Geo-Skiers: Duo Makes NCAAs
They love snow. They love the
outdoors. They love geology. Is it any wonder they ended up at Michigan
Tech?
Two Tech seniors, Chris Seaman
and Amanda Shanight, qualified for the 2001 NCAA nordic skiing championships.
Both have skied since they were small. Both came to Michigan Tech for
the skiing and for its reputation in engineering.
Seaman placed 31st in the NCAA
classic race and 17th in the country in the freestyle.
“Chris had an all-star
performance in the freestyle,” said Gary Nichols, MTU’s nordic
ski coach. “He was the seventh American finisher in the race.”
Shanight was the 11th American
woman at the national championship classic race (22nd overall) and placed
27th in the freestyle.
Both have now earned their
degrees in geological engineering, although Seaman will be back next year
to ski again.
“I was injured my freshman
year and had surgery,” he said, “so I have a year of eligibility
left. I’ll start graduate school, which is something I wanted to
do anyway.”
Seaman’s skiing days started
when he was young.
“I have a picture of me
skiing in my back yard when I was about five,” he said. “My
parents both skied and we went out and skied for fun. Then in junior high
I leaned how to skate ski and started racing. I got serious my sophomore
year in high school. I used to play hockey and ski, but I dropped hockey
and started skiing and training year-round.”
“Serious” is a good
word for it. Seaman’s high school team had 120 skiers, “by far
the deepest in the state,” he said.
As he neared the end of his
high school days in Anchorage, Alaska, Seaman knew he wanted to study
engineering and to ski.
“I e-mailed a letter to
every ski team in the country asking for information,” he said. “This
was pretty much the only good engineering school in the country with a
nordic ski team.”
He came to Tech in chemical
engineering, but soon switched to geological engineering. “I want
to get a job back up in Alaska, and this seemed the most logical choice,”
he said.
For the summer and on into
grad school, he will work with Jim Wood, professor of geological engineering,
doing surface soil samples in lower Michigan oil fields. “It is exploration
geochemistry and I’ll be working with new data and some that has
already been collected,” he said.
He will also bike, run, roller
ski, and swim all summer and fall. The ski team will run up and down Ripley
twice a week. They will do a roller ski time trial once a week on the
road from Redridge to Freda.
“Roller skiing is great
until about October, then I really want some snow,” Seaman says.
Shanight’s ski career
also started when she was a youngster in the Minneapolis area.
“My dad used to race the
Birkie in the early ‘80s,” she says, “and we would just
go out touring in the woods. I got serious when I was about 15.”
When it came time for college,
she looked at Tech, Northern Michigan, Montana State, and “a couple
of schools in Wisconsin,” she says. “I had no idea what I wanted
to do, so I was open. I visited Tech and I liked the atmosphere a lot.
I also knew (coach) Gary (Nichols) a little in high school and I knew
some of the team members up here.”
After starting in biology,
she “decided I would probably not go very far with this. I thought
I’d like engineering and thought geological engineering would fit
me perfectly.”
Shanight’s ski career
is over and she will start her professional career in upstate New York,
“where I can continue skiing.” She will work with an environmental
engineering consulting firm.
Both skiers have positive impressions
of their undergraduate days.
“Since the department
is small, you have real good personal relationships with your professors,”
Shanight says. “They respect your abilities, but they don’t
let you get by with anything. And they were very supportive of our athletics.”
Seaman agreed, noting that,
“Sometimes when Amanda and I were in a class together, we were half
the class. The department is small enough where they would change some
class times to accommodate skiing. The student-faculty ratio is just outstanding.
It has been a great experience.”
