Jolie Ritzo ’04 schools the next generation of skiing and snowboarding Olympic hopefuls at Carrabassett Valley Academy

Story and photo by Marc Glass

In the timber-framed foyer of Carrabassett Valley Academy’s new Spencer L. Murfey Jr. Hall, built in the shadow of Maine’s Sugarloaf ski resort, Jolie Ritzo ’04 sits cross-legged on a sofa, discussing her teaching career at the private college-preparatory school. A few students—most of whom would like nothing more than to follow CVA alumni Kristen Clark, Bode Miller, and Seth Wescott to National, Olympic, and World Cup podiums—stroll in from a late-winter training session and say hello to their teacher en route to their residence hall rooms. Above Ritzo, mounted near a window with a view of Sugarloaf, is a vivid acrylic painting of the iconic 4,237-foot mountain. Lest there’s any doubt, skiing and snowboarding loom large here.



Ritzo, however, works to make sure neither activity dominates her students’ lives. In her classroom, for instance, there’s one creative writing topic that won’t make the grade.

“They’re so passionate about their sport that I have to say, ‘Tell me more about yourself than your love of skiing and snowboarding,’” says Ritzo, who teaches English, social studies, and health to CVA eighth- and ninth-graders. “We have very goal-oriented kids here, but we can’t allow skiing and snowboarding to be the only focus. It has to be balanced by all of the rest of the things that go into making us who we are.”

While her students passionately hone their ability to hurtle downhill, pursuing cleaner lines to faster and faster times, Ritzo—a 1999 CVA graduate and former ski racer—knows the post-graduate reality: Rarely will more than two boys and two girls from each birth year be nominated to the U.S. Ski Team’s development team. Not the World Cup- and Olympics-competing U.S. Ski Team—the development team.

“Our alumni are doing some amazing things, and a lot of it doesn’t have to do with skiing,” she says. “Our goal as a faculty is to help these students leave here as well-rounded, responsible people. It’s important for our student-athletes to understand they may not always be a ski racer or a competitive snowboarder.”

So, for Ritzo’s students the après-ski scene involves school work—and lots of it. Ninety-eight percent of CVA alumni go to college, and given how much learning, skiing, and snowboarding CVA students pack into a typical day, they graduate with superior time-management skills.

As her students spend most mid-winter weekends competing at regional venues like Lake Placid, N.Y., and Stowe, Vt., Mondays, says Ritzo, “are academically counterbalanced to the weekend athletics,” with seven classes of “unbroken instructional time” stretching to late afternoon.

The rest of the week, the school’s 115 students have all their classes in the morning before an afternoon sports block of skiing, riding, mountain biking, or dryland training, according to the season. Classes then resume until 5:30 p.m., followed by dinner and a mandatory study hall.

“I can barely talk at the end of a Monday,” says Ritzo, who prepares lessons, corrects papers and tests, and consults with colleagues while students train during the day. “I can tell when they’re tired, too. They wear it.”

By season’s end, when students can be away for a week or more competing at, for instance, the U.S. Nationals in Alaska or the Junior World Championships in Japan, Ritzo develops travel-friendly distance-learning activities, and provides class notes and assignment feedback via Edline, CVA’s online classroom. CVA Tube, a Web site that allows traveling students to follow along in any time zone, features video recordings of lessons and teachers’ notes gleaned from digital smart boards in CVA classrooms. And coaches, who administer tests and quizzes on the road, make sure students spend at least three hours on school work each day they’re away from CVA.

“You’re kind of working around student sports here, but that’s in no way to say that academics are less important,” she says. “Our students can be all over the world and check back with the classroom. We integrate the co-curricular and academics very well.”

Ritzo, who majored in community health education at UMF, started her college studies at the University of New Hampshire. But after taking several intro-level courses “with upwards of 300 students,” she found the school “overwhelming in its size.”

Her parents, she says, encouraged her to come home and “take classes at UMF to sort out what I wanted to do.” Asked why she stayed, she recalls sitting roundtable-style with 12 other students in a creative writing course taught by Professor Pat O’Donnell. “It was awesome,” she says. “I was used to growing up in a small-school community where people make eye contact with you, and it was right there again at UMF.”

Yearning for a strong sense of community in her career, Ritzo returned to teach at CVA, where she and her husband, Chad (an instructor in the school’s Alpine Leadership Pursuits for Skiers and Riders program), live among and mentor students in Murfey Hall. And with her father, John, as school headmaster and her mother, Patty, as a teaching colleague, Ritzo holds herself to high standards in the classroom.

“In high school, I didn’t want to get in trouble and let them down. It would have been embarrassing,” she says. “I know my husband is now in that same boat. I’ve always thought of it as my parents’ school. I definitely think about that now as a teacher. I want to do a good job for them.”