UNH alum Tim Baucom will be working with Hailey Swirbul and her US Olympic teammates.
Insider Report: Teaming Up Again
1/30/2022 1:14:00 PM | UNH Insider, Skiing
Share:
Alums Baucom, Morehouse Help Olympic Squad Prep, Wax
By: Allen Lessels
Tim Baucom out of Walpole, N.H. and Andrew Morehouse out of North Creek, N.Y. met up early on their freshman year at the University of New Hampshire as Nordic skiers on the Wildcat ski team.
It took little time to form a tight friendship and not much longer than that to form a band.
Both the friendship and the band – Walcrick, playing "mostly Americana, folk, some bluegrass," Baucom said, and featuring originals as well as covers – are still going strong.
Baucom and Morehouse, both 2009 graduates of UNH and residents of Bozeman, Mont., are teaming up again next month at the Beijing Olympics as part of the support staff for the U.S. Nordic Ski Team, helping the nation's top cross country skiers prepare for their races. They also were with the team in the last Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea in 2018.
Baucom is on the ski team staff and travels the Nordic World Cup circuit.
Morehouse, who was on the staff from 2015-19, is coming aboard for the Olympics this time around. He's the Nordic program director and head coach at the Bridger Ski Foundation in Bozeman.
As service technicians, their duties include getting skis ready for competition, a process that involves matching up the correct waxes with the weather and snow conditions – which can change during the course of a day and even within a race – and calls for testing and more testing and then testing again after that.
"Each technician is typically in charge of one or two athletes," Baucom said from Bozeman shortly before starting his journey to Beijing. "A new or younger skier might have 20 pairs of skis. A ski fleet for an athlete that has been around for a number of years might have more like 60-plus pairs of skis. It's a large among of equipment and you have to know everything about those skis and be constantly checking them and changing things out if they're skis they haven't raced on or a pair that hasn't been working for them."
Baucom is working with Hailey Swirbul on the women's side and JC Schoonmaker on the men's, both of whom are in their first Olympics.
Overall, Baucom is in charge of the glide wax side of things with the team. Glide wax is applied to skate skis and the gliding part of classic skis, the tips and tails. It's a substance that makes skis glide fast.
Kick wax is used on classic days (the more traditional style of Nordic where skiers stride in a form more like walking) and is a tacky substance placed on a short span in the middle of classic skis so when pressure is applied (the kick) the wax sticks to the snow and propels the skier forward.
Morehouse will likely help with testing of all sorts.
"The relationship you have with the athlete is a pretty unique feeling and cool," Baucom said. "You become very close professionally. You're working constantly to give them the best ski possible for race day. It's stressful for both parties and at the same time communication is the biggest factor. You have to make sure the athlete and the tech are on the same page as far as what their needs are. The most rewarding parts of the job are the personal relationships with the athletes and working with them on race days."
Being in the stadium when Jessie Diggins and Kikkan Randall won the gold medal in the women's team sprint event at PyeongChang – the first-ever Olympic gold for the US Nordic team – was a thrill.
"That was my biggest takeaway from that Olympics," Baucom said. "It was pretty awesome. For a lot of the staff, it felt more like a relief than anything else. It was a long time coming. There had been expectations in the past that hadn't played out. It's kind of silly to rest all your laurels on one event that happens every four years, but it does help the team as a whole develop and be seen when you win medals. We were pretty psyched about it. We had some other great races there, but it was good to get that evasive medal. That it was gold was obviously extra special."
Baucom and Morehouse and the staff will do their best to give Diggins and Swirbul, Schoonmaker and the rest of the US skiers all the backing they need to perform their best in Beijing.
"They work with some of the best skiers out there and they work with some of the best wax technicians in the world," said Cory Schwartz, UNH's coordinator of skiing and Nordic head coach who does at Wildcat meets what Baucom and Morehouse do for Olympians.
Baucom and Morehouse will be working at the Olympics at a new venue without the base of knowledge they usually have either from previous experience at the site or a bunch of testing going into an event. There were few windows of opportunity to test for these Olympics and the US technicians did not get to the site. All the teams are likely dealing with the same background, Baucom noted.
"It doesn't bother me that much that we don't know much about it," he said. "It's a matter of getting there and starting to work and figuring it out."
A positive going into the Olympics is that the team has worked at developing an atmosphere similar to what Schwartz and his assistant coaches strived for at UNH.
"Our ski camps at that time were in an old house in Franconia called "The Hawk," Baucom said. "After Christmas we'd go up there and it was one big family. The team environment was great, very similar to what the national team is trying to achieve with its optimal team dynamics. I have friends who went to Middlebury and Dartmouth and basically every school in the East and they all remember UNH being a super fun team and they're all jealous of how we got along. We weren't always the powerhouse in the East, but we got good results. For sure, it started with Cory and trickled down."
Walcrick helped, too. The name was built from the hometowns of Baucom and Morehouse and they came up with it about an hour before they played their first gig. They played at Libby's in Durham, at Cinco De Mayo and Homecoming parties and the like. Andrew Morehouse (Left), Tim Baucom (Right)
They played at Tim's wedding – Andrew officiated the ceremony - last September in Bozeman and play around Bozeman, too.
They played at those ski camps as well.
"That was a pretty musical group with Tim and Andrew and a few others," Schwartz said. "Some played and some sang. During trips and those camps we had a lot of music playing."
How often they'll get to play music on their next stop well north of Beijing, given COVID and various other restrictions, remains to be seen.
.png&type=webp)
