So if the highlight of her year was becoming National Champion in April, the second highlight came yesterday. The snowboard team coach, who also is in charge of the alpine operations certificate at UMF, invited Whitney to sit in on his class last night because Seth Wescott was coming in to speak. He's one of Whitney's idols. He grew up in Farmington and his "home mountain" is Sugarloaf, which is where the UMF team practices. He is a two time gold medal winner in the Olympics for boardercross (2006 Torino, 2010 Vancouver), he also has a gold medal in the World Championships as well as several silver medals in the World Championships and Winter X Games.
Seth is one reason she went into boardercross. I'm not sure what the class was about but she had a chance to talk to him for a few minutes after he was finished then the two of them walked out together (neither was staying for the rest of the class). She was super excited last night when I talked to her! She had the chance to talk to him for about 15-20 minutes after the class and they talked about her snowboarding, his snowboarding, and he gave her some advice on next steps in her snowboarding career. She found it interesting that he started doing half-pipe but moved to boarder cross when he saw people like Shaun White coming up behind him. I think that was probably a good move! He thought it was funny that she didn't do half-pipe because mom said no and she was not as coordinated as you need to be to survive half-pipe (never mind the fact that there are no half-pipes in Virginia).
I'm so excited for her to meet one of her idols, especially since she missed her chance to talk to Alex Deibold (bronze medalist, 2014 Sochi Olympics) when we were at Nationals in April. This sounds like a good start to her season...now for the snow to start falling.
