SBA Clubs

Looking for something to do after school and training? Join one of our SBA clubs! Clubs are open to all students.

Climbing Club
Mondays | 5:00pm | High Altitude Fitness, Truckee

Come climb with the SBA community! Climbing Club will include bouldering and ropes and is open to SBA students and staff. Climbing gym fees apply.

Ceramics Club
Wednesdays | 5:00pm | SBA Ceramics Studio

Join us for Ceramics Club meeting Wednesday’s after training! If you have any interest in ceramics, come check it out.

Young Entrepreneurship Club

Wednesdays | 5:00pm | Academy Building

Develop confidence and experience in entrepreneurship, building a business, and the opportunities that come with thinking BIG!

Journalism and Media Literacy Club

Thursdays | 5:00pm | Academy Building 

Support students who want to dissect hot-button issues, ask questions about the world around them, and share their findings with others.

Journalism Club News Desk

Rapids, Granite, and a Campfire with YOSAR: Our Week in Yosemite

By Angus Blackburn and Kai Hull

The team met at Sugar Bowl at 7:30 a.m., loaded up, and drove to the South Fork of the American River for the first stop of a weeklong trip to Yosemite.

Rafting came first. The rapids only work if everyone paddles together, and it took the morning to figure that out. By the lunch stop halfway down the river, the crew had it.

That night the team stayed at a hotel where the key cards turned out to open every door in the building. It became the running joke of the trip.

The drive to Yosemite the next day took about three hours. In the valley, the team rented cruiser bikes and rode 15 miles, stopping below El Capitan to look up at roughly 3,000 feet of granite.

Camp was at Curry Village. In their free time, skiers bouldered on the rocks around the campsite and traded beta on the harder problems.

The longest day was a 10-mile hike to North Dome. Near the top, the group found a cliff-jumping spot, and every person on the trip jumped into the water, which was freezing. Once they were back down, they cooked pasta in the Curry Village parking lot.

Climbing started at 8 the next morning and ran until 3 p.m. All day, each climber was tied in with a teammate on belay, the person on the ground whose job is to catch a fall. That evening the team grilled burgers at the campsite and played spikeball and football until dark.

For many on the team, the best part of the week came that night. Members of YOSAR, Yosemite’s search and rescue team, joined them at the campfire. They talked about rescues they had worked on and what the job is actually like. Then they gave the team a tour of their camp, where they live six months of the year. The way they described depending on each other was close to what the team had done on the rock that morning. The difference was that, for YOSAR, someone’s life is on the line.

The team drove back to Sugar Bowl the next day, most of them sunburned.

Ice Box, Melting Glaciers, and Warm Yeast Dumplings on the Gondola Ride Down: Our Weeks in Europe

By James Jedlic

The team spent the first week of its October trip to Europe training on snow in a country with no mountains.

Snow Valley, an indoor ski slope in Peer, sits in the flat northeast corner of Belgium. The team trained slalom there from the 13th to the 17th, running roughly 8 runs a day on a hill that was a rough combination of Christmas tree and Union Street, but fully iced over. We got train alongside Mattias Wilson, who is a former SBA PG athlete and now on the US Ski Team. Additionally, we got to see the British ski team athletes train, who are widely regarded as the best indoor skiers in the world. 

It was warmer outside than in. The highs in Belgium reached around 68 Fahrenheit for most of the week, and a band of rain moved across the country on Friday, Oct. 16. That evening the team walked around Peer, and I stopped to photograph a white wooden windmill lit up against the dark sky. 

By Saturday morning the temperature had dropped about 10 degrees, and the team was in the van heading for Austria. By 8:30 a.m. they were past Cologne, and most of the van was asleep. Ryan Russo was the exception, as he stayed up to complete a LEGO set that everyone had told him was a bad idea. 

The second week was giant slalom on the Hintertux Glacier, at the head of the Zillertal valley in Tyrol. Hintertux is the only ski area in Austria that is open year-round, and its lifts go up to 3,250 meters, or about 10,660 feet.

The glacier didn’t have much new snow when the team arrived. Mornings were clear. The groomed pistes ran past walls of exposed blue ice, some taller than a skier, striped with gray layers of old snow and dirt. Below, the valleys were still brown. All athletes who had been going to Hintertux for a while were able to see the saddening melting of the glacier; something which has been increasingly noticeable during our time there. The training was solid with ice as our surface until the final few days when a large storm rolled in. 

On Friday, Oct. 23, the lift station in the valley was packed with other teams waiting to go up, with skis stacked along the barriers. During the worsening weather, Ryan again found himself in a dance battle with a Polish 10-year-old (he lost). That night snow returned to Tyrol’s higher elevations and closed the Zillertal High Road. 

After a long drive back to Munich, everyone took off for dinner, where the team ate a hearty meal at India King. We then all finally flew home the next day.