Trail Mix Relay Prep Accelerates

Behind the scenes, teaching faculty, coaching staff, and student/athletes from the ninth and tenth-grade advisories are working hard to make this weekend's Trail Mix Community Relay a memorable event. Below, Ambrose Tuscano and Casey Jobe collaborate on the obstacle course. 

Marmots Go Retro at South Lake

The following report of Fighting Marmots running wild comes from Head Nordic/XC Coach Jeff Schloss: 

We had a super fun day at the South Tahoe Retro Relays. Our Varsity girls' team of Savannah, Lauren, Elise, and Danielle medaled in fifth place out of a strong field, and our young boys' team of Sam, Sklyer, Casey, and Peter were fifth in the JV boys' race. Overall there were about 80 teams, and many were decked out in costumes. SBA looked sharp and even fielded a coaches' team with Ambrose, Martin, Jeff, and Cassidy’s Dad, Doug, joining us. We weren't the fastest coaches' team but we looked the best!

SBA Goes Big, Then Home at Pole Peddle Paddle

Congratulations, again, to Nordic Coaches Schloss and Tuscano for their fantastic finish at the Pole Peddle Paddle last weekend in Bend, Oregon! 

Coach Schloss submitted the following highlights. You will notice that each of the SBA student-athlete teams that participated in the event finished first in its division!

 

"Bend, Oregon’s Pole Pedal Paddle is a six-leg relay race that includes alpine skiing/snowboarding, xc skiing, biking, running, canoe/kayaking, and a sprint to the finish for a total distance of about 34 miles. This year, 2,922 racers competed in the 882 individual/team entries. Olympian and US Nordic Ski Team member Kris Freeman won the men’s elite division and XC Oregon’s Stephanie Howe won her third straight title in the women’s elite race. Six SBA teams represented Far West Nordic. All SBA teams came in first in their division with the exception of coaches Ambrose Tuscano and Jeff Schloss who were second in their age group but seventeenth overall. Ambrose alpine skied, biked, and paddled while Jeff nordic skied, ran and sprinted.

• Team SBA: Skyler Mullings and Casey Jobe - WINNERS of pairs age 17 and under.

• Team Gangstar Ninjas: Cassidy Cichowicz and Scott Cooper - WINNERS of coed pairs age 18-24.

• Team PB: Bria Riggs and Peter Carroll - WINNERS of coed pairs under 17.

• Team Victorious Secret (males): Joe Piercy and Austin Meng - WINNERS of male pairs 18-24.

• Team Victorious Secret (females): Savannah Blide and Erika Klenk - WINNERS of female pairs under 17."

Left to Right: Casey Jobe, Jeff Schloss, Skyler Mullings, Peter Carroll,
Austin Meng, Scott Cooper

Keeping Our Campus Clean!

Sugar Bowl Academy faculty and student-athletes worked together during advisory today to collect garbage from the campus grounds and around the West Bay parking area of Sugar Bowl Resort. You will notice an SBA Suburban packed for the Pole, Peddle, Paddle in Bend, OR. Go Fighting, Garbage-Collecting, Poling, Peddling, Paddling Marmots! 

Coach Jefe's Tahoe Rim Tour Raises $2,000 for FWNSEA

A strong field showed up at North Tahoe High School yesterday for the fifth running of the Tahoe Rim Tour, a fund raiser for the Far West Nordic Ski Education Association’s Junior Ski Programs started by SBA's own Head Nordic Coach Jeff "El Jefe" Schloss.

This year's event raised some $2,000 and featured prizes donated by Sierra Nordic of Truckee, among others.

Schloss himself finished first in his age group and eighth overall in the Classic division. Congratulations, Jefe! Assistant Coach Ambrose Tuscano took eleventh overall in the Classic wave, with Peter Carroll close on his heels in fifteenth. Mother and daughter duo Laurel and Nancy Fiddler crossed the finish line together sporting matching head bands and uniforms in first place for each of their respective age divisions. Also in the Classic division, Kelly Habibi took third and Joe Piercy sixth for their age divisions.

In the Junior Skate division, SBA's Skyler Mullings and faculty child Casey Jobe finished first and second, respectively.

Said Jefe: "huge THANK  YOUS go to SBA volunteers Camille Hartley, Joelle Romo, Katrin larusson, Bria Riggs, Roxanne Romo, MaryBeth Larusson, Sonja Harris, Paige Derdowski, and Kelley Carroll.”

Enjoy the movie!

Scene on Campus Photos of the Day, 4/3

The Prestige Gallery has been many, many moons in the making but is nearing completion. During advisory today some of the finishing touches were applied. The idea of a snow-pool-like "guestimate" of the official opening day has heretofore been floated. 

Nordic Girls Sweep...Again!

The Nordic girls once again flexed their muscles, taking the top four places yesterday at Auburn Ski Club's combination race. This video clip shows the mid-race ski switch from skate to classic, or vice-versa...

Scene on Campus: Clean and Other Advisory Action

Prestige Gallery in the making

Chris Fitzpatrick on the palm sander,
Ambrose on supervision

Austin Peña and Spencer Crist on Clean

SBA Student/Athletes Wade into Political Consulting

"We picked Romney because we felt he had the largest chance out of all of the candidates since he has been steady in the polls throughout the entire race thus far. The race is getting more interesting!!" - Cassidy Cichowicz

Put in the shoes of hired political consultants for an AP English Language and Composition project, SBA student/athletes Grace Hutton, Dylan Murtha, and Cassidy Cichowicz delivered the advertisement below for Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney.

"Back in December the AP Language students chose Romney as the most likely to win the Republican nomination and the election, based on the various candidates' relative appeals and liabilities," said teacher Ambrose Tuscano. "They did a lot of background research on the primary candidates and watched a bunch of ads to get the flavor of the race, looking at all the details of making an effective, persuasive (campaign) commercial." The objective of this assignment was for students to use the fundamentals of persuasive rhetoric to produce an ad that would appeal to South Carolinian Republican voters in the run up to that state's primary.

"Students did research on South Carolina's Republican electorate and then chose the type of ad they wanted to produce (positive or negative) and the main themes they hoped to touch on," Tuscano said. "From there, each student scripted a 20-second piece of ad that would highlight one or two of the themes the class had chosen to evoke--patriotism, fiscal acumen, etc. The finished product, not surprisingly, turned out to be a lot like some real ads the Romney campaign was running in South Carolina."

After creating their ad, AP Language students will be looking at how candidates prepare for a debate and write a speech. Each step of the process is heavily dependent on rhetoric (or persuasion), which is a primary focus of the AP Language course.

Scene on Campus Photo of the Day, Fri., Dec. 16th

Team Nordic Gathers Around Coach Schloss

SBA Alpine, Nordic Skiers Unite to Sweep U-17 Podiums at Pole, Peddle, Paddle

Pole Paddle Paddlers strike the standard Team Nordic dinosaur pose

From the office of Head Nordic Coach Jeff "el Jefe" Schloss comes the following Marmot news flash of SBA Alpine and Nordic skiers joining forces to sweep podiums: 

Springtime in the mountains of California and Oregon offers a wide range of outdoor sports, from skiing to biking to kayaking and a host of other options. 

The small city of Bend, Oregon has created a novel race to celebrate this diversity of outdoor activities called the "Pole Pedal Paddle."

The race consists of six different legs: first a downhill Super G race on Mt Bachelor, then an 8k Nordic race, followed by a 22-mile road bike ride, then a 5-mile trail run, then to the Deschutes River for a 1.5-mile kayak, and finally a half-mile running sprint to the finish in River Bend Park in downtown Bend. 

The race can be contested by individuals doing all six legs, by teams of six people each doing one leg, or by the way SBA athletes choose to compete, as two person “pairs teams” where two teammates split the six events.

The SBA Nordic team paired themselves up and recruited two SBA alpine racers, Dylan Brooks and Scott Cooper to round out the teams. Nordic Coaches Ambrose Tuscano and Jeff Schloss somehow rounded up enough kayaks and bikes for the six different pairs teams and it was off to Bend for a fun weekend of racing and lots of equipment logistics.

With over 3000 people racing the whole town of Bend seemed PPP crazy. Everywhere you looked there were cars with bikes and kayaks on the roofs and fit looking people running around trying to figure out what to do with all of their outdoor toys.  Eventually everything was in place and the starting gun went off on a cool cloudy day at Mt Bachelor. As expected the SBA alpine racers aggressively opened up some impressive leads on the alpine leg and then it became a race of endurance with teams changing places throughout the several hour race.

By the finish, SBA teams were dominating the pairs division with Austin Meng and Evan Dion winning their age division in Male Pairs, Cassidy Cichowicz and Scott Cooper winning their age division in Coed Pairs, followed closely by Danielle Nivinski and Dylan Brooks in second, and Bria Riggs and Alec Wiltz in third. Also representing SBA was the coaches team of Ambrose and Jeff, second in their category, and SBA alumni Corey Talbott second in his age group in  the individual category.  Even SBA parents were represented in the race, as moms Julie Riggs and Leisa Runyan paired up for the event.

All in all, it was a super successful race and was a great low-key way to finish the 2010/2011 race season. It’s a long way off, but its not too early to start thinking about the logistics for next year's event - what legs do you want to do?

Jeff failed to mention that Coach Tuscano was able to keep his whiskers after making a friendly wager with Team Meng/Dion. The Beard remains! 

Thank you, Jefe, for this detailed report.

Way to represent, Marmot student/athletes, faculty, coaches AND parents! 

"Respectable Doctor or Body Snatcher?"

Injun Joe accusing Muff Potter of murder

What was a respectable town doctor doing with two miscreants in a graveyard the night of his murder?

Was Muff Potter framed? Did Injun Joe do it? 

Bringing The Adventures of Tom Sawyer back to life earlier this year in high-tech, journalistic fashion, Ambrose Tuscano's eighth-grade English class wrote, designed and published a sensational edition of The St. Petersburg Herald, featuring opinion pieces and complete news coverage of the circumstances surrounding the murder of Dr. Robinson and the disappearance of Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn and Joe Harper.  

Ambrose supplied the following overview of the class project: 

The point of the paper was to get kids to think hard about the important plot elements of the story, and they also had to place themselves in the setting so as to distinguish between things a reader would know and things a resident of St. Petersburg would know. I think that their reading comprehension was better than it would have been if we'd just been reading the book and not writing the paper simultaneously. 

Basically the kids applied for jobs at a made-up newspaper in St. Petersburg (setting of Twain's story) during the time when ATS takes place. We had several types of editors, graphic designers, photographers, and columnists, and I tried to give each student one of his/her first choices of job. 

Each student wrote two pieces for the paper, though some jobs required additional writing. The kids really enjoyed Tom Sawyer, and I like to think they learned something about what it takes to produce a finished, published piece of writing in the process. 

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The "printing press" that our graphic designers were working on is actually Adobe InDesign, a state-of-the-art piece of software that is used for designing professional print media of all stripes. It's a rather complicated program to master, but it does allow users to put anything they can imagine onto the page. 

Students assigned to graphic designer jobs had to work hard to learn how to create and manipulate text, photos, and graphic objects. For this particular project, our aim was to recreate the look of a mid-19th century publication, so digital color photos had to be processed with Adobe Photoshop to become black and white and look more like something that could have been taken with early film cameras. All told, the kids learned some valuable real-world skills and gained respect for the work that goes into producing real daily newspapers.

The process of determining which stories would be written was one of the most important for this project. Each time we finished a significant chunk of reading we would have a "staff meeting" in which all newspaper employees would brainstorm possible story ideas from the reading. This process helped students focus in on the major events of the story, but also made them think about it through the prism of what residents of St. Petersburg would have known about Tom Sawyer's Adventures. Not all of his exploits were public knowledge, for instance, which forced students to think about what information they could include in newspaper stories and what they couldn't. Where good information was not provided in the story, students did have to creatively extend the story to create names for unnamed minor characters, create backstory where none was provided, and envision events that readers did not witness. All in all, a positive experience with some great learning opportunities.

Thanks, Ambrose, for the copy and for the great teaching! Clicking on any of the newspaper thumbnails below will allow you to view pages of The St. Petersburg Herald in full(er) size.