After her sophomore season skiing for Spruce Mountain, Julia Pomeroy felt like she had gotten as much as she could out of competing on the slopes. Even being a part of a state championship team couldn’t help pull her out of her mental and physical rut, and she considered giving up competitive skiing.

“I just felt I’d plateaued. It kind of ruined by mojo,” she said.

Pomeroy slowly got her mojo back her junior season, ultimately earning top-15 finishes in the Class B slalom and giant slalom championships.

“By end of last year, everything fell into place. I was stronger than I’d ever been before, strong enough to use my equipment the way it should have been used,” she said. “I just put more techniques in and put more work in.

“So going into this year, I had the drive to want to do well. I was excited to ski.”

She zipped through a sweet senior season that peaked with a giant slalom state championship and earned Pomeroy the Sun Journal’s All-Region Girls Alpine Skier of the Year.

Pomeroy, who has been ski racing since she was in fourth grade, learned to seize the moment as part of the young Spruce team that in 2017 rallied on the second day to win Class B team state championship.

“Leave it all on the hill,” she said.

Black Mountain was the hill she dominated in the MVC season-opening giant slalom.

“That kind of set the tone for the rest of the season. I just wanted to get better and better,” Pomeroy said.

That didn’t necessarily mean more victories, but Pomeroy was consistently strong through the rest of the regular season. She never finished outside of the top five in any race, slalom or GS. but wherever she finished, she always got something out of each race

“I think the races that really stand out a little more are the races that were learning curves more than victories,” Pomeroy said. “The ones where I was, like, ‘Well, this didn’t work out, but now I have things to take to practice with me,’ or ‘this could improve a little bit.'”

Pomeroy’s technical approach to each course and each race impressed Spruce Mountain coach Bill Acritelli.

“She really studies the course, and that’s huge,” Acritelli said. “She’s very thorough in what she does.”

Pomeroy admits she probably was a little anxious and over-analytical after her first GS run at the state championships, again at Black Mountain. Her time, 51:37 seconds, gave her a 1.06 second lead, maybe too good for someone who always had something to improve.

After a few deep breaths and some time to collect her thoughts and remember her overall goal, she added another 1.2 seconds to her lead with her second run of 56.10.

“Generally, kids would back off the throttle a little bit (in their second run), but she didn’t,” Acritelli said.

“I had set myself up well throughout the season with all of my races and all of the learning curves,” she said. “I had learned as much as I could leading up to that and to apply it to that one day, to those two runs. My coach had always told me it takes two runs to win a race. You can’t just take one run and feel defeated or take one run and feel like you’re all set, because you never know what that second run is going to bring.”

Pomeroy, who capped her career with her second spot on Maine’s Eastern High School Championships team, will enroll at Southern Maine Community College next fall. That likely means an end to competitive skiing, which probably means she’ll lose a little of her mojo again.

“Those things you didn’t think you’d miss when you were in the moment, I now realize I’m going to miss,” she said. “I just don’t feel like I could have accomplished the things that I did, without my teammates and my ski family.”

 

 

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