This week sophomore Devon Spika will compete in the Nordic Skiing NCAA National Championship in Bozeman, Mont. She was one of two Whitman students to qualify in their sports, along with senior Erin Petterson for swimming.
Nordic Collegiate Nationals consists of a 5K skate ski that took place on Wednesday and a 15K Classic this tomorrow. Whitman competes in NCAA Division I, which means that Spika will compete against scholarship athletes from Division I powerhouses such as the University of Colorado.
Whitman is the smallest college in the conference and the only Division III School to compete in the Western conference.
Qualification to the national championship is based on each skier’s best two races in both skate and classic.
“All the races are based on a point system. The first person gets a certain number of points and the second person gets less points and so on,” said Spika. “The Western region takes 16 women and 18 men.”
Spika’s qualification was made even more difficult by the increasing caliber of athletes within Nordic skiing.
“I was 14th so right back on the edge. I didn’t have a super good season,” said Spika. “I found that last year racing I had a lot better results. I think that the level of competition has just increased this year. We’ve gotten a lot of Europeans, and they are just really fast.”
Spika has had a challenging racing season. “Some of my races I had trouble focusing, and that’s super important especially since most of our races are just five kilometers long so you have to be going as hard as you can the whole time, so if you aren’t focused or are having a bad day you can drop way back in the results,” she said.
Every year Spika, who has dual Canadian/U.S. citizenship and has lived in Denmark, puts in 500 hours of training. She hopes that this will pay off in Nationals.
“I think top 15 in skate would be really neat. Top 20 in classic. I don’t know how the people in the other regions are. It changes so much from year to year, and there definitely are some really strong skiers in the east. But for sure if I go as hard as I can I can do it,” Spika said.
Petterson was the other winter athlete with an opportunity to compete at the national level in her sport. She qualified in swimming. In the regional meet in Federal Way, Wash., Petterson finished second in the 200-yard butterfly and 100-yard butterfly races. Her times give her a chance at competing in the NCAA Division III National Championship; however, they do not signify automatic qualification. Her qualification depends on how other swimmers perform.
According to a Whitman press release, her times last year would have automatically qualified her for the NCAA championships, which will take place March 14 and 15 in Oxford, Ohio.
