Photo: Leo Davies competes in Mammoth, California, in 2023. Courtesy of Leo Davies.

Steamboat Springs Winter Sports Club is home to 100 winter Olympians. It’s also home to tens of thousands of athletes, some who have reached the peak of their careers, some who skied or snowboarded in college, and some who are still training. The idea behind the club’s mission to create champions on and off the mountain is to educate the whole athlete – mentally and physically, in health and through injuries – providing a foundation for success on the mountain, at school, at home, at work, and anywhere. Here’s a look at four off-mountain champions, the lessons they learned and the values they took.

LEO DAVIES
“I was a part of the Winter Sports Club for pretty much as long as I can remember,” says Leo Davies. He tried it all – snowboarding, cross country, freestyle – before eventually landing on ski racing in early middle school. “It was a huge part of my life,” Leo says. “I definitely think one of the biggest things was time management; being gone so much for skiing but still having school taught me how to keep a good balance of doing schoolwork but still having time to compete.” He recalls doing dryland training at 6 a.m. in the summer: “You learn a lot of discipline.”

That discipline translated to his college experience at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where he skied at the USCSA club level. When he arrived at school, he found a shrunken, practically non-existent ski team due to Covid. “As one of the new kids, I tried to step up and joined the e-board,” he says. In his junior and senior years, he was the men’s team captain. “For me it was very impactful to watch the team grow back to what I had heard it was before Covid,” he says. “I could really pass on the joy that I got from skiing. That community grew a lot over my four years at Cornell and I was really proud to be a part of that leadership team to make it happen.”

One thing that Leo recalls emphasized during his training with SSWSC was ownership, leadership and always being responsible for your actions. During summer camps, he and his peers would mentor the younger athletes and pass on skills to a new generation. “Off the mountain, that’s something that I’ve tried to bring into my everyday life,” he says. “Owning my actions and being a leader; finding a group to make an impact on and leave your mark on.”

When Leo graduated from Cornell last May, he started a job as an electrical engineer, where he can translate those lessons. “Right now I’m new and observing the organization structure to see where I can fit into that,” he explains. “Older engineers are mentoring me now, but when I get older and more established, I can step into more of a leadership role and return the favor.”

EMILY CALDWELL

 Emily Caldwell jumps at Howelsen Hill, circa 2007.

“The immediate feeling after any Nordic race is a flood of relief as you lie in the snow and just breathe, the pain of racing over,” remembers Emily Caldwell. The SSWSC cross-country skier was racing at the U.S. Nationals in Rumford, Maine when she experienced two breakthrough results that qualified her for her first Junior World Championships team. "In the afterglow, I felt two contradictory things – validated that all the hard work had paid off since I’d exceeded what I thought I could do, but also that there was so much further to go since I suddenly had to expand my goals,” Emily says.

As a tremendous competitor and a rigorous student, Emily was used to meeting – and then
re-adjusting – her goals. In elementary school, she began her training with SSWSC in Nordic combined. She continued through her sophomore year of high school and then switched to cross-country full time. At school, she was on “skier’s schedule” which allowed her to train more intensely – 500 hours per year, which included morning workouts of roller skiing, running or biking, and afternoon workouts of strength training, ultimate frisbee, runs or more roller skiing. Once the snow came, Emily would go to camp over Thanksgiving week which she describes as “eat-ski-sleep-eat-ski-sleep.” Then racing season would be around the corner and the team would ramp up the intensity of its ski sessions while continuing with strength training. She qualified for the World Junior Championship team and was ranked top five in the country for her birth year by the time she was a senior in high school. In other words, she was skiing really well.

Her success for the club though, also set her up for success for the rest of her life. Case in point: she attended two Ivy League schools for college (Harvard University and Dartmouth College) and is currently working as a laser scientist at a physics lab in Boulder. She attributes much of her success to her two coaches, Josh Smullin and Brian Tate. “I think that they had an outsized influence on my life and where I am now,” Emily says. “Being able to put my head down and work is really the default mode of operation, and I think that’s because of the cross-country program.”

Her coaches asked their skiers to read “The Pursuit of Excellence,” by Terry Orlick. “I think that summarizes most of my life until now,” Emily says. “Making decisions in the pursuit of excellence in whatever I’m doing.” The program, she says, gave her an appreciation for what hard work truly entails. "There are no shortcuts to get the results you want,” she points out, and this is a lesson that she hopes to highlight one day for her daughter. "The club prepared me for academics and life outside of skiing,” she says. “And that’s something that I want my daughter to also experience in some capacity.”

ASHLEY DEIBOLD

Ashley Deibold remembers participating in SSWSC at a young age, but what stuck with her was her time in the club as a teenager. “The biggest takeaway that I had from being an athlete and participating in competitive athletics as an older teenager was how impactful it was to find something to work towards and to strive for, outside of school and social circles,” she says. It’s part of the reason that she later returned to SSWSC to coach. “Snowboarding has defined my community for my whole life,” she says. “The relationships that I’ve made through snowboarding are super important and that’s why I’ve stayed in it and continued to come back.”

As a snowboarding coach, Ashley advocated for her athletes to focus on the process, not the outcome. “Focus on the things that you can control through the process,” she would tell them. The other thing was finding balance. “As I was coaching, I started with younger kids and then transitioned up the development pipeline with them,” she says. “As they got higher up in the talent pool, I noticed that having balance in their life was super important. I always tried to advocate for athletes to go to school; go to college, even if it’s slowly.” She points out that studies show that athletes who go to school perform better – and it also makes that transition out of athletics easier.

"As a coach, I think one of the things that struck me and has stayed with me is how much I enjoy helping other people achieve their goals,” she says. “I actually like being a coach better than being an athlete.” After eight years of coaching, Ashley took a job as the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Sport Development Director where she continues to impart the knowledge and lessons learned from her time with SSWSC. She also serves on the board of SSWSC and is married to the Olympian and current SSWSC snowboard program director, Alex Deibold. “Finding snowboarding really redefined my life direction,” Ashley says. “Having competitive snowboarding as a teenager gave me that north star. I love being able to support a club and community and give that to other kids now.”

MARSH GOODING

 Marsh Gooding on a Sunday at Howelsen Hill with his wife, Hannah, and daughters, Lida and Uma.

As part of a fifth-generation Routt County family, Marsh Gooding grew up with skiing in his blood. His grandfather, Gates Gooding, was involved both with getting the resort started and with SSWSC. “As Steamboat transitioned from cowtown to ski town, my family was here and was very involved in skiing,” Marsh says. “My dad talked about the rivalry between the ski community and the ranching community when he was growing up. But he was a ski racer; it was something that he had fallen in love with. He had me on skis as soon as I could walk.”

Like so many of Steamboat’s youth, Marsh’s SSWSC career began in the Little Toots program. Then, like his father, he got into ski racing. He was in SSWSC all through high school and in the back of his mind were the two goals that he says every skier has: either make the U.S. Ski Team or make it on to an NCAA college team. Marsh was aiming for the U.S. Ski Team but the day after he graduated from high school, his father died. "Between that and some other things, I couldn’t really focus,”he says. He went to school, but he hadn’t snagged a spot on the University of Vermont ski team and he was unable to walk on.

He decided to leave UVM and return to SSWSC, where he trained rigorously for another 1 1/2 years. It was a time that he remembers fondly, despite the hard work. “I had a really good coach, Chris Puckett, who came in and changed the culture at the club a bit,” Marsh recalls. Chris created a “breakfast club” for his skiers during which they had to be at morning workout at 6:30 a.m. “If you missed three, you got kicked out,” Marsh says. “All of my friends were still asleep and I had already banked a win for the day.” Another challenge was to get to the top of Emerald Mountain as fast as you could. "I remember walking down feeling like ‘wow, I got up and didt his,’” Mash says. “I distinctly remember that shift of feeling like I had one up on the world in that moment.”

It was a feeling that he took with him back to UVM, when he eventually returned, but this time to ski on a full scholarship. "At school, we trained an hour away,” he says. “I would be on my bike in 20 below weather to get to the van to drive an hour to go and train. The tolerance for the hard side of it – especially when your peers around you are living the traditional college experience – is a taste for that reward.” Tolerance and hard work are lessons that Marsh garnered from his time in SSWSC, as are endurance and perseverance.

"About 140 skiers enter a race and there’s one winner,” Marsh points out. “You’re not going to be winning very often. In life, there’s a lot of small disappointments and that’s no big deal – you just keep chugging.” These are lessons that Marsh and his wife, Hannah, hope to impart on the next generation of the Gooding family: their two daughters, Lida and Uma. So far, so good: “We have to wait until Uma is asleep to get her to leave Howelsen and someone usually has to kick Lida off the Poma lift,” Marsh says. “We, as a family, love Howelsen Hill. Our one weekly guarantee is that we will be there for Sundays at Howelsen.”