Spring may not seem the most likely season for a young person’s thoughts to turn to skiing, but mid-May is when local cross-country skier Maya MacIsaac-Jones accepted her nomination to the Canadian junior national team.
For the 19-year-old skiing wunderkind, the upcoming ski season will be her fourth and last with the junior national team.
“It will be my last opportunity to try and qualify for the world junior championships,” said MacIsaac-Jones. “(It’s) basically just an important year because it will set me up for next year in terms of if I qualify for any senior national teams.”
Trials for the Nordic Junior World Ski Championships are in January 2015. While MacIsaac-Jones didn’t qualify last year, she did the year prior.
This year, worlds will be held in Kazakhstan.
Though the ski season doesn’t officially start until around November/December, MacIsaac-Jones has plenty of summer training plans with her ski team, the Rocky Mountain Racers out of the Calgary/Canmore area. She just finished a camp in B.C., and this week she heads to a glacier near Canmore.
“We’ll be skiing there for a week on the snow, and actually my younger brother and sister, Michael and Anna, will be coming to that as well,” she said.
Her spot on the national team doesn’t augment her summer training opportunities, but it does help in other ways.
“Basically with the junior national team, we receive some funding with Cross-Country Canada to just put towards racing, travel costs — things like that. And then we also receive some sponsorship deals and just racing equipment,” she said.
Off the ski trails, MacIsaac-Jones is taking courses through Athabasca University towards a bachelor of arts with a major in humanities. She hopes to complete her degree while continuing to ski, even though that means a schedule as packed as a well-set ski trail.
“With skiing, basically, it’s training six days a week, and the volume hours can range anywhere between 10 and 20 hours per week, so it’s a fairly busy schedule,” she said.
MacIsaac-Jones’s connection to Athabasca goes beyond her family roots and post-secondary institution of choice: she said she’s grateful for the all the community support she still receives, especially local sponsorship through Lincoln County Oilfield Services.
Reflecting on the season just ended, MacIsaac-Jones said highlights included the western Canadian championships in Prince George, B.C., and nationals in Newfoundland.
“It was really nice to go to Newfoundland and just travel to a different part of the country,” she said.
Her second-place finish in the skate-sprint at nationals didn’t hurt, either.
This year, MacIsaac-Jones is turning her eyes to the Canada Winter Games in Prince George, which only happen once every four years. She participated in the last Canada Winter Games in Halifax in 2011.
“For Canada Games, I would say I have quite a good chance at qualifying. And for world juniors, I think it just depends on how my training season goes. I think I have a good shot, but it’s hard to tell at this point,” she said.
