Thanks to everyone for a great season!  It takes a lot of people, places, and moving parts to make everything work!  Mother Nature finally agreed with us this year by giving us Winter!  The conditions were good and the temps rarely went above 32 or below 0!  The on hill crews and Ski Challenge staff at Buck Hill and Wild Mountain worked hard to bring everyone a quality program for all abilities and race levels.

2017-18 By the Numbers

For the 2017 Preseason season we ended up with 218 racers starts.  We tried something different this past preseason by cutting back to two weeks of racing.  This avoided having to cancel the first week due to lack of winter weather and snow cover.  Cancelling the first week has been a trend for the last few years.  Starting the second week in December gave the ski areas time to get a good base and be ready for racing.  Unfortunately, we were unable to have a Wild Mountain preseason league.  There just was not enough participation to warrant the Ski Challenge Team format.  Wild Mountain did offer practice gates each Wednesday night in December for Ski Challenge racers.  Hopefully we can try again to have a pre-season league at Wild in December of 2018.

The total number of racer starts for our regular, seven week league series was 6,615.  This was number was up about 1% from the year before.

Ski Challenge helped put on the Padraig’s Place Ski Race benefit at Buck Hill on Saturday, February 10.  A total of 82 racers participated.

Giants Ridge hosted our end of the year Championships.  We had 361 racer starts in our Team Events.  96 participated in the Friday Ski Challenge Open race and 54 racers competed in the King & Queen of the Hel race.

Overall, the Ski Challenge submitted 7,276 results into NASTAR during the 2017-18 seasons.