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Utah Ski Team claims 2022 NCAA championship on home snow

The 2022 NCAA Champion Utah Ski Team
Sean Higgins
The 2022 NCAA Champion Utah Ski Team

The University of Utah Ski Team secured another NCAA championship Saturday at Soldier Hollow, the 15th in program history.

15 national titles and four in the last six years. That’s how dominant the University of Utah Ski Team has been lately.

The Utes continued their dominance on Saturday by closing out the 2022 NCAA Skiing Championships on top of the podium. The Utes were led by Sophia Laukli’s impressive win in Saturday’s women’s mass start freestyle.

Utah’s women went 1-2 in the final race of the championship. Novie McCabe finished in second place, 34 seconds behind Laukli. Laukli and McCabe were also teammates at the 2022 Olympics for Team USA. The University of New Hampshire’s Jasmine Lyons rounded out the podium in third.

After the race, Laukli said she wasn’t so sure she’d be able to take the win after struggling during her pre-race warm up.

“I felt really good," she said. "I had some really fast skis, so that worked to my advantage and it ended up just playing out really well. I was warming up and I was like, ‘oh no, this might be a long race.’ But, honestly, I tend to race better when I warm up and feel a little bit off, so I was hoping that was going to be the case today and it definitely did work.”

The University of Vermont managed to leapfrog from fourth place after the first day of competition to finish in second. Vermont leaned on a strong team performance in Friday’s slalom races where Mathias Tefre took the men’s title. 2022 Olympian Ben Ogden also took his second win of the series with a gold in the men’s freestyle on Saturday to help Vermont finish on the team podium.

Utah alpine head coach JJ Johnson said even after all the wins, they never get any easier. He credited the team’s closeness for its success over the past few seasons.

“It’s the culture, right?" Johnson said. "It doesn’t matter how good you are or who wants to come here, and the COVID year really brought that together when they had to hang out together. They all love each other and they all want to do it for each other and no one was mad when they were left off the team and it just shows how much support they have.”

Utah took the team title with a total of 578 points to Vermont’s 511. The University of Denver finished in third with 436 points.

Full results from the 2022 NCAA Skiing Championships can be found here.

Sean Higgins covers all things Park City and is the Saturday Weekend Edition host at KPCW. Sean spent the first five years of his journalism career covering World Cup skiing for Ski Racing Media here in Utah and served as Senior Editor until January 2020. As Senior Editor, he managed the day-to-day news section of skiracing.com, as well as produced and hosted Ski Racing’s weekly podcast. During his tenure with Ski Racing Media, he was also a field reporter for NBC Sports, covering events in Europe.