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The sun came out on Saturday at Dartmouth’s Oak Hill Ski Center in Hanover, New Hampshire. The best collegiate skiers in the country gathered in Hanover, New Hampshire, for a week of racing at the NCAA Championships. The final races of the week were the nordic distance races, 20km freestyle for both the men and women. University of Utah’s Joe Davies skied away with the national title on Saturday, much like how his team gapped the competition.
Though Utah’s nordic and alpine teams combined points ultimately created an unclosable gap, the championships started off close. In the first nordic races, the 7.5km men’s and women’s classic race, it was the host school Dartmouth who had the top racers.
In the men’s 7.5km classic race, Dartmouth’s John Steel Hagenbuch won by 16 seconds over UVM’s Finn Sweet. It was his second NCAA title, having won the 7.5km skate competition in 2024. Steel Hagenbuch’s teammates Luke Allen and Cooper Camp finished 4th and 9th, respectively. They combined for 93 points, besting Utah by nine points. Rounding out the podium was Utah’s Joe Davies, who just days before the competition was in Trondheim, Norway, racing in the World Championships skiathlon. Competing under the Great Britain flag, he finished 24th, 1:31.8 behind Johannes Klaebo.
Utah earned their first individual win of the 2025 NCAA championships when Erica Laven won the 7.5km women’s classic race. Annie McCulgan of UVM finished second and Dartmouth placed three in the top eight. Jasmine Drolet, Ava Thurston and Nina Seeman finished third, fourth and eighth, respectively. The Dartmouth women tallied 88 points for a slim two-point edge over Utah.
As the competitions continued at the Dartmouth Skiway, Utah’s men’s and women’s alpine teams both scored the most points in the Giant Slalom. They opened up a sizable lead that would be incredibly difficult for the trailing Dartmouth and University of Colordao to close.
After Davies took control of the men’s 20km freestyle on Sunday, that lead became impossible to catch.
Oak Hill has undergone major renovations in the past few years, and the newly homologated races loops were on full display during the championships. The configuration is such that fans can see racers in multiple spots, so as the laps ticked away during the 20km, fans watched as Davies pulled farther and farther away from Steel Hagenbuch, ultimately winning by over a minute. It’s his second NCAA title. His first was in 2023 at the 10km skate in Lake Placid, when he was a sophomore racing for UAF. That year, Steel Hagenbuch finished second.
Having Davies and Steel Hagenbuch leave the championship with one win each is fitting. They’ve dominated their respective sides of the country and met at NCAA’s to jockey for podium positions over the last couple of years – all while benefitting from the relatively new mentality that allows collegiate skiers to compete in both college races and on the World Cup, instead of having to choose between domestic and international competition.
For Steel Hagenbuch, it’s extra sweet to have gotten a win at home. Though he grew up in Idaho, he comes from a family of Dartmouth athletes and has added greatly to that legacy.
After the men finished, the competition was still close for who would finish runner-up in the team competition: Dartmouth had a 14-point lead over Colorado.
It didn’t take long for Kendall Kramer of UAF and Erica Laven of Utah to create a gap over Colorado’s Tilde Baangman and Denver’s Lea Wenaas. Behind them was a dense chase pack. But once Kramer decided to go, she was gone. She skied in total control, her crisp tempo unchanging over Oak Hill’s rigorous climbs. She finished 35 seconds ahead of Laven, taking a bow as she came across the line. This has been an impressive year for Kramer in the 20km: In February, she won the 20km at U.S. Nationals in Anchorage.
After all had finished, the points were tallied. Colorado, who won the NCAA team title in 2024, had two women in the top 10 in the 20km to Dartmouth’s one. They scored 20 more points than Dartmouth in the women’s race to overtake them and finish in second for the week-long team competition.
The NCAA Championships are dominated by the Western schools – Utah has now won six of the last seven championships. So to see Dartmouth finish runner-up on their home turf, in a star senior’s year, on that sugary, spring East coast snow, would’ve felt like a fitting end to this story. But even though it’s not the result they wanted, it takes nothing away from what was accomplished at Oak Hill, and the successful championships they hosted there.
Complete NCAA Championship Results
