BILLINGS--Frontier conference football and basketball often make headlines, but one of the most awarded programs at Rocky Mountain College is their ski team.
The Rocky Mountain college ski team has a long history of success and is one of the gems of Battlin' Bear athletics. The program attracts athletes not only from all over the country, but all over the world.
It's a tight knit group, all with unique paths to becoming Battlin' Bears.
"I was skiing back home, and then I felt that I wanted to combine the academic aspect of being at a college," senior Alexander Sehlberg said.
Sehlberg came to Rocky from Sweden. Others, like freshman Zach Bion, are from the U.S. and stumbled upon Rocky almost by accident.
"My mom was looking at schools for my brother, and she saw they had a ski team, and it sounded like it would be a good fit for me, and that was history," Bion said.
"Skiing in college was always something I had aspired to do. And obviously, I grew up racing around the Bears and coach Wolf," senior Jacob Drake said.
Junior Emma Hiebert had committed to another school already, until the pandemic forced that college completely online.
"I contacted Jerry here to see if there were still in person classes, and he said that everything here was a go, so I committed on a Friday, flew out on a Saturday, and started classes on Monday," Hiebert said.
Like Sehlberg, junior Hilde Sato was looking to come to the U.S. to combine skiing and college, something that was more challenging to do in her home country of Norway.
"I wanted to go to college and combine school and skiing, because that's pretty hard to do back home, so I did apply to a couple of schools, and Rocky was the school I found most interesting."
They feel like that uniqueness of their team is valuable to their college experience.
"It's amazing, and it's definitely one of the most special aspects of our team here I think," Drake said. "It's just a real melting pot of so many different personalities and cultures and identities, and I think it's interesting, we're a pretty tight knit family, and I think some of our differences have allowed us to be able to communicate with each other and learn more about each other, just being interested in where we all come from and what we do back home."
"It just brings us so much together when we can hear a little bit about the culture from like everywhere around the world," Hiebert said. "There will just be little things where they're like 'oh we did it this way' or 'what, you do it like that? You have to do it this way. There's never a lull, there's always something to talk about with those people too."
"We were driving and there was a group of two other new freshman girls and they saw a school bus drive by, and they were like 'what? Those aren't just in the movies?!' and I was like yeah, we actually drive those to school!'" Hiebert said.
The women took home the title at USCSA Nationals earlier this month, and the men came in second. While they're proud of those accomplishments, they feel like they didn't the chance to give all they had due to the weather.
"The whole national championship turned into a one-run slalom race. It made bibs a really big deal and we didn't get the draw we wanted on our third seed," Bion said.
"We didn't know that it was cancelled until right before," Hiebert said. "So, we went down ready to compete in our slopestyle event, and we were waiting and the wind and snow was getting a lot worse, and we were mentally preparing for how we were going to do this, and then right before, we were told it was going to be cancelled."
But the triumph of winning is still the same, and they look forward to a chance to prove themselves again next season.
"The conditions were really hard this year, like the others have already said. So, it was really fun to be able to actually win it as a team," Sato said.
