The U.S. Para alpine skiing team spent the offseason resetting, reorganizing and finding ways to become a more cohesive unit.
Now the group enters the 2022-23 season with high morale as the coaches have strived to encourage more athlete input while providing more transparency in decision-making processes, said Tony McAllister, associate director of high performance for U.S. Paralympics Alpine Skiing.
Read MoreThe Para alpine skiing calendar can best be described as condensed and relentless.
The highly competitive, almost non-stop schedule is not particularly conducive to focused, consistent and quality runs. The best-trained skiers spend nearly all four years in a Paralympic quad repeating their habits, refining their technique and honing in on the smallest details so that when they’re at the start gate in the Paralympic Winter Games, they are able to replicate their best personal performance under the most intense circumstances.
Read MoreThe U.S. women’s hockey team extended its winning streak on Canadian soil to four games on Thursday night with a 2-1 win over Canada in Kamloops, British Columbia, in the second game of the 2022-23 Rivalry Series.
Two days after winning the series opener 4-3 in Kelowna, British Columbia, the Americans outshot their neighbors to the north 34-20 on Thursday, holding the Canadians to single-digit shots on goal in each period.
Read MoreThe U.S. women’s hockey team started off the 2022-23 iteration of its Rivalry Series against Canada with a 4-3 shootout win Tuesday night in Kelowna, British Columbia.
Hilary Knight and Alex Carpenter each scored in both regulation and the shootout, while goalie Nicole Hensley did not allow a goal in the shootout.
Hensley came up huge for the Americans with 32 saves, including a game-saving stop of Marie Philip-Poulin’s penalty shot with 39.2 seconds left in the extra period. She also did not allow a power play goal in seven opportunities for Canada.
Read MoreThe U.S. Para Snowboarding team begins its next four-year cycle — with an eye to the Paralympic Winter Games in Milano and Cortina in 2026 — this month with a world cup event in Landgraaf, Netherlands. The 10-member team will compete in banked slalom and snowboardcross events around the world with hopes of plenty of podium finishes this season.
The biggest competition will be this year’s world championships, set to take place from Jan. 19-29 in La Molina, Spain.
A perennial favorite in the sport, the U.S. is seeing other countries consistently gaining ground. This season, the Americans are focusing on preparedness so that the boarders are in the best position to make the right split-second decisions in a race to help them win.
Read MoreThe post-Olympic season is the best time to reset, reevaluate and make changes, said USA Nordic Sport ski jumping coach Anders Johnson, and now a groundbreaking partnership and new program philosophies could make this one of the most interesting U.S. ski jumping seasons in recent memory.
“We have a group of young, really motivated and talented athletes,” he said. “So the timing was perfect for us to really shift gears.”
Read MoreNorthbrook Speed Skating Club (NSSC) of Illinois is celebrating not just seven decades of existence, but 70 years of excellence.
The club has evolved from barrel jumpers and skating outdoors on the flooded center of a bicycle velodrome to become one of the country’s preeminent speed skating clubs, and home to more than 20 Olympians. In fact, a member of NSSC went on to compete in every Olympic Winter Games from 1952 through 2018.
Read MoreA deep rivalry will be renewed when the U.S. and Canada meet Sunday in the gold-medal game of the IIHF Women’s World Championship.
The U.S. has played in the title game of every world championship since the event began in 1990, facing Canada in all but one of those games.
“To me, U.S. versus Canada is the best game you can watch in our sport. And it's the one that everybody is gearing up for,” said Katie Crowley, a three-time Olympian and current Boston College coach who also participated in six world championships from 1997-2005.
A new coaching staff for the U.S. women’s hockey team has the group playing with a new mentality and a new style at the 2022 IIHF Women’s World Championship currently taking place in Frederikshavn and Herning, Denmark. The Americans hope these changes will also bring a change of fortune.
The past 365 days did not go as the U.S. would have liked.
This time last year, the Americans fell short of the world championships title for the first time since 2012 when they dropped a 3-2 game in overtime to rival Canada. Prior to 2021, the U.S. had won eight of the previous nine world championship titles, including five straight dating back to 2013.
A few months after those world championships, the U.S. made a run back to the Olympic gold-medal game in Beijing in February. However, this time they fell 3-2 to Canada in regulation.
Paralympian Nick Mayhugh posing for a photo with his cousin Kim Schaeffer isn’t too rare of an event. Their families are close, and Mayhugh considers Schaeffer the little sister he never had.
What took this impromptu family moment over the top was the fact that it was taking place in the White House.
Read MoreGrowing up in Clarkesville, Georgia, McKenzie Coan has vivid memories of attending sporting events at Clemson University with her father, an alum of the school. There were many football and men’s basketball games, but she said she wasn’t really exposed to a lot of women’s NCAA sports as a kid. In fact, she didn’t even really know they existed, or that playing sports in college was an option for women.
“I didn’t know what kind of opportunities existed for females who wanted to compete in college. I didn’t know what that looked like,” she said.
It wasn’t until Coan got involved with the U.S. Para swimming team as a teenager that she began to understand the importance of women’s college sports. Now 25, Coan is a three-time Paralympian and has six medals — four of them gold — to her name. Yet her college experience remains foundational to her, both in and out of the pool.