Crested Butte – Buried in debt with dwindling enrollment, the 11-year-old Crested Butte Academy buckled in 2003.
In nine days that year, school supporters and parents rallied to scrape together more than $600,000 – including a $300,000 gift from a California tea magnate – to save the distressed school from closure. But success for the eighth-grade-and-up academy remained elusive.
“I gave it a one-in-a-100 chance, but it was worth taking that chance,” said Warren Witherell, a skiing legend whose two-year tenure at Crested Butte Academy is aiming to put the school on track to become the West’s top sports academy.
Two years later, a vibrant community of students with three young alpine skiing champs, a national-class miler, two freeride skiing medalists and a handful of snowboarding champions indicates Witherell’s plan is working.
“We aren’t there yet, but we are much better than where we were two years ago,” he said.
Skiing is familiar ground for Witherell. He penned the definitive book “How the Racers Ski,” which defined the edge-first-then- pressure carving turn prevalent today. He designed water skis. He’s in the halls of fame for snow skiing and waterskiing. But his real legacy is found at Vermont’s acclaimed Burke Mountain Academy, which he founded in 1970 with one student and served as the school’s headmaster for 14 years, a tenure that included the inception of nearly 30 more ski academies following the Burke model. Reviving Crested Butte Academy was not unlike starting Burke from scratch, he said.
Redefining the mission
In April 2004, Witherell, who had helped the academy’s trustees form the school in 1992, came out of retirement and took the headmaster reins with the goal of transforming the “mountain school” into a “world-class sports academy.”
“The only chance we had to survive was to have a niche, and we have something right outside our window that no other school in Colorado has,” Witherell said. “We needed to emphasize this mountain. We needed to be a true sports academy – a world-class sports academy.”
That focus on athletics has left some teachers pining for a stronger emphasis on academics and preparing students for college. Seven of eight teachers at the school are leaving this year.
Witherell has hired seven new teachers and veteran alpine ski coach Crawford Pierce – another former Burke Mountain ski skipper. But rumbling at the campus indicates some unrest at the headmaster’s unwavering focus on athletics. Is the balance of the sports academy listing too heavily toward sports?
Maybe. If it is, that’s a good thing for Carol Kemp.
Her son John always has been a natural athlete. He has struggled in school, though. His learning disability, while not earning him easy A’s and B’s, has translated into an asset on the ski hill. He is intensely focused while ski racing. Not surprisingly, racing is his life, his mother said. The balance of schoolwork and ski training at the academy has ignited a fire in her son.
“His progress has been light years, and that has transferred over to the hill, too,” she said of her 16-year-old son, who this year ranks No. 1 in the world for giant slalom in his age group. “He is absolutely driven, and he knows what he has to do to be successful. I’ve never seen him work this hard.”
Witherell is unapologetic in his elevation of athleticism as an equal to academic development. Emphasizing sports never means sacrificing intellectual stimulation, he said. Athletes post their best grades while in the meat of a rigorous competition schedule, he said, pointing to the school’s top athletes: ski racer Elizabeth Woods and runner Daniel Roberts. Woods recently was named to the U.S. Ski Team’s development squad, and this spring Roberts posted what were the fourth- and fifth-best mile times in the nation this year. Both are straight-A students, despite missing as many as 60 days of class a year.
“Elizabeth has really accomplished her dream, and I don’t think she could have done that anyplace else,” said Julie Ann Woods, whose son Tim also excels at Crested Butte Academy.
For the 2005-06 school year, full-time students paid $32,000 for tuition, room and board (day students paid $18,000). There is a five-month winter term that costs $20,500.
Tapping the pipeline
At Burke, Witherell oversaw the grooming of about 35 Olympians and 20 world champions. Crested Butte Academy could do the same, but it’s not in a position to compete with the established Eastern ski academies such as Burke, Stratton and Green Mountain in the fight for students. Witherell has a plan to tap the smaller ski clubs in the Midwest as seed programs for his school, much like the Eastern academies scour the hundreds of ski clubs in the East. Crested Butte Academy is bolstering its summertime athletics with a running program based on the increasingly popular philosophy of high-altitude training.
The running angle could prove a powerful student magnet as coach Trent Sanderson touts the athletic benefits of running and sleeping at 9,000 feet.
The academy’s running and skiing programs are following the traditional mold of ski academies. The school’s snowboarding program – its largest with a vibrant community of 34 students, many paying full tuition – is forging a new model for sports academies with its emphasis on park-and-pipe snowboarding and even skateboarding.
But to get to the top, academy snowboarding coach John Chorlton knows he has to counter the counterculture vibe that anchors snowboarding. He travels to pro events with a horde of aspiring and hyper-skilled academy riders, and he cringes when they see top-name riders partying and pretty much dismissing the notion that hard work, diligence and focus are key to success.
Dedication and toil are hard sells in Crested Butte, where, like most resort mountain towns, hedonism is celebrated as an art form.
“All these kids hear from us is ‘no drinking, no smoking, no partying’ and everyone else is saying ‘party, party, party,”‘ said Chorlton, the co-coach of the academy’s snowboard program, which last year fielded 15 athletes in the U.S. snowboarding national competition.
Growing pains
The academy has matured along with its scholar-athletes. Crested Butte Academy began with students meeting in a former church. The school struggled from its inception. Struggle reached crisis in December 2003 when an audit revealed dwindling enrollment and annual deficits had left the school $600,000 in debt. Enrollment was down to 40 students, far from the academy norm of at least 60.
Three days after students left for Christmas break in 2003, the academy’s board of trustees voted to close the school. About three dozen parents defied the dire outlook and breathed a last financial breath into the school in a fundraising blitz. The school opened after Christmas break, wobbling but standing. Witherell arrived in the spring, promising new life for the academy.
After spring graduation in 2004, a mere 24 students were returning. Witherell recruited Team Summit ski coaches Rob and Anje Worrell from their successful program in Summit County, and they brought 15 students from Summit County to Crested Butte. That saved an alpine skiing program that had withered to four racers. Worrell last month took a regional coaching gig with the U.S. Ski Team.
By fall 2004, Witherell had 64 students enrolled in Crested Butte Academy. He reduced scholarship grants from 34 percent to 25 percent. He secured a $1.6 million loan, guaranteed by the Town of Crested Butte and Gunnison County.
Last month the academy negotiated a complex refinancing worth $3.95 million, which allowed the school to buy the Inn at Crested Butte for $1.9 million. The new 9,000-square-foot facility across the street from the academy’s campus will add 12 more rooms for students and three staff apartments, giving the academy a total of 54 student dorms and solid footing for its mission to be world-class.
Crested Butte Academy grads – there are about 110 now – leave the school with a tremendous sense of individuality, said Kristi Murrin, a math and science teacher whose mad kayaking skills are fueling a small but diligent cadre at the school.
“They know who they are. They can rise to any occasion. I’m always amazed at how much they believe in themselves and how well they know exactly what they want from life,” she said.
“I’m a big supporter of the idea that outdoor success, it really prepares students for life on their own. It creates balanced people and it fosters community.”
