Thursday and Friday, Feb. 20-21, saw a triumphant end to this winter’s Colorado High School Activities Association (CHSAA) downhill skiing race season for Aspen High School (AHS). The Aspen teams hosted this year’s championships for the first time in nine years. The final races also marked a major shift: every prior year, the Skiing State Championships were determined by the results of both the alpine and cross-country ski teams. In 2025, the disciplines prove themselves on separate weekends, with separate points.
Head coach Jennifer Morandi-Benson spoke with The Sopris Sun about hosting the championships and about her athletes’ performance this winter. When any town hosts CHSAA downhill races, local parents and coaches step up to the plate.
There are 13 teams in the CHSAA alpine competition, including Aspen High School. Each of those teams has at least two coaches, and more adults travel to each race location to help as race crew, technical support and to administrate the events for the state agency. That means some 70 adults and 100-150 teen athletes traveling to an area on any competition weekend.
“Logistically, [States] is similar to a regular season race, but doubled since both disciplines [slalom and giant slalom] compete,” said Morandi-Benson. “We were in talks starting last season to prepare for these races.” She noted that parent volunteers are crucial and that the Aspen team is grateful for support from Aspen Skiing Company, Romero Group, the Aspen Valley Ski and Snowboard Club and other local organizations.
Around 60% of Aspen’s athletes qualified for this year’s State Championships. The team is smaller than usual, just 26 skiers compared to an average of 40. But their overall performance level is high. Having 15 athletes in the championships is more than double the 25% statewide average; in normal season races, skiers must finish in the top quarter of the field to qualify for the final races. Some athletes only qualify for one discipline, slalom or giant slalom, while others qualify for both.
Morandi-Benson expressed pride in the AHS Skiers’ strong performances on their challenging home terrain. While the athletes have more experience on these slopes than their visiting competitors, “Highlands is a challenging pitch and terrain,” Morandi-Benson explained. And no racers get to do training runs on the course, the way pro North American and World Cup skiers do. The teen athletes get to do inspections of the courses, slowly side-slipping the terrain to mentally prepare. In the races, they get two runs per discipline. If an athlete crashes on a run, it affects their points, and if they crash on both runs, they won’t receive any points at all.
Crashes nearly took the AHS boys team out of the running for the championships. Four out of the seven qualified local skiers were not able to complete both runs on Thursday’s giant slalom course. For team results, each school must have a minimum of three athletes finish their runs for that discipline.
Morandi-Benson praised the girls team for a come-from-behind consistency. She said they had steadily improved throughout the winter; last weekend, that paid off with many top-ten individual finishes. “Girls won both days’ giant slalom and slalom. The girls were so rock solid, steady and consistent. It was great to see that,” Morandi-Benson said. It was also exciting, she shared, “to see the boys come from behind to move from Thursday’s third-place team standing into first.”
Morandi-Benson also noted particularly strong individual accomplishments. Among these, she cited Matthew McDermott’s 2nd place finish by one-hundredth of a second and Joshua Stephen’s 2nd and 3rd place finishes over the weekend. On the girls side, Darienne Kenny and Rocksy Kroeger were All-State Giant Slalom and Slalom winners. Their strong results all winter also earned them the Colorado Cup for overall top points in both disciplines. Joshua Stephen and Thomas Robinson also won All-State Giant Slalom and Colorado Cup, and Stephen and Matt McDermott won All-State Slalom.
Morandi-Benson is the chair of AHS social studies, in addition to being head coach, and lives in Glenwood Springs. She appreciates getting to work with the athletes inside and outside the classroom. “As a coach that is also a teacher at the high school, this is the most rewarding for me.” She gets to see teens in a non-academic setting and learn “the whole child” by seeing them in different environments. She sees big benefits for her athletes from the necessary balancing of priorities and travel for competitions, citing that the Skiers have strong executive function transfer from the time management required to keep up with their academics during competition season.
Full results from the competitions can be found on the CHSAA website: www.bit.ly/CHSAAski
This weekend, athletes from the Colorado Rocky Mountain School will compete in the Nordic Skiing State Championships in Steamboat.