The season of 2013/14 ended in an unwelcome surprise
for Team USA when The U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association
USSA announced a drastic cut of fundings for the
discipline of Nordic Combined. Now, three month
later, the teams for the new season were announced,
as Steamboat Today reports.
The A Team consists of Olympic gold medallist Bill
Demong, who will also take a central role in the
new cooperation with USASJ, the organisation grown
around the U.S. male and female ski jumping teams,
and World Cup veterans Bryan and Taylor Fletcher.
Adam Loomis, Brett Denney, Michael Ward and Ben
Berend were sorted into the B Team category while
the C Team is made up of Ben Loomis, Erik Lynch,
Aleck Gantick, Jasper Good and Nicholas Madden.
A central figure in the new setup of Nordic Combined
in the USA is head coach Dave Jarrett whose salary
has been guaranteed by USSA for one more year. Jarrett
has been trying to raise funds to pay for assistant
coach Greg Poirier and the technicians which any
team needs on the World Cup tour. „We are working
our damnedest to raise money to secure all of our
staff, coaches and service guys“, Jarrett said towards
Steamboat Today. „The next piece of the puzzle,
once that’s done, we start raising money for camps
and comps. We didn’t think it made sense to do that
until there was an infrastructure to support that.“
A central part of the future of Nordic Combined
will be the cooperation with USA Ski Jumping, a
discipline that now shares the same funding setup
as well as the Nordic roots of the sport with Nordic
Combined. “We’re combining with those guys and hopefully
in the future we’ll be 100 percent seamless with
the same kind of marketing and sponsors,” Jarrett
says.
“Nordic Combined and ski jumping are essentially
all the same clubs, athletes and coaches at the
base or development level of the sport in this country”,
USASJ’s Rex Bell adds, “thus following many meetings
and listening to the needs of the combined community
we will be working towards a “bottom up” strategy,
working with young athletes, coaches and clubs to
maximize things like sharing of expenses and resources
to mutually benefit the goals of each sport. We
are thrilled an extraordinary athlete of Billy Demong’s
caliber—with all his years of experience, is excited
to work with us.”
