The Craftsbury Green Racing Project was born in 2009—a combined vision of Tim Reynolds, then a senior at Middlebury College, and Dick Dreissigacker and Judy Geer, two Olympic scullers whose family foundation had recently purchased the COC. One of Middlebury’s top cross-country skiers at the time, Reynolds wanted to continue ski racing after graduation and try for an Olympic team.
“But there weren't a lot of options for skiers beyond the college years to have a good support structure to train and race,” he said by phone. “And I didn’t have the means to keep skiing on my own.”
So as a senior project, Reynolds wrote a proposal for a post-collegiate Olympic development program. He worked with renowned author and environmental advocate Bill McKibbon, who serves as the faculty affiliate to Middlebury’s Nordic team, and proposed a ski training program with a broader purpose. In addition to training and racing, the skiers would give back to the community and find sustainable ways to live. Reynolds presented his idea to a few Vermont businesses, as well as to NENSA (New England Nordic Skiing Association).
Geer attended one of Reynolds’s presentations and liked what she heard. She and Dreissigacker had had a similar vision when they purchased the COC. A cross-country ski center in the winter and sculling center in the summer, the COC had been attracting skiers in winter and top rowers in the summer to the campus since the 1970s. (Geer and Dreissigacker had coached sculling at the COC since the late 1970s, and their company, Concept2, which manufactures oars and popular indoor ergometers, is located in nearby Morrisville.) Many area kids learn to cross-country ski at Craftsbury, and the place has a family feel, where everyone knows everyone and feels welcome. With an on-site dorm (in a previous incarnation, the COC was a boys’ academy) and cabins, plus a dining hall renowned for its great meals, it would work well as a training center.
"Since our goal was to provide a training program with room and board—and since sustainability was and still is part of our mission—it fit really well to adopt Tim's vision of a green racing team,” said Geer.
After graduation in 2009, Reynolds moved to Craftsbury and joined five other cross-country skiers, including Geer and Dreissigacker’s oldest daughter, Hannah, who had come up through Craftsbury’s Bill Koch League (BKL), a regional youth cross-country ski program, and had recently graduated from Dartmouth. The six skiers were charged with shaping the program and its mission—and naming it. They chose Craftsbury Green Racing Project; it placed equal emphasis on training/racing and the environmental/community component.
The skiers earned their keep doing projects like mapping and building ski and mountain bike trails, supporting the center’s many events (like the Craftsbury Marathon, a popular ski race), gardening and composting, and working with young skiers in the BKL program, among other projects.
For Reynolds, these projects gave him purpose beyond training and racing—the “stuff that fills your soul,” he said.
Soon, the GRP added biathlon, then a sculling program. Gibson, along with Dunklee, Egan, and the Dreissigacker siblings (Hannah, Emily, and Ethan), were a few of the program’s first biathletes. Gibson had recently graduated from the University of Vermont with an engineering degree but wanted to pursue biathlon. Geer, a family friend who used to drive son Ethan, Gibson, and a few other boys to the Ethan Allen Firing Range in Jericho, Vermont, when they were young, emailed him out of the blue to let him know that the GRP now had a biathlon team.
Skiing at the COC as a kid, Gibson liked the “amazing community.” He also liked the GRP’s mission of balancing training with “interesting intellectual projects.” Along with Ethan Dreissigacker—an engineering grad from Dartmouth—the two designed an electric motor to replace the two-stroke engines used by the sculling coaches’ motorboats.
The projects and sense of purpose in the community help give the GRP athletes a sense of balance in their lives—and a sense of satisfaction (especially important for athletes if they are battling injuries or having a tough string of races).
Goessling—who serves as a liaison between the GRP and the COC staff, has archived COC pictures, and writes race reports—felt gratified watching kids having fun and challenging themselves on small mountain bike jumps that he built at the COC last summer.
Grossman has found similar gratification coaching kids in the COC’s BKL program, volunteering at the local middle school, and during the pandemic, running a Zoom book club for kids. She also helped deliver food through a local food share program to neighbors in surrounding villages during the pandemic.
“The program has helped me mature as a person,” she said. “I went from an immature recent college graduate to becoming a member of a community with a solid group of people around me, a member of the national team, and I now have a clue what I want to do next in my life.”
Training, though, is still a priority. The GRP has already sent a handful of athletes to both the summer and winter Olympic Games, including Dunklee, Egan, Hannah and Emily Dreissigacker, and cross-country skier Ida Sargent. And GRP biathletes are regulars on the world cup and IBU Cup tours. In a one world cup relay last winter, the U.S. women’s 4x6km relay team was comprised of only GRP biathletes: Dunklee, Egan, Emily Dreissigacker, and Grossman, who described it as “a really special GRP moment.”
In the past year, the GRP’s biathlon program has made big gains. Gibson, who retired from competition in 2018, returned to Craftsbury last spring as the GRP’s head biathlon coach—“It’s the community, it’s the place that I wanted to be,” he said—and has made the biathlon program a separate entity from the GRP ski program.
In prior years, the two programs trained together, with the biathletes practicing in the range around ski practice.
The COC now has a paved rollerski loop that opened in 2020—a boon during the pandemic when athletes could not easily travel to other paved loops (the COC is located far from paved roads). The center also debuted a new 15-point shooting range—a significant upgrade from a smaller, more rustic range built in a field near the “ski house” (where many of the skiers and biathletes live).
With the improved facilities, Gibson aims to improve the depth of the national team by recruiting talented collegiate cross-country skiers who might like shooting—and might like living at an isolated but idyllic sports center in northern Vermont.
“The role that Craftsbury plays in the greater ecosystem of U.S. Biathlon is transitional talent,” Gibson explained, “taking cross-country skiers who are interested in biathlon or who never had exposure to biathlon and being able to give them good consistent coaching and equipment to try biathlon.
“If I can convert a couple biathletes, that’s fantastic.”
