely love it,” he said. “They’re on it every day.” 

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A post shared by Pete McBride (@pedromcbride)

And perhaps no one agrees more than Aspen-raised Pete and Johno McBride, skiers and hockey players whose outside rink in Old Snowmass has developed skills, thrills, chills and spills since they were boys. Johno, who coached Bode Miller to two World Cup titles, now serves as alpine director for the Aspen Valley Ski and Snowboard Club, while Pete is a photographer, writer and filmmaker who has traveled on assignment to more than 75 countries for the National Geographic Society, the Smithsonian Institution, Google and The Nature Conservancy. But neither is above shoveling their rink when they come home. 

“The more snow, the harder they are to maintain, requiring lots of shoveling,” Pete said. “But cold temperatures help and so does wind, which can blow off the dustings.” 

He added that between Mother Nature and manpower, including surface flooding to fill in cracks, they can usually get three months or so out of it every year, depending on the weather. 

And neither he nor Johno would trade skating on it for the world.

 “It’s just magical and beyond fun — we all love it,” Pete said, adding the only thing better is skating on natural lakes. “It’s like being in a total time warp.” 

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As she stood on the ice earlier this month in suburban Boston, with the national anthem filling the arena, Nicole Hensley took to heart the advice of friends who reminded her to drink in the atmosphere and appreciate how she got here.

They weren’t referring to her team’s travel from Minnesota, though the trip featured small luxuries that bore no resemblance to the low-budget hockey trips of earlier years. They meant how she got here, in the broad sweep of history, to her inaugural game in the fledgling Professional Women’s Hockey League, a well-backed and promising effort to create new opportunities in her sport. 

So Hensley, 29, took a minute to revel in a moment so long in coming, from her days on boys’ recreational youth teams in Colorado to girls’ select squads to a college program struggling through its infancy to elite international competition to … well, a professional future that once seemed anything but a sure thing. 

“We can call ourselves truly professional athletes now,” she says, recalling the prelude to that first puck drop. “So that was pretty cool, to stand on the blue line during the anthem and just appreciate everything that’s been done up to this point.”

For the past few years, the sport’s most talented women had worked feverishly toward a player-centric wish list for a top-flight professional league, contingent on the emergence of one key ingredient — substantial financial backing. A little more than six months ago, the right investor emerged: Los Angeles Dodgers owner Mark Walter, who owns all six of the league’s teams (big-time hockey markets Minnesota, Boston, New York, Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal) operating under an eight-year agreement with the players. 

No less a legend than tennis great Billie Jean King, a minority owner of the Dodgers, also has been instrumental in advancing the PWHL as it scrambled to fast-track a season — a 24-game schedule that began Jan. 1, plus playoffs — rather than wait until next fall. 

Suddenly, everything converged to place Hensley, Colorado’s only representative on the league’s opening rosters, on the ice as Minnesota’s goaltender — and part of a potentially game-changing venture. She quickly got down to business, withstanding a furious late surge by the Boston team to preserve a 3-2 victory for Minnesota. It marked the historic first win for a squad that, like the league’s other five entries, was so hastily assembled that it doesn’t yet have an actual name. 

A few days later, Hensley would witness another moment that pointed toward an auspicious start. A crowd of 13,316 converged on the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul for Minnesota’s home opener — shattering the previous mark of 8,318 for a PWHL game in Ottawa only days earlier. 

That might have been the most forceful hint yet that, after many failed attempts to test the viability of women’s pro hockey, players, fans and financial backing had finally coalesced around a plan to gradually bring the sport into the public eye.

After years of futility, it was game on.

Small beginnings in Lakewood

For Hensley, it all began as a little kid in a Lakewood cul-de-sac. A neighbor boy who played ice hockey was getting in some practice on his inline skates, shooting on an empty net.  

“One day he asked if I wanted to play, too,” Hensley recalls. “And his parents came over one day and started talking to mine, saying, ‘Why don’t you let her try it for real?’”

She gravitated to the goalie position slowly, trying it once at age 7 when her recreational team rotated the pads among anyone who wanted to give it a shot. The next year she served as backup goalie, and the year after that split her time between playing in net and skating at other positions. By the next year, though, the transition to goaltender was complete.

To this day, she’s not totally sure what enticed her to take up such a high-stakes position in front of increasingly harder shots as the years went on. But she suspects her attraction echoed the usual reasons — lots of really cool gear and getting to be on the ice for the entire game — but with a local twist.

“At the time, the Avs had Patrick Roy, and obviously he’s, in my opinion, the best of all time,” she says of the Hall of Fame goaltender who helped win two Stanley Cups with the Colorado Avalanche. “So it doesn’t hurt having him to watch on TV night in and night out.”

She progressed in youth hockey with the Foothills Flyers organization, playing out of the Edge Ice Arena in Littleton, where she competed on boys’ teams into her high school years, including her last year in a club program under coach Geoff Riegle.

At that point, Hensley was 15, playing “up” against 16- and 17-year-old boys for the Flyers, splitting time in net with another goalie.

“Her compete level was always high, her work ethic was always top on the team,” Riegle says. “And she really focused on the details — her angles were good, her quickness was good. She was always trying to make more than just the first save and the team in front of her fed off of that.”

The first of two career watershed games Hensley played came that season in the state playoffs, when her Foothills team faced a talented Boulder squad that eventually would advance to the national playoffs. Riegle recalls Hensley finishing the game with an amazing 50-save performance despite a 2-1 loss. 

That sealed her decision to move from the rec league to the Colorado Girls Select program, where she once again played up as a 16-year-old on a U19 team, hoping that the exposure might trigger interest from college coaches. 

“It was a good fit for her,” Riegle says. “They were set up more from a recruitment standpoint, more national attention to the players and more support for the next level than we were. It made sense for her.”

But Hensley’s only college opportunity came from a fledgling program at Lindenwood University just outside St. Louis. In 2013, nearing the end of her freshman year, a playoff game in Pittsburgh against Robert Morris University turned out to be her second watershed moment, the game that changed everything.

A 1-1 tie after regulation sent the teams into a sudden death overtime period. And then another. And another. A gathering crowd added to the tension. A men’s game scheduled for the rink after the women’s game brought another wave of fans who found themselves witnessing something special. 

Hensley turned away a barrage of Robert Morris shots — until, halfway through the third overtime period, one slipped by her to hand Lindenwood a 2-1 loss. Afterward, an NCAA official approached Hensley with a scoresheet. Despite the loss, Hensley’s mind-boggling 90-save effort was record-setting. Not officially, because technically Lindenwood was still in transition to the NCAA’s Division I ranks, so Hensley was denied a place in the record book.

But her performance caught the eye of Brianne McLaughlin-Bittle, a Robert Morris assistant coach who also happened to be a two-time Olympic medalist with the U.S. national hockey team. She got on the phone to advise the program that she’d seen a promising young goalie who might deserve their attention.

“Honestly, it’s one of the coolest things,” Hensley recalls, “because (McLaughlin-Bittle) was still in the (U.S.) program. She wasn’t a coach, wasn’t a consultant or anything. She was a player on the team who was like, ‘Hey, we should give this kid a look.’”

We can call ourselves truly professional athletes now.

— Nicole Hensley

By the time the 2018 Olympics were on the horizon, Hensley was in the mix, competing in a string of international tournaments before eventually attending a camp of between 80 and 100 invitees. 

Ultimately, she earned a backup goaltender spot on the U.S. Olympic team that won gold. Hensley got one game in net and made the most of it with a 13-save shutout of Russia. She would go on to be part of the 2022 Olympic silver-medal team and play in more international tournaments, becoming an elite talent among a handful of other goalies whose intense competition for playing time now has shifted to the professional ranks. 

“Even when there were multiple professional leagues, it was still the national team, the Olympics, that was the pinnacle for us,” Hensley says. “And the Olympics are still like our big dreams and our big goals, but I do think that having a sustainable professional league where you’re making a living wage makes it more real than any professional league we’ve had before.”

Players building a dream

Low pay. Subpar facilities. Players digging into their own pockets to cover expenses. These were just a few of the realities that plagued efforts — well-meaning but often ill-fated — to carve out a sustainable space for women’s pro hockey.

Hensley felt relatively lucky. She played briefly with the Buffalo Beauts, a team financed by the owners of the Buffalo Bills NFL franchise and the NHL’s Buffalo Sabres, whose commitment to quality would become part of players’ wish list for the future. 

When the Canadian Women’s Hockey League folded in 2019, players had had enough and began to take matters into their own hands. They formed the Professional Women’s Hockey Players Association and launched the Dream Gap Tour, lashing together four teams that barnstormed across North America playing weekend exhibitions — almost as a proof of concept that women’s hockey at the highest level could attract a significant audience.

“Over the course of the next three, four years, basically we created something where we could play in very competitive games with top level players,” Hensley says, “while creating the awareness of what was needed for a sustainable professional league.”

The PWHPA also created a board and began to craft the framework of a collective bargaining agreement. Then came the effort to find someone with whom to bargain — the right people to invest in a sustainable women’s league. 

Jayna Hefford, the longtime Canadian national team star, helped pitch the business model to Mark Walter, and — after a furious six-month run-up to the Jan. 1 launch — now serves as the PWHL’s senior vice president of hockey operations.

“We didn’t want to put it off another year,” Hefford says. “We didn’t think it was fair to the athletes. We just thought that this was the best way to get going, knowing that everything wouldn’t be perfect and that we may make some mistakes in the first year. But we would also have the ability to fix those mistakes.”

Karell Emard also participated in the early stages of the players’ efforts to create the framework for a pro league. She played in PWHPA events until last summer, when she retired to devote full time to her role as director of operations for women’s hockey, and as a player agent at Quartexx Management in Montreal. At that point, she stepped away from negotiations to avoid conflicts of interest.

She now represents 11 women in the PWHL, including Hensley.

“We did it backwards, in a sense — or maybe this is a new way of doing things moving forward,” Emard says. “But we unionized ourselves. We protected the players right from the beginning. Any female leagues before in the history of women’s sports, you usually see a league being created. And then there’s a formation of a player’s association and then you fight for your treatment, equality and all of that.” 

Something I’ve always said is that we want to leave the game in a better place than we found it.

— Nicole Hensley, on women’s hockey

Hefford notes that having a collective bargaining agreement in place was “critically important” to Walter as a framework that could provide cost certainty in mapping out a long-term future. Similarly, players could move forward with confidence and a measure of security.

The agreement with ownership calls for at least a 30-game regular season after the first year. The leaner schedule — at least compared to NBA and NHL 80-plus games — leaves room for players to represent their countries and reflects the enduring importance of international competition to the women’s game.

Players also came away from the negotiation with a housing allowance, per diem on road trips, health insurance, expenses for visa processing, among other details. There’s a salary cap, but with the proviso that it grows by 3% each year and teams must spend to that limit. Currently, Emard says, the average PWHL salary is $55,000.

Hefford says that team names, logos and mascots weren’t regarded as a “need to have” as the league hustled to get up and running. Year one, she says, is focused more on building the PWHL as a brand and learning how its teams fit into individual markets. Branding individual teams and translating that into merchandise and more sharply defined identities was “one of those decisions you don’t want to get wrong.” So for now, the PWHL’s original six are known simply by location.

With proven ownership, King’s star power and an advisory board with names like Dodgers president and CEO Stan Kasten, longtime CEO and commissioner of World Team Tennis Ilana Kloss, and Dodgers business strategist Royce Cohen, momentum turned into a whirlwind. Hensley was a believer by the time the league held its first draft Sept. 18.

“It all felt real when we got to the draft in Toronto,” she says. “To walk in and see how professionally that event was done, to see how it was broadcast — it was something we’d definitely never experienced. And I think that was the first aha moment that I felt like, OK, this is going to be good.”

Hensley sat off to the side of the event’s staging area, a vantage point that allowed her to glimpse the teleprompter — so she knew, seconds before it happened, that she’d been drafted 12th overall, by Minnesota. 

Exactly where she’d hoped to land. 

A league of their own

The self-proclaimed State of Hockey stood up to its reputation with that opening-night record crowd — played in the 20,554-capacity St. Paul arena that’s also home to the NHL’s Wild. 

But the PWHL has chosen to anchor most of its teams in more modest facilities, preferring to build on the atmosphere of a smaller but mostly full venue over a cavernous site where fan energy might be diluted. Average attendance has hovered around 5,000 per game in the league’s first month.

“In a perfect world, we would have five-to-seven thousand seats in every market,” Hefford says, noting that attendance expectations have been exceeded. “Five thousand a game, that’s a good number for us in our first year.”

Will the PWHL expand beyond its “original six”? Hefford sees no rush. For now, the focus remains on maintaining the quality of competition and ensuring that the league’s level of professionalism aligns with the players’ vision.

“Every time we talk to players we ask: Do you feel like a professional? Do you have what you need to perform?” Hefford says. “And when we get a yes, that’s a validation point for us.”

While enthusiasm for the new operation runs high, it remains a work in progress that hopes to prove itself and establish its widespread appeal once fans become familiar with TV and livestreaming options and the league’s marketing machine has shifted into high gear. 

The first game in league history, the Jan. 1 contest featuring New York at Toronto, captured 2.9 million viewers in Canada on New Year’s Day through three broadcast partners. Streaming of the league’s first five games on its YouTube channel generated more than 634,000 views. (The stream of Montreal’s game earlier this week at Minnesota, where Hensley was in goal for a 2-1 loss, her first of the season, hovered around 9,000 viewers.)

At 29, Hensley is philosophical about the timing of this opportunity.

“I wouldn’t have complained if it had been a couple of years earlier,” she says. “But something I’ve always said is that we want to leave the game in a better place than we found it. I think this group has worked so hard for this league and to have this come together, it is truly doing that.”

Her three-year contract with Minnesota lends the kind of stability that, even for someone with a U.S. national team pedigree, allows her the luxury of not feeling like she’s living every moment of her career on the edge.

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“With the national team, it’s very much like, if you don’t perform you can be out the door pretty quick,” she says. “When you know that a team has put their trust in you for three years, that’s something special and shouldn’t be taken for granted. It does help you put some of the external worries out of the way and just play hockey.”

Minnesota Coach Ken Klee — a former NHL defenseman who spent the 2006-07 season with the Colorado Avalanche while Hensley was honing her skills in a nearby rec league — has the team off to a quick start that finds it battling Montreal for the league lead. Hensley also has been chosen to play in the PWHL’s 3-on-3 showcase Feb. 1 in Toronto, as part of the NHL’s All-Star Weekend.

She remains committed to growing the game, participating in specialized goalie camps and often engaging with young players on her returns to Colorado. 

Over the holidays, just before the start of the PWHL season, Hensley took to the ice at Ball Arena and answered questions about college recruiting at an event for girls prior to an Avalanche game. Marketing strategies are great, she says, but ultimately there’s nothing more powerful than coming face-to-face with someone who’s living her dream.

“It’s still the person-to-person that I think will sell the league,” she says. “And sell us.”

GREELEY — When Andrew Alirez felt a pop in his left knee, it sounded as if someone had snapped their fingers, like a wizard finishing a spell. 

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It made sense. It was as if he’d been transformed. 

On a mat, he was — as  Ric Flair, the iconically macho wrestler (pro variety), was fond of saying — “The Man.” In high school, Alirez won a state title all four years and beat college All-Americans in regional tournaments. He had a realistic shot at the Olympics. But after coming back from an injury-ridden freshman year at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, he thought he’d gotten his mojo back, only to tear his knee. 

He’d never taken off more than a couple weeks from wrestling. This injury would mean sitting on the sidelines for six months. He was no longer the man. In fact, he didn’t have any idea who he was anymore. 

“I thought, well, I’ll never be healthy,” Alirez said. “I lost myself a bit. It gets pretty dark in there sometimes.” 

Alirez knows now that he had never been humbled before and didn’t know how to react to the adversity. But he also knows now that for the first time in his life, he was depressed. 

Depression is a common and understandable malaise after facing any kind of severe medical diagnosis, and yet, health care providers admit they didn’t really understand how prevalent and serious depression was during recovery until recently.

But hospitals now have experts on hand to help patients, and universities such as UNC and professional sports teams in the last few years have hired counselors to help athletes cope both physically and mentally with serious injuries.

The fact that it seems to hit a wide range of people, many of whom aren’t skilled athletes, means UCHealth and Banner both have a number of support groups filled with others going through similar conditions. There are support groups for breast cancer, bariatric surgery and brain tumors. There’s also behavioral health specialists integrated into most primary care clinics and hospitals. There are men with heart histories who talk to other men after their first cardiac arrest. There are support groups for those such as Alirez healing from a major injury. 

Molly Brady, a UCHealth psychologist who sees a number of patients, said doctors have come to expect their patients will be a little down, or worse, during treatment. 

“More often than not, that’s the case,” Brady said. “The big consideration is when you don’t want to be over-pathological. It makes sense to some extent that you’d be depressed. But we also don’t want to overlook it.”

Depression, after all, can delay recovery, sometimes by months. It slows healing, given that depression is linked to inflammation. Depression also discourages patients from doing what they’re supposed to do to get better: Recovery can be hard work, and if you’re not eating well, or sleeping, or doing the difficult exercises, well, you don’t recover. 

Alirez, for instance, wondered why he bothered watching his diet, forgoing the temptations of life such as alcohol and working out so hard when he couldn’t wrestle as a reward.

“I wanted to just get through it,” he said, “instead of attack it.” 

Life-changing events

There are many factors as to why any kind of medical condition, illness or injury can cause depression, Brady said, beyond the obvious reason that, well, it sucks. 

Pain can alter dopamine levels, so patients don’t feel as well as they normally would, Brady said. This can make the pain seem even worse. 

“Pain affects mood and mood affects pain,” she said. “A patient’s job is to cope with the pain. Pain is not a catastrophe.”

Medical trauma, or even surgeries that are elective, such as a hip replacement, can disrupt life, and that can also cause anxiety and therefore depression, Brady said. Money is usually an issue, both from bills and from the time off work. Parents may not be able to take care of their kids. Recovery can also mean spending all day indoors, isolated from friends, family and the sun.

I wanted to just get through it instead of attack it.

— Andrew Alirez, wrestler

Considering all these factors, it’s almost crazy that more patients’ lives don’t fall apart, Brady said, and it’s OK to remind patients of their fortitude even if they are depressed.

“It’s part of my job to destigmatize depression,” Brady said. “It doesn’t mean you are weak. We need to consider the depression part of your overall management.” 

There are several different ways to help patients through their depression, Brady said, and they start with the basics. Patients should push themselves to get into a regular sleep schedule again, eat well and find outlets for their stress. 

“These are basic health routines that can go by the wayside when you are worried,” she said, “but in reality, those routines are foundational to your recovery.” 

Exercise is especially beneficial, Brady said, even for those who weren’t active before. 

“It’s shocking to people in my field at the level it helps,” she said, “even when we knew it was beneficial.” 

Finding support is also important, she said, and sometimes that can be more important than prescribing medications. 

“Engaging in the community, maybe a job change, or finding purpose and meaning,” Brady said. 

Physicians have learned to recognize the signs of depression, and this is why sometimes it’s Banner Health orthopedic surgeon Dr. Kelly Sanderford’s job to be a cheerleader. He will try to educate his patients on the time it takes to recover from a serious injury or joint replacement and refer those more severe depression to a counselor or their family physician. But he will also encourage them to keep working on getting better. 

“It’s part of the job, I think,” Sanderford said. “The length of time of recovery is hard on people. You have to encourage them to just push on and get through it. We don’t get a lot of training to speak of that, and a lot of surgeons don’t want to get into that at all. I’m honestly not sure I’m good at it. But if I sense they need a little encouragement I’m all in on that.” 

Hiring some help 

When he’s not talking to student athletes at the University of Northern Colorado, sometimes Eddie Boyer will make his way down to the training room. 

He’s fit, but getting buff isn’t a goal for these trips. He’s looking out for those who don’t seem themselves. 

Many times, this can mean athletes recovering from an injury who are pouting, or going at half speed, or don’t even seem to care at all about doing the work to heal. 

“You can see the ones who are doing well and the ones who aren’t,” said Boyer, the athletics mental health coordinator for UNC. “Other times coaches typically have a pretty good bead on who is down, and they will send them my way.” 

Universities have beefed up their mental health staff across the country, and now that’s true in athletics as well. UNC hired Boyer a couple years ago to counsel athletes going through a tough time. That doesn’t always mean they’re injured. College athletes have as many or more doubts than the rest of us. But many times an injury is a big reason for visiting Boyer. 

“Most of them have done sports for 20 years, so their identity is wrapped up in it,” Boyer said. “So they are questioning who they are at this point. It doesn’t have to be a year either. Just six weeks of being hurt can do it.” 

Identity can be a huge thing for our well-being, Boyer said, and so even those who graduated from college 20 years ago, or are weekend warriors at best, can use sports to frame who they are as people. People call themselves “runners” or “mountaineers” or “ballers.” When that’s taken away from them, a literal identity crisis can occur. Boyer can relate: He once broke his leg, eventually endinghis own promising athletic career as a pole valuter. 

“That changed the trajectory of who I am,” he said.

Not all athletes will see Boyer even if their coaches recommend it, and he can’t force them to come. All he can do is do the job well.

“It’s my job to give them hope,” Boyer said. “When people see hope, it changes their ability to recover.” 

When he does, sometimes other athletes will vouch for him. 

“I’ve had teammates convince others to come see me,” Boyer said. “When it’s working well, it feeds itself.”

Boyer arrived at UNC just a year ago, too late to help Alirez through his crisis, but Boyer loves talking about him now. 

Alirez returned and wrestled his junior year, and he admits today that he didn’t do enough work to get ready. 

He struggled through knee pain and doubts. But in the months before his senior year, he came to a realization: He wanted to try his best just to say he did. He worked hard, watched his diet again and, by the start of his senior year, he felt a bounce again. 

“I was afraid my junior year, I’ll use that word,” Alirez said. “But my senior year, I was able to get after it.”

That senior year, two years after he tore his knee, he won an 2023 NCAA title in his weight class. He was UNC’s first wrestler in the modern era to win a national title. 

“It’s not like I became a way better wrestler,” he said. “It was mindset.”

Once again, he’s thinking about the Olympics: The trials are in April. He’s now learned how to embrace the mental aspect of wrestling, not just the physical part. He talks to himself regularly, filling a once-cynical head with positive mantras that fuel his workouts. 

“All those corny sayings you are used to hearing,” Alirez said. “They’re all true.”