When a 15-year-old boy hears that, on the path he is taking, he’s going downhill — and fast, nearly 100 percent of the time the rest of the discussion does not go well.
To Brandon Zoll, it means job well done.
Zoll, a freshman at Shawano Community High School, is making a name for himself as an elite alpine skier. He recently finished in the top half of an Under-16 competition against the country’s best skiers at the Rocky Central Junior Championships in Steamboat Springs, Colorado; this after winning the silver medal in the Super G event at the Shelly Glover Memorial in Marquette, Michigan, Jan. 16.
Super-G, or super giant slalom, is a speed event, in contrast to the technical events of slalom and giant slalom, wherein skiers must negotiate a series of 50 to 60 gates, 10 to 12 meters apart for the slalom and 24 meters apart in giant slalom.
“The Shelly Glover Memorial was huge,” said Ron Lawrence, a Shawano resident and coach of the Wausau-based Granite Peak Ski Team, of which Zoll is a member. “What he did there was really big. It was the equivalent of a football team winning a state title.”
Zoll is a gifted athlete who played nose tackle for Shawano’s freshman football team last fall, and will high jump and run the 400 for the track team this spring. But ever since the first time he joined his father, Matt, and Lawrence to sample alpine skiing at Michigan’s Norway Mountain, he was irretrievably hooked.
“It’s quite different from everything else I do,” Zoll said. “What I like most about it is the sheer speed. It’s a different state of mind when I’m on the course — knowing that, if I were to fall, I could actually die.”
Sixty miles per hour, wearing no seat belt, with gravity doing its thing — this would indeed be an effective reminder of one’s mortality.
It would also be a fine source of that storied adrenaline rush.
“Brandon has a knack for going fast,” Lawrence said. “He thrives off speed and he’s unshakable when the pressure is on.”
Brandon’s father, Matt Zoll, has coached high school football, basketball and golf at Shawano, and been an assistant coach for the Team Norway ski team for the past five years. When his son joined the Granite Peak Ski Team, dad followed suit, as an assistant coach for the traveling program.
Having a family member on board helps Brandon maintain an arduous practice schedule that involves much time and travel. Brandon also acknowledged the good-hearted nature of his teachers at Shawano for their flexibility in allowing him the wiggle room to complete some of his assignments away from the classroom.
“Often times when you have a promising young skier, the coaches of the national or Olympic ski teams will prefer that the skier not go to college, in order to spend most of their time skiing,” Lawrence said. “It’s an uphill battle to get on a national ski team. It comes down to how much perseverance the skier has. Elementally, they’re still young at 18. There’s that gymnastics philosophy — push you early to get on a team, and if you decide to go to college, it makes it difficult for you.”
Brandon has high hopes for his skiing career — among his next major goals is to qualify for the U-18 national team at Copper Mountain, Colorado. But he’s also an excellent student who plans on going to college to study business.
“Soon I’ll be done with skiing until June, then I’ll go to a camp in Oregon,” he said. “Some mountains there are high enough to where there’s still real snow on them in June. I just want to keep striving to get better. I couldn’t believe I took second place (at the Shelly Glover Memorial). It was very exciting. I’ve loved skiing since I started. So far, this has been my best year.”
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