HHS Nordic ski team brings home multiple medals from OFSAA

Main photo: The Huntsville High School OFSAA Junior Boys Nordic Champions (from left) Riley deGans, Ryan Clarke, David Laughton, Zak Varieur, and Cameron Heinz.

By John Cowan

The Huntsville High School (HHS) Nordic ski team travelled to Sudbury’s Laurentian University on February 22 to compete in the OFSAA provincial high school championships. The Huntsville Nordic program had 23 athletes competing with three complete teams including the Junior Boys A team, Junior Boys B team and Senior Boys team. There were three junior girls and two senior girls who competed as individuals.

The Ontario Federation of School Athletic Associations (OFSAA) Nordic Championships is a two-day event with teams and individuals competing on the first day in distance events and on the second day the teams compete in four-person team sprint relays. Approximately 11 per cent of all high school students in Ontario will ever attend an OFSAA championship in a sport.

The trails at Laurentian University start and finish from the varsity stadium field and they cover gently rolling terrain with distances of four kilometres for Junior Girls to six kilometres for the Senior Boys.

This year the Senior Boys distance was trimmed from the usual eight kilometres due to thin snow coverage on sections of the trail. The snow condition was packed granular snow with icy sections in the morning warming throughout the day so the ski base preparation staff was managing the changing conditions throughout both days with the use of toppers and structuring tools.

As well, this year OFSAA chose to spread the recognition of efforts of the students by classifying them as club-trained (open) or high school-trained with two awards. Both classifications raced the same course and against each other; at the end of the competition the awards were given based on their classification.

After the first day of the championships, the OFSAA individual results were the following (top 8 finishes):
Mark Cheek won gold in the Special Olympics category.
Junior girl Sophia Marshall captured the bronze medal in the open category. Special mention needs to be given to teammate Emma Dickson for finishing nin^th in the high school-trained category.
Junior boy Zak Varieur received a fourth-place finish in the junior boys open with his teammate Riley deGans in fifth place in open.
Cam Heinz and Ryan Clark took fourth and sixth respectively in the Junior Boys high school-trained category.
Natasia Varieur was able to capture a solid four^th place in the Senior Girls open category.
Owen Johnstone finished fourth in the Senior Boys open category with teammate Carson Pearse taking fifth position in the Senior Boys high school-trained category.

The team results are calculated by looking at each age category and determining the top four places to create a score. The Huntsville High School Junior Boys A team won GOLD and the Junior Boys B team took eigh^th. The Senior Boys team took seven^th.

On day two, the four-person team sprint relays, the Junior Boys A team won GOLD. The Junior Boys B team finished 10^th and the Senior Boys team finished the finals in eigh^th position.

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