Colorado University Athletics
Ski Scoring System Developed By CU's Snyder Set Table For Immediate Title Celebration
March 28, 2024 | General, Skiing, Neill Woelk
BOULDER — If you saw the recent video of the Colorado ski team joyously celebrating the Buffaloes' NCAA championship in early March, you saw history — in more ways than one.
For starters, the moment marked CU's 21st NCAA championship, the second-most in collegiate skiing history, and it confirmed the re-emergence of the Buffaloes as a true national power. The victory was also the closest final score in the coed era of the championship and became the second-largest final-day comeback in the meet's history as the Buffs overcame a 51-point deficit to outscore Utah by a mere two points.
Historic indeed.
But if you watched the video, you also watched a spontaneous, spur-of-the-moment celebration erupting in real time, mere seconds after the Buffaloes clinched the title.
That has never happened before.
Because the scoring system for the NCAA Championships is so complex, teams in close finishes in past years have had to wait as long as 60 minutes after the final race to be assured they had won the title.
But this year, the Buffaloes knew they were national champions less than a minute after their third skier had crossed the finish line in the men's 20K classic race. That moment became possible because of a computerized, online scoring system developed and refined over the past decade by Colorado Associate AD/Athletic Communications Curtis Snyder.
The system computes and adjusts team scores in real time. Thus, when CU's Johannes Flaaten crossed the finish line in 11th place, the Buffs knew in less than a minute that they had scored enough points to overtake Utah for the crown.
Commence celebrating.
The fact that it was the Buffs who became the first team to reap the reward of the real-time scoring system in such a close finish is mere coincidence. Over the last several years, the team champions have been relatively easy to discern as the final individual race unfolded because there were no scoring margins even close to single digits.
But this year's championship provided a historic scenario — and had the computerized scoring system not been in place, the Buffs and Utes may have waited for 30 minutes or more before the final score became official.
"The fact that it was CU that most benefited from it is just happenstance," Snyder said. "I'm obviously happy this worked well in a championship we won, and one that came down to the final racer in the final race, but I still would have been happy had it been any other team that was able to experience that moment of pure joy when you know you reached the ultimate in college skiing by winning a national championship."
Other Buffs are quite familiar with what it was like to wait for the final results.
Colorado assistant coach Chad Wolk competed for Colorado on CU's 1998 national championship team that won the title by a mere 2.5 points. He remembers the team waiting to find out if they had won after the final individual race had been completed.
"I know the pressure that performing for a team means," Wolk said. "During my time, we were busy printing out results following the individual races and calculating the scores by hand. Generally, we knew what happened but had to wait longer and longer for all the calculations to be checked and double-checked as each race progressed through the meet. Day one was easy, 30 minutes to know the score. Day two 45 minutes to know the score, day three up to an hour and in 1998 our day four took a whopping 2.5 hours to know what the final team score was. While this definitely added to the drama, it stole the opportunity for us to share in the emotion of the moment."
Snyder's development of the scoring system — which has been embraced by NCAA ski coaches across the country — didn't happen overnight.
Rather, the process began when Snyder was working at Duke in 2007. While there, he built a website for the Rocky Mountain Intercollegiate Ski Association.
When he returned to CU (he started his sports communication career in Boulder while a student in 1994), he began working with the ski team. He very quickly saw the impact of the "old" system of calculating team results by hand when he traveled with the Buffs to Vermont in 2011.
Colorado ultimately won the team title that year. But again the Buffs had to wait … and wait … for the official results.
"I wanted to make sure I knew we had won the championship before telling anybody we had, and it was almost 90 minutes after the final event was over," Snyder recalled. "By then everybody assumed we knew. It was still a joyous occasion, but I felt like something was missing."
Snyder served as the NCAA Championships' official scorer in 2012 and again in 2016, when CU hosted the meet and he was also co-tournament director.
"From 2013-15, the old system was used but there was a group of SIDs including me, Utah's Brooke Frederickson and New Mexico's Frank Mercogliano, that all served as back-up scorers because the system that was in place oftentimes had multiple mistakes," Snyder said. " We were essentially each adding things up and double-checking each other. By then I had developed an Excel sheet that I still use as a back-up."
When CU hosted the championships again in 2018, Snyder was ready to debut the live team scoring system. He had spent the previous fall coding and developing the system, which basically provides up-to-date team scoring after every racer, and the results are posted in real time on the RMISA website.
The development proved to be a labor of love that provided more than its fair share of obstacles.
For starters, college skiing is one of the few places in the world where team scores are kept. Almost everywhere else, it is an individual sport.
Then there's the fact that within the alpine racing community, there are two primary timing systems, with college ski associations using one or the other. In Nordic, the timing process is even more spread out, with numerous timers across the nation and each college ski meet using one of those many timing systems.
So, Snyder had to develop a system that took the results from the individual race timers and computed team results. It required manual input of the individual results but still proved to be more reliable and much faster.
The end result was a system that resulted in Snyder becoming the official scorer of the NCAA Championships in 2018, a role he has held every year since.
"It was developed so that teams will know as quickly as possible that they won the title," Snyder said. "Obviously races need to become official, and I double- and triple-check my work as fast as I can, and label everything unofficial."
Snyder also made sure the up-to-the-minute scoring system is provided live on the RMISA website. That live service then provided the moment of spontaneity in the 2024 championships that became a social media hit.
"The 2024 championship was the first time that the championship really came down to the final racer since I developed the system," Snyder said. "One of my proudest moments was when one of our creative students, Matan Coll, showed me a video of one of our skiers, Emma Hammergaard, looking at her phone on the website and within 20-25 seconds of Johannes Flaaten crossing the finish line, it showed that we won. She reacted and the whole team reacted."
Had the computerized system not been in place, race officials would have had to double-check and triple-check the results by hand. With a final margin of just two points — and a comeback that erased a huge deficit — the winners would have had to wait for many minutes to get the final results.
Instead, they knew in seconds.
"The fact that it was trusted enough that the team reacted by watching that software, not me yelling that we won, was the goal the whole time," Snyder said.
Snyder is now talking with the NCAA to about becoming the official scorer and media coordinator at every NCAA Ski Championship, east and west, in the future.
In the meantime, he will continue to refine the scoring program in order to provide updated team results even faster — and every team champion will have the opportunity to celebrate when the title is clinched.
Wolk has now seen both ends of the championship celebration spectrum — the waiting in 1998 and the immediacy of this year's championship.
He will never forget the setting.
"With Johannes flying down the last downhill needing to pull in front of the person in front of him, he passed with ease and pushed hard to the finish," Wolk remembered. "Everyone looking at their phones to wait for the live team scoring to update. The first refresh, Buffs in second … Then it happened. The CU crowd of student-athletes, fans and friends erupted. CU by two points. The media crew did an amazing job capturing what was one of the most unbelievable comebacks in NCAA skiing history! Everyone knew the results immediately. The celebration was on. The team had done it!"
