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Kendall Kramer poses in her UAF cross-country skiing garb before the 2024-2025 season.

By Sam Bishop

When UAF skier Kendall Kramer finished less than a half-second out of first place in a 20-kilometer freestyle race in February, her coach felt puzzled.

“I’m like, ‘Oh, weird,” said Eliska Albrigtsen, recalling her reaction after Kramer’s performance in the 2025 collegiate regional championships in Anchorage.

“She skied behind Erica Laven from Utah the whole time,” said Albrigtsen, UAF’s head skiing and running coach. “And we were like, ‘Come on, Kendall, you going to push and just get away from her?’ Because we knew she could do it.”

Albrigtsen knew that because, just the month before, Kramer had edged Laven by about two seconds to win the 20K classical race at the U.S. Cross Country Ski Championships.

So, it was no fluke in early March when Kramer vindicated Albrigtsen’s confidence at the 2025 National Collegiate Athletic Association championships in Hanover, New Hampshire.

The morning of the 20K freestyle events, former Nanook Joe Davies, skiing for the perennial powerhouse University of Utah, won the men’s race.

The women’s race came next. Laven, a Utah freshman from Sweden, and Kramer, who grew up in Fairbanks, were among the favorites.

“And I was like, ‘Kendall, I hope you're not going to let Utah sweep,’” Albrigtsen recalled. “And she's like, ‘Yeah, don't worry.’ And, at that point, I knew she was ready. I knew she had a plan, and I knew she's going to go for it.”

Go for it, she did. At the finish line, Kramer was more than 35 seconds ahead of Laven.

Kramer became the national collegiate 20K freestyle champion in 50 minutes, 14.2 seconds, a gratifying finale to her stellar skiing and running career at UAF.

Building up UAF

Such performances — not only from Kramer but also from several fellow student-athletes in recent years — have brought UAF growing attention in national skiing and running circles.

“I think that [UAF] has built itself up as having a really good work ethic, like consistently good results,” Kramer said in an interview a few weeks after her NCAA skiing victory.

UAF also has a fun team whose members hang out together, Kramer said. “And that's really attractive,” she said.

Albrigtsen, the head coach, said she has already seen that attraction at work as young skiers have sought out UAF. The buzz hasn’t been limited to the women’s team, she noted.

“It's always good to hear when the guys are like, ‘Oh, wow, you guys have a national champion,” she said.

UAF already has a full roster of returning men for the 2025-2026 season. “We have had to say ‘no’ to a lot of people, unfortunately,” Albrigtsen said.

But the women’s team is another matter.

 “This year, just with Kendall winning the national championship and the NCAA championship, we're adding four more girls,” Albrigtsen said. “For a college of our size, four women is incredible. Women are really hard to recruit. It's really hard to find women who want to live in Alaska. It's a lifestyle choice.”

Feeling at home, at home

Five years ago, Kramer almost made a different choice.

She’d grown up in Fairbanks. As her 2020 graduation from West Valley High School neared, she had a feeling common to many students looking toward college.

“I was like, ‘Oh, it's my hometown,’” she said. “I'm obviously not going to stay in my hometown.”

Given her high school record, Kramer also had plenty of interest from other universities. She’d collected five state champion titles in cross-country skiing. The U.S. Ski Team had put her on its development squad. She’d also won three straight state cross-country running titles.

So she looked at not only the University of Alaska Anchorage but also a few Outside schools, recalled her mother, Susan Schwartz.

By then, Schwartz was friends with Albrigtsen, hired as an assistant coach at UAF in 2018. Schwartz, who doesn’t ski but administers the Nordic Ski Club of Fairbanks’ Junior Nordics program, said she first met Albrigtsen at one of Kramer’s high school competitions.

But, she said, “I thought Kendall was going to go Outside for skiing, so I wasn't really concerned at that point about, ‘Oh, is this going to be Kendall's future coach?”

Her daughter then visited UAF to look at the skiing and running program, and that clinched it.

“She came back, you know, just 15 minutes away from home, and she's like, ‘Wow, I really like the team,’” Schwartz said.

“We also offered her a really good scholarship that would basically cover everything that she needed,” Albrigtsen said. Kramer has noted that the scholarship assistance helped motivate her to stay in her home state and has been a big factor in her academic and athletic successes.

Skiing out the door

UAF had several key advantages, Kramer said in a mid-April interview at the Arctic Java coffee shop in Wood Center.

First, UAF is among just a few colleges that allow students to join more than one athletic team, she said. Kramer both ran and skied during her entire five years at UAF, absent one fall semester lost to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The proximity of ski trails, both on campus and across town at Birch Hill, also made a big impression.

“That was a huge sell for me,” she said. “When I was visiting other schools that are like ‘better’ — Utah, Colorado, whatever — they would be talking about how they need to drive an hour to ski. And I was like, ‘How would anyone choose this?’ I ski so I can ski on snow. I don't ski because I love roller-skiing or something. I love skiing on snow, and I want to do that for as long as possible in the year and as easily as possible.”

Kramer lived in the Cutler Apartment Complex on campus for most of her time at UAF, but she moved to a dry cabin in Goldstream Valley this past year.

“You can ski from the on-campus apartments just out the door,” she said. “When I lived up there, I’d do it all the time. But even at my cabin, there's [dog] mushing trails right out my door, so I can also ski there.”

The ease of trail access advanced another goal of importance to Kramer: academic success.

“We are so lucky, time efficiency-wise,” she said. “It allows a lot of people to be engineers. It allows a lot of the girls to be biology majors, because we can make it back to lab.”

Kramer graduated this spring, magna cum laude, with bachelor’s degrees in biological sciences and psychology. She hopes to become a teacher.

Something less tangible but just as important also drew Kramer to UAF initially. She simply liked the athletes and coaches.

“That’s your day-to-day and who you have to hang around,” Kramer said.

Friends and competitors

One of those likeable fellow athletes arrived at UAF a year after Kramer. Rosie Fordham traveled from Australia in fall 2021.

Fordham stayed with Kramer’s family during her first few days in Fairbanks, and they became good friends and serious competitors.

“I think we always got on,” Fordham said. “We've gotten closer as friends and realized that maybe we are each other's biggest competitors, but we're also each other's biggest asset when we race.”

That symbiosis was never so clear as in this past season’s collegiate running championship series:

• In October 2024, Kramer won the Great Northwest Athletic Conference 6K race, and Fordham placed second.
• In November, at the Division II NCAA western regional championships, Fordham won, dipping just under the 20-minute mark in the 6K. Kramer followed her in second place about 14 seconds later.
• Both went to the NCAA nationals, where Kramer finished second and Fordham took eighth.

Albrigtsen said the pair created a rewarding bond.

“Both of them feeding off of each other in every workout, one wanting to be better than the other constantly, but being friends and knowing that they're benefiting each other, was really, really great,” she said.

Fordham’s eligibility to run for UAF has expired, but she’ll be back for the 2025-2026 ski season while finishing bachelor’s and master’s degrees in statistics simultaneously.

Kramer now plans to take at least a year to explore professional skiing, sponsored by Rossignol. She’ll train in Anchorage with the Alaska Pacific University program, which is a club rather than a collegiate team.

A slower start

Both Kramer and Fordham were relative latecomers to cross-country skiing.

Fordham, whose family had to drive six hours south from Sydney to find snow in Australia’s short July-September season, didn’t ski her first race until she was 15.

Kramer’s father, Mike, grew up in Fairbanks and was a Washington State University runner in the late 1980s. He won the 1998 and 2004-2006 Equinox Marathons here. But his daughter preferred artistic endeavors and didn’t take up running and skiing until seventh grade, much later than many kids in the local Junior Nordics program. “I was very defiant,” she said.

When her best friend started skiing in the Nordic Ski Club of Fairbanks’ advanced FXC program for kids aged 10-18, Kramer decided to try it out.

“She was getting really muscular, and I was like, ‘I want to be muscular like her,’” she said. She said she got “addicted” to feeling stronger every day.

Her dad was delighted with the change, she said. “He's been very, very happy to watch me excel at it, because it's always been important to him.”

Schwartz, Kramer’s mother, said she first realized her daughter’s potential at a first-of-the-season ninth grade running race Outside. “She won that first race, and I was like in shock, right?” Schwartz said.

Schwartz attended every one of her daughter’s college skiing and running races.

“I don't know how to wax skis, so unfortunately I wasn't able to help with that. But I helped as much as I could to make it easier on the coaches,” she said.

Being friends with Albrigtsen, the UAF coach, gave Schwartz additional incentive to attend. “I wasn't just going to watch my daughter ski, but I was going to watch her teammates ski and help my friend out.”

Olympics opportunity

Kramer said many people have asked her about whether she aspires to join the U.S. ski team at the February 2026 Winter Olympics. (Fordham likely will be on Australia's team.)

“I'm not going to put it as my goal necessarily, because there's so many factors,” Kramer said. “Maybe, you know, everything isn't perfect on the week of qualifications, and then if I don't make it, I don't want to necessarily be crushed.

“The field for U.S. skiers is very deep, and there's only a few spots there,” she added.

Her former coach thinks Kramer has a good chance at filling one of those spots.

“The scary part for me is that she will be changing who she trains with, how she trains, how much she runs,” Albrigtsen said.

From what Albrigtsen saw during the past five years, though, Kramer has the fortitude to become a top-tier international skier.

“She's very methodical. She works really hard for what she wants to get. And then, because she trained for it, she preps for it, she gets it most of the time,” she said. “So in that way, I'm feeling very comfortable letting her go into the world.”

Kramer’s legacy also will continue to strengthen UAF’s team, Albrigtsen said.

“For quite a long time, people didn’t even know we existed,” she said. “Now every athlete in the U.S. knows there is a really good ski program at UAF.”

Sam Bishop is a writer and editor with UAF University Relations.