When the Paul J. Finnegan Family Head Coach for Harvard Nordic Skiing role opened up last spring, a handful of Cate Brams’ former skiers reached out, urging them to apply for the job.
Brams, a Belmont native, initially hesitated, having only been an assistant coach at the University of Denver for one season. After giving it more thought and talking with their circle, Brams applied, received an offer, and moved back to the area in late July.
“The group is great. From the jump, they’ve been super motivated, asked really good questions and super fired up,” said Brams, 29. “Being in an athletic department that has 42 sports, there are a lot of opportunities to learn from coaches who have been here for a long time and learn from which has been great for me personally.”
After graduating from Belmont High School in 2014, Brams went on to a four-year career on the ski team at Middlebury College, helping the Panthers to the 2018 NCAA Championships as a senior. Brams also served as a team captain and earned Eastern Intercollegiate Ski Association All-East First Team honors.
Brams spent one season as a professional ski racer with the Sun Valley Ski Education Foundation Gold Team in Ketchum, Idaho, before a two-year AmeriCorps stint in Boston as a legal advocate with the Volunteer Lawyers Project of the Boston Bar Association. While with AmeriCorps, Brams co-led the Eastern Mass Cross Country (EMXC) youth club (formerly Cambridge Sports Union, where Brams raced in high school) before becoming the full-time head coach for two years, designing and directing training plans for more than 50 high school-aged athletes while managing assistant and volunteer assistant coaches.
According to Brams, Boston, Minneapolis, Minnesota and Anchorage, Alaska, are the three significant hotbeds for youth Nordic skiing.
“It was really cool to work with kids who … asked really good questions, kind of wanting to be nerds about the sport in a way I appreciated and excited me,” Brams said. “Boston is unique in that you get a whole community like that. It was cool to be working with a group that, for the most part, was very representative of this area, which has a ton of colleges, universities and opportunities.”
At EMCX, Brams won the New England Nordic Ski Association Coach of the Year Award in 2022. They helped seven student-athletes qualify for the 2023 Junior National Championships and helped nine earn junior All-American nods.
From there, Brams took an assistant coaching job with the University of Denver’s ski program, spending one season with the Pilots, helping them to a third-place finish at the 2024 NCAA Championships and coaching five All-Americans before Brams took their new role at Harvard.
A member of the Eastern Intercollegiate Ski Association, Harvard Nordic competes from January to March at sites across the region in Maine, New York, Vermont and New Hampshire. The team consists of 10 athletes. The university also sports an Alpine ski team with the same number of competitors. Casual observers might differentiate Nordic skiing as cross-country skiing and alpine as downhill. For fall practices, team members roller-skate and run all around Boston. Winter training is at the Leo J. Martin golf course in Weston, also the site where Brams learned how to ski.
Brams, the most recent college graduate serving as a Harvard head coach, started leading practices at the beginning of September, well ahead of the competition schedule. Dartmouth is the only other Ivy League school that fields a ski team of any type. Brams said their goal is to offer a program for high-level skiers with lofty academic aspirations.
“We have a group that really wants to create the idea that Harvard’s a place you can go and be a really strong skier while getting a really good education,” Brams said. “What we’re working on now is how to be a team and group of individuals that lives that day-to-day.”
