Odyssey Ends Back on Slopes for Coach

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the Nordic ski team’s rise this year is that the team’s assistant coach is a former softball recruit who had never cross country skied before college.

Coming to Cambridge as an undergraduate after a high school softball career put her at near-celebrity status in her hometown, Sara Cushman ’97 found herself drawn to sports more outside of the limelight.

“It was a little bit anticlimactic playing softball in college,” she said. “I’d always been on these really good teams and we’d have this huge following. It was a big event in my town, the softball games.”

Cushman excelled on the softball field early, earning All-Ivy status in the sport as a freshman. But at the same time, she was becoming increasingly interested in Nordic skiing, a sport she had decided to take up after her First-Year Outdoor Program trip.

“I was fairly obsessed with obscure sports my whole life,” Cushman said. “It just so happened that my FOP leader was on the Nordic ski team. Before school started, I got a chance to talk to her about joining the team, and it seemed like something I was going to be able to do.”

For two years, Cushman balanced softball with Nordic skiing. Her status on the ski team grew quickly, and she was named captain of the Nordic team her senior year.

“She came in [to Harvard] to play softball and got addicted to aerobic sports,” said Chris City ’94, the Nordic team’s head coach and a college teammate of Cushman’s. “You don’t see that coming from someone who’s used to running 90 feet at a time.”

But once Cushman found her passion for endurance sports, a different springtime activity—flat water sprint kayaking—drew her away from the diamond.

“It was really kind of random,” she recalled. “I was sculling in the summers. Somehow through that connection, I heard that the U.S. canoe and kayak team was trying to bring women into the sport, so I went to this development camp in San Diego.”

The kayaking world was small, and Cushman rose through it quickly. Before long, she was working out at the Olympic training center in Lake Placid and trying to earn a spot on the team.

Eventually ,Cushman began to realize that she wasn’t going to be one of the top two kayakers in the country, and the lack of competition came to bore her.

“The sport is so small that basically the only competitions are Olympic trials or U.S. nationals,” she said. “One of the reasons I stopped continuing with it was because there wasn’t that competitive outlet there if you were not on the national team.”

As her kayaking career came to a close, Cushman returned to the first “obscure” sports team that had captured her heart—the Crimson Nordic ski team, for which she served as the head coach from 1997 to 2002.

In the meantime, Cushman picked up a third endurance sport, one even more unusual than her first two: cyclo-cross—short distance bike racing which requires competitors to carry their bikes over parts of the race course.

“[It’s] continuing with my theme of really obscure sports,” she said.

With the head coaching position “essentially voluntary” as Cushman described it, reality soon set in, and the obscure sports star turned to a more conventional path—law school.

But Boston College Law School couldn’t keep Cushman away from the Crimson for too long. In the fall of 2008, the cyclo-cross racer returned as an assistant coach for the Nordic team.

“I heard that Chris [City] was the coach,” she recalled. “Chris and I skied together, and I thought it’d be really fun to work with him. I was just remembering how fun it was to coach the first time around, and I thought it’d be a nice way to balance out my life.”

Cushman quickly jelled with the athletes.

“She’s great,” said Nordic women’s captain Audrey Mangan. “Sara’s personality plays well with the team...She jokes around and makes techno dance CD mixes. She’s really fun.”

And City has appreciated Cushman’s dedication to the team.

“She jumps in to do things all the time,” he said. “She does it because she loves the team...It’s more than a job for her...She gives so much more than you could ever ask of an assistant coach...I hope Sara’s with us for many years to come.”

—Staff writer Christina C. McClintock can be reached at ccmcclin@fas.harvard.edu.