CAMERON SUMMERTON
csummerton@sunapeeschools.org
Lebanon Outing Club
The Definition of Success
February 2018, Salisbury Connecticut. For three years I worked to get to this point, non-stop, year-round. Training as much as I could taking trips across the country to train and it all came down to this. There were three of us sitting around that table looking at each other one of us was about to get on a plane in two weeks and fly to Anchorage Alaska to compete in Junior Nationals and two of us were going home. The entire team had been called and I knew that the last spot was going to be decided by less than a point. That five seconds before they called my name was the longest five seconds of my life. When they called my name, it was the best feeling in the world. Three weeks later I came dead last in individuals at Junior Nationals. For me, though it didn’t matter what place I had just come in, I had just been introduced to a group of kids that would become some of my lifelong friends.
For the last two years, this group of people has become my family away from home. For months we would live together and grow as a team. It was never the ski jumping or the countless hours of training that would bring us closer together. It was showing up to the hill four hours before we were supposed to start jumping and re-cutting a track in the hill or raking out a landing hill or hauling five-gallon buckets of snow up the tower of the jump to fill in where the track had melted the night before. When you are a ski jumper you can’t just show up to the hill and expect to be jumping. Most days we would grab a rake and a shovel and start working on the hill so we could train. For me this made me grow as a person. If you need something done, you get it done, no ifs and or buts about it. As I grew as a jumper and moved up to national competitions, one of the hardest things was not being able to help get the hill ready before a competition and then the competition getting delayed due to lack of help.
The hardest part of being part of a junior national team is maybe one person will make it to the national team. For many of us, it was never a goal of making the US team or making it to the Olympics. It was to grow as a team and a family, to push your boundaries and to become the best that we could be. The Eastern Junior National team has shaped me into the person I am and without it and the friends I have made I don’t know where I would be today. Some say it would be a failure to work so hard for something and come up short, but in life, one may see failure but to another, it’s the biggest success of their life.
WHAT HAVE WE HERE? NORDIC COMBINED SURGES TO THE LEAD! In both donors and dollars!
ALL FUNDS, WHETHER DONATED THROUGH THE NORDIC COMBINED OR THE SKI JUMPING LINK, WILL GO TO THE DEVELOPMENT AND TOP TEAMS OF BOTH PROGRAMS!
CONSIDER A DONATION IN (HIGHLY APPRECIATED) STOCK
USANS is set-up to accept donations of public stocks. As a donor you get full credit tax write off for the value of the stock and avoid paying any taxes on the capital gain associated with that stock. Win Win! INSTRUCTIONS: Wire stock to LPL Financial, DTC 0075; Account: USA Nordic no. 3532-8923; contact: Paul Tan. If you have questions, call or email Paul Tan at (435)962-4548 or paul.tan@lpl.com
