COMEBACK ATHLETE OF THE YEAR: Junior Returns with Stellar Race

When junior Cara Sprague left nearly all of New England in her wake with her sixth-place finish in the classic event of the Eastern Intercollegiate Ski Association Championships in February, she did more than post one of the strongest finishes in the history of Harvard skiing and lead her women’s Nordic team to a second-place finish.

The rising co-captain also capped off a season-long recovery from a collarbone injury that had kept her off the race course and out of commission all fall.

“This was the first time I’d been injured,” Sprague said. “It was pretty shocking.”

The injury kept the junior from conditioning all summer and fall—a major setback for an athlete competing in an endurance sport.

During the fall, Sprague was unable to participate in many of the team’s workouts or compete for the Harvard cross-country team, which she has done in years past. The two-sport athlete was limited to moderate training on her own.

“It was frustrating just because I wasn’t able to keep up with the team like I knew I was capable of,” she said. “I had to skip out on a lot of workouts. I was on my own for a lot of it, which was kind of daunting. It was very hard mentally.”

When her injury had finally healed by Christmas, the months without serious training had left Sprague out of shape, and she had to fit two seasons worth of conditioning into two months.

“I was really proud of how diligently she worked to come back,” said Nordic coach Chris City ’94. “She just put her head down and went back to work. She trained really hard throughout December and January.”

Two months of work were not enough to prime Sprague for her first few races, and the team’s former top skier struggled to hit her stride in the season’s early competitions.

“I was kind of racing myself back into shape,” she said. “Trying to do that during the school year, while I had classes and homework, was hard.”

Though Sprague wasn’t posting her desired results, an outsider would have hardly noticed her struggles. The junior was consistently the Crimson’s fourth-best finisher, sitting just behind co-captain Audrey Mangan and freshmen Alena Tofte and Esther Kennedy, who traded spots at the top.

Fueled by the quartet’s performance, the women’s Nordic team made the leap to a consistent middle-of-the-pack squad, knocking off regional powers such as Middlebury and the University of New Hampshire.

Sprague was putting up finishes in the top 40, even though she was only skiing a few kilometers of each race at her former strength.

“I really didn’t have a strong foundation,” Sprague said. “The races are so long that I’d have kilometers where I’d feel great, but I just didn’t have the endurance or the strength or the muscle memory for a 10- or 15-kilometer race.”

But when Sprague finally put together a complete race at the championship meet, few in the region could stop her. The junior was only 42 seconds off league leader Katie Bono and less than two seconds out of the top five.

“It just kind of fell into place at the right moment,” Sprague said.

“I couldn’t be prouder of the tenacity she showed,” City added.

Sprague’s finish wasn’t Harvard’s lone standout performance of the day. Kennedy and Tofte backed her up with 14th- and 19th-place finishes of their own, and the women’s Nordic team beat every team in the region, save powerhouse Dartmouth, in the classic event.

At the center of what was one of the team’s best-ever finishes, Sprague had done more than complete a comeback. She had emerged better than she was prior to her injury, moving up 16 places from her finish at regionals the previous year to stake her place as one of the top skiers in the EISA—an accomplishment that is especially impressive given that the Crimson is already disadvantaged by its lack of snow relative to most of its competitors.

Now healthy again and able to train, Sprague has the potential to emerge as one of the dominant skiers in the region next winter. Given how she responded to her first major injury, one shouldn’t bet against her.

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