contributed photo
The St. Cloud Cathedral/Sartell Nordic ski team is sending five skiers to the state level, three of them from Sartell. 

Five Nordic skiers – three of them from Sartell – are now in Biwabik, competing at the state level after winning individual placements at the Section 8 meet Feb. 7 at Callaway.

All five are members of the male and female joint St. Cloud Cathedral/ Sartell Nordic ski teams.

The Sartell High School skiers who qualified for state are Josh Hill, Andrea Franz and Anna Lindstrom. The Cathedral High School qualifiers are Greta Danielson and Kyle Sovada.

“It was a great accomplishment for each skier who qualified for state,” said Mike Schroden, who, along with Joe Teff, coaches the team. “It was a tough year for practice.”

“Tough” because central Minnesota had a virtual snowless winter.

But the team, Schroden said, was fortunate enough to ski on the man-made snow at Riverside Park and also to ski on several area lakes.

Typically, one or more members of the Cathedral/ Sartell Nordic ski teams qualify for state competition, but this year is an exceptional achievement as five members are competing.

The three Cathedral/Sartell female skiers are among the eight top skiers from the Section 8 meet competing at state. The two males are among the top eight individual skiers from Section 8.

Under the rules for Nordic competition, the top male and top female team advance from sectionals to the state meet. There are seven skiers on each team. After the teams win at the sectionals, the next top-scoring eight individuals, males and females, can advance to the state.

At Callaway, Brainerd was the winning male team at 378 points; the Cathedral/Sartell team placed seventh with 264 points. In the female category, the Little Falls team won with 385 points, and Cathedral/Sartell was a close second with 365 points.

Nordic skiing competition involves a 10k pursuit race. It is divided into two parts. For the first part, skiers race a 5k route and ski in what is known as the “skating” or “freestyle” form. The skiers then take a 2.5-hour break and each skier returns to the exact place he or she stopped after the first stretch. Then they ski the rest of the course (5k) to the finish line. The second form of skiing must be “classical,” similar to the cross-country skiing technique.

Competing at state, along with the three Cathedral/Sartell female winners, are the five other top-winning individual skiers who hail from Alexandria, Brainerd, Detroit Lakes and Mora.

The top male individual skiers, along with the two from the Cathedral/Sartell team, are from Bemidji, Detroit Lakes, Little Falls, Mora and St. Cloud Tech. All of those cities are within Section 8.

The state meet was underway, as of Newsleader press time Thursday, at Giant’s Ridge ski resort near Biwabik, which is in St. Louis County northwest of Duluth.