End of Season Events Celebrating Kids & Skiing

[Sarah Southam]

Dear Outing Club,

Today, just about now, the 2026 Bill Koch Festival is kicking off at Jackson XC Center in Jackson, NH. The Bill Koch Festival is an annual celebration of young cross country skiers (Grades K-8) from New England and this year Maine West Project Play ski club is taking 37 local youth to it! We have kids from the MWPP middle school program, the Saturday morning BKL program and the MKA/MWPP after school program in attendance. Thank you to MWPP program director, Sam Langlois, for her orchestration of getting all those kids registered and organized to go!

Thank you to all of you on the BOC, too! The BOC helps to partially fund these local kids' BKF race registration fees so that they can all attend at a minimal cost. Maine West Project Play, Maine BKL and Telstar also support these athletes - it takes a village - thank you! The BOC also helps purchase skis for many of these kids to use for the ski season. In the past two years, we have added good classic and skate gear to the BOC fleet of skis so that these kids are on up to date equipment.

The BOC Board also met on Thursday Night and voted unanimously to provide $600 to support Grace Scott for her Eastern High School Championships and to provide $800 to support Nyla Scott as part of her costs to compete at Junior Nationals. Both these young women have grown up in the Bethel area, attended local BKL programming, skied with Telstar middle school team and with Gould in high school. We are so excited for them and their passion for cross country skiing! We wish them lots of luck and are super proud of what they have accomplished through LOTS of hard work!

I just wanted to make sure you knew that when you help at the ski sale in October, which seems so long ago, you are helping make all of this happen in the cross country ski community! Thank you!

If you are not a BOC member, but would like to be, you can join HERE.

If you would like to donate to the BOC to help keep good things happening for kids and cross country skiing, you can do so HERE.

I hope you all can get outside to enjoy skiing today - just like all our youth are doing! It's going to be a beautiful day! Remember - you can use the listserv to gather new and old friends to do outdoor activities together. We encourage you to use the listserv for that!

Thanks, Sarah