From July 28-30, Team Summit Colorado hosted its first-ever homecoming weekend celebration, with current and former members converging to celebrate the youth development team and snowsports community.

Each day of the three-day homecoming weekend included an activity or event. The weekend kicked off on Friday, July 28, with the induction of four snowsport pioneers to Team Summit’s wall of fame. 

This year’s inductees included Alpine athlete Gene Gillis, freeski athlete Chris Carson, Nordic skier Jody Anderson and snowboarder Don Sather. All four inductees of this year’s inaugural class have not only had an impact on Team Summit, but they have also drastically shaped the greater snowsports community.

Gene Gillis

According to Team Summit, Gillis goes down in history as one of the most important and influential Summit County ski figures. Native to Bend, Oregon, Gillis learned how to ski on a pair of planks at the age of 3, and he was a passionate, lifelong skier from that moment forward. 

Eventually, Gillis branched out into downhill ski racing, which led him to race for the U.S. team at the 1948 Winter Olympics in St. Moritz, Switzerland.

After his racing career concluded, Gillis still managed to achieve success through coaching skiers and developing ski areas. Having already helped to develop Mount Bachelor in Oregon and Stratton Mountain in Vermont, Gillis was a key part of the team that developed Keystone Resort after he moved to Summit County in 1971.

Gillis helped create the kind of ski and ride experience people still find today at Keystone’s North Peak and Jones Gulch, and he also was a major player in the installation of snowmaking equipment at Keystone.

Beyond the development of Keystone, Gillis also was a co-founder of the Summit Ski and Education Foundation and a head coach of the Summit Race Team. 

Chris Carson

A Pro Mogul Tour skier, Carson fell in love with skiing at an early age and has chased his passion on the slopes throughout the rest of his life.

Carson started out his career as a ski racer with the Copper Mountain Race Team, but he was quickly drawn to the moguls because of the freedom they gave him. 

Carson skied with the Winter Park Freestyle Team during his teen years and later turned his focus to the Pro Mogul Tour. While on the tour in the early ’90s, Carson was a consistent top-five skier and even won at Keystone in 1991.

In addition to a standout freeski career, Carson was the winner of the famed A-Basin Enduro numerous times and held the record with Rex Wehrman for the most laps on the Pallavicini Lift in one day. 

After his competition days were over, Carson focused his energy on coaching and sharing his love for skiing with the next generation of up-and-coming athletes. Carson first started working with mogul skiers as a development coach before moving his way up to be a head mogul coach. Carson helped athletes such as Heather McPhie, David Babic and Mikaela Matthews advance to the United States ski team. 

Carson was also an industry leader in bringing park and pipe skiing, big mountain skiing, ski cross and ski mountaineering to the club level. 

Jody Anderson

Longtime Frisco resident Jody Anderson has perhaps done more for the tradition of snowsports in Summit County than many other wall of fame members.

The driving force behind Colorado’s oldest, annual Nordic race — Frisco Gold Rush — Anderson conceived the race in 1969 in order for the local Nordic club to have enough funds to send kids to the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association’s Junior National Nordic Championships in Alaska.

Since the first running on the race, the event has continued to be a tradition not only among Summit County residents, but also in the greater Colorado Nordic skiing community as well.

Anderson also ran the first Nordic ski shop out of the Frisco Lodge in its early days to support local Nordic skiers with equipment, and she had a deep passion for teaching Summit County kids how to ski. 

With new skiers not allowed at Arapahoe Basin Ski Area in the 1970s, Anderson and Marie Zdechlik even cut trees down with chainsaws and burned the slash to create a small ski slope by the current middle school where kids could learn to ski from the duo.

Don Sather

A resident of Summit County since the ’70s, Sather was the co-founder of Team Summit Snowboarders in 1989. 

Sather saw the ski team athletes with their Team Summit jackets leaving school early to train and said he wanted that for Summit County’s snowboard athletes.

As a representative of both the United States of America Snowboard Association and the International Snowboard Federation, Sather helped to pursue Olympic status for snowboarding and was on the selection committee of the first U.S. Olympic snowboard team.

Sather also gave Shaun White his first snowboarding gold medal when he was 7 years old, was the co-founder and organizer of the first snowboarding Junior World Championships in Slovenia in 1994 and served as a representative in the U.S. Senate committee hearings on the Olympic and Amateur Sports Act.

Following the wall of fame induction ceremony, Team Summit hosted a picnic at Copper Mountain on Saturday and concluded the weekend on Sunday with the third annual Paul Kresge Memorial Ride on the Summit County Recreation path.

To learn more about Team Summit and its winter sports programs, visit TeamSummit.org.