Freeride teams in college?

Yo! Stoked you wanna continue freeriding in college. It’s a great opportunity to travel with homies at your school and compete all over, and every school’s team can be different. Some teams like U of U, boulder or western colorado have legit teams with actual coaches and shit and they’re pretty serious about it, and other teams like the one @cyphers and I kinda started at UW in Seattle was more of a midweek meetup shred & carpool to comps kinda vibe.


The cool thing is that ifsa has a ‘collegiate freeride’ division where points from riders at a certain school get tallied per comp over the course of the season and they crown a winner at the end.

I’d just start DMing schools asking what their program is like and go from there! Also even if schools don’t have a freeride program, you can still totally find people to hit comps with so don’t let that limit your search for a school. Give a shout if you have any questions!

Rock_InhabitantHey everyone. I’m a freeride skier in the Denver metro and in high school. Right now I’m on a team pretty casually but want to start taking it to the next level. I think the best move out of high school is to be good enough to get on to a college team, maybe in SLC, Bozeman or CU Boulder, but call me out if this is a dumb move. I am also willing to go to school in Europe because I have lots of family there and can speak a Germanic language. If anyone has experience on how to transition to college skiing, or what kind of preparation I need to do for this sort of thing, let me know.

Having spent a semester in Europe and gotten a humongous amount of skiing in there, I can't recommend it highly enough. The schooling will be much cheaper, and if you're smart you'll be able to figure out a way to take public transit to the mountain - prime study time, in my book. I studied at University of Salzburg, but I have to imagine that Innsbruck would also be an excellent option.

Westminster, while a mid teir school does have a monster team. The U in utah will also hit hard.

I'd encourage you to remove your self from the idea of a "team" and just move to a major freeride place and throw down. Progression! Alta/Bird will be the place in the west, as very few come out of Colorado or bozeman, and the mammoth people eventually move here.

Can't weigh in on EU as ive never been, but if you want to stay in the states Alta/Bird is where you should be in the west.

hell ya dude! college freeride is probably the best way to develop after juniors. however college teams are all very different from each other so you will want to research (gram/websites/FB) to see what the vibe is

off the top of my head - CU, Utah, Western CO, Montana State, UBC all have pretty established freeride programs so I would start by checking out those

and don't worry about being good enough to get on the team, all the comps are opens and as far as i know there aren't any teams that require X amount of experience before joining

Yo! I’m VP of the Freeride Ski Team at University of Denver. Joining the freeride team here as been one of the highlights of my college experience. Most of the teams mentioned here are structured basically the same with some nuanced differences in pay structure. At DU, we are an official club sport and we travel around colorado and the greater region. We compete at 1*,2*,3*, and 4* events. Last year we went to 6 comps as a team. Some members of the team join with no competition experience and some join with 10+ years of competition experience. Some join the team just to ski and travel. Others compete hard and qualify for the Challenger Series. We do not have official coaching. However, the more experienced members are always willing to give advice about judging, line choice, inspection, and really everything else to do with competing. We don’t have official practices but we try and ski together at copper, wp, and a basin as much as possible. In addition to skiing and competing we do fun backcountry jump days and eat lots of hotdogs in the parking lot. We also do fun fundraising events such as ski movie nights, concerts, and parties. We see most of the other clubs mentioned here at competitions so if you have any questions about DU or some of the other clubs feel free to reach out!

Thanks a lot lot lot for everyone chipping in on this thread. Definitely learned a lot in 5 minutes.