Club was smashing success
At Waterville Valley, a time to celebrate
WATERVILLE VALLEY, N.H. - In its infancy in this country, skiing was pioneering. Long before motor-driven lifts were invented, groups of friends headed to the mountains, climbed up carrying their skis, then skied down the untouched terrain on whatever conditions existed.
Most of the clubs that formed around this daredevil new sport have long since disappeared.
But when members and alumni of the Black & Blue Trail Smashers meet at Waterville Valley next week for a reunion, they won't be celebrating merely a glorious past - but also a dynamic present day role in skiing and snowboarding.
At 75 years old, WVBBTS might be celebrated for its rich history dating to the Great Depression era. But in the mid-1960s, the club transformed into an active presence that has produced such Olympians as Felix McGrath (1988) and Nikki Stone, winner of a gold medal in freestyle skiing in 1998, and snowboarder Hannah Kearney who competed in the 2006 Games in Turin.
"The Black & Blue club was just one of many ski clubs that formed around Boston," said Tom Corcoran, a two-time Olympian. "It got inactive around World War II but we were looking to start a racing club at Waterville and we took BBTS, revised the bylaws and made it a racing club."
Corcoran, who skied for Dartmouth and became a four-time national champion, placed fourth in the Giant Slalom at the 1960 Olympics at Squaw Valley.
While working in Colorado, Corcoran was president of the Aspen Ski Club and brought his experience back east when he founded the Waterville Valley resort in New Hampshire's White Mountains.
Though the BBTS was never originally affiliated with his ski resort, the lore and legacy of the old club appealed to Corcoran.
As its name suggests, the early founders of BBTS reveled in the very toughness and challenge of the sport in the 1930s. Based in the Boston area, the group would make the long trek in those days and meet at Waterville Valley to blaze trails and ski.
Armed with axes and saws, the mountaineers would climb up Mount Tecumseh and create the narrow windy trails that once typified New England skiing. On those same trails, they competed with each other in ski races.
Between the climbing, trailblazing, and skiing - so the lore goes - those early founders got so beat up that they adopted the dramatically vivid name for their club, which was active for a decade until World War II.
At Waterville Valley, Corcoran met the only remaining original founder of BBTS, "Doc" Sosman, who lived in Concord and had a ski house in the Valley. Together with Anna McIntyre, who became famous for her "Anna's Army" of volunteers working FIS ski races, the trio launched the new incarnation of the Black & Blue Trail Smashers.
"We had very strong ideas about what made a racing club successful," Corcoran said this week. "Particularly what had to be the relationship between a ski club and a ski area. A ski area could start a race program, but it would be a mistake to try and run it. As the programs matured [the ski resort] had to turn them over to the club, and we needed a lot of volunteer help from parents. If they think they're being asked to volunteer in an activity that profits a ski area, they think they're getting ripped off."
So independence was one of the early building blocks of a racing club that quickly became entwined with international ski racing. For the next two decades, as the competitive world expanded for BBTS, Corcoran brought 11 World Cup races to Waterville Valley, the most by far of any eastern area.
Meanwhile, BBTS expanded into education, forming the Waterville Valley Academy, located in the village, and providing students with a five-month season of academics and snowsports training.
Says Corcoran of the development of BBTS in the four decades since he, Sosman, and McIntyre reinvented an ancient club, "It's really been a lot more of a success than I thought it would be. It's one of the biggest most successful clubs in North America and put a lot of kids on the US Team in alpine, freestyle, and snowboarding.
"But it was the parents who really took off with it. They've made good decisions and put a lot of money into it. I'm very, very proud to see what has become of it."
The 75th anniversary weekend (March 20-22) will feature competition, a dinner, and the establishment of a WVBBTS Hall of Fame.
In alpine ski racing, the Trail Smashers' most successful athletes include McGrath, Hilary McCloy, and Nick Baker. Freestyle skiers include Stone, Kearney, Dylan Ferguson, Kayla Snyderman, and Tim Preston.
Snowboarders include Pete Thorndike, Michael Gorgone, Chaz Guldmond, Pat Moore, and Tim Humphreys.
