Skiing
- Title:
- Head Nordic Coach
- Email:
- bruce.cranmer@colorado.edu
Bruce Cranmer, a familiar name among skiing historians in Colorado, was the Nordic head coach for 18 seasons for the Buffaloes.
Cranmer skied collegiately for CU, helping the Buffs to two national championships in 1972 and ’73 under coach Bill Marolt. He later went on to compete for the U.S. Ski Team from 1980-88 when he was a member of the 1985 World Championship team.
Longtime Coloradoans certainly know the name, as his grandfather, George, started the Winter Park Ski Resort in Winter Park, Colo., which has blossomed into one of the finer skier areas in the world.
Cranmer brought an outstanding coaching resume with him to Boulder and he has expanded it even further once he got there, as he was the head cross country coach at Vermont, helping the Catamounts to four NCAA Championships between 1989-2000. Vermont was also the national runner-up three different times under Cranmer and head coach Chip LaCasse.
Since returning to Colorado in 2001, the Buffs have won four NCAA Championships (2006, 2011, 2013 and 2015) and have finished runner-up another seven times in his 17 years.
He coached 12 different skiers to 18 individual NCAA Championships, including Petra Hyncicova who swept the women’s Nordic titles at the 2017 NCAA Championships in New Hampshire. Hyncicova is one of four athletes Cranmer has coached to individual NCAA Championship sweeps, first in 2006 when current head Nordic coach Jana Weinberger (then Rehemaa) won both the classical and freestyle championships, then in 2008 Maria Grevsgaard won both championships and Mads Stroem swept both in 2016.
Seventeen of the 18 individual national champions came in the last 12 seasons of his tenure.
The Buffs also won the mythical Nordic national championship seven times under Cranmer’s tutelage, scoring the most Nordic points at the NCAA Championships in 2004, ’06, ’08, ’10, '11, ’13 and ‘15, marking the first seven times the Buffs have topped the Nordic points list since the NCAA went to a combined skiing championship in 1983.
CU’s men’s Nordic skiers earned the most points at the NCAA Championship five seven under Cranmer (2004, ’06, ’08, ’10, ’11, ’14 and ’15), the first seven times since 1983 the Buffs have topped that point total, as well. On the women’s side, Cranmer’s teams earned more points than other women’s Nordic squads six times under Cranmer (out of eight times in CU history), including in 2002, ’06, ’08, ’11, '13 and '17.
Grevsgaard set a new CU record when she won 24 races between 2006-09, five more than any other skier in CU history, Nordic or alpine. Out of the 22 skiers that have won five or more races in a season, Cranmer coached nine of them, including Grevsgaard’s totals of 11 in 2008, matching the CU record, seven in 2007 and five in 2009, and Rehemaa’s five in 2006, Gelso’s five in 2010, Oedegaard’s five in 2012 and 2014, Reid's nine in 2013, Stroem’s eight in 2016 and Hyncicova’s five in 2017.
In Cranmer’s first season in 2001, Storeng became just the seventh skier in CU history to earn two podium appearances in their first NCAA Championship, as she was the runner up in the classical race and took third in the freestyle race.
A total of 30 of his athletes earned 72 first-team All-America honors and in all, and he has had at least one first-team All-America performance each year and 10 times CU had four or more Nordic athletes earn first-team All-America honors, including a CU record five, accomplished in 2010. CU’s four athletes earning first-team honors in 2011 earned a combined seven honors, the most in CU history before his 2017 squad duplicated the feat.
Including second-team All-America honors, Cranmer has coached 34 different athletes to 119 such honors in his time at Colorado. The Buffs under Cranmer also had 25 different skiers win a total of 129 races, including 20 skiers winning 121 races from 2006-18. CU won at least five races in each of the last 12 years Cranmer was at the helm and four of those years the Buffs won 12 or more Nordic races throughout the season. The Buffs have twice swept all four Nordic races under his tenure, in 2008 at the RMISA Championships when Grevsgaard and Kit Richmond both swept the races, and in 2009 at the Alaska Invitational when Grevsgaard won both races while Gelso and Kjoelhamar each one a men’s race.
In his time at Vermont, the Catamounts boasted 12 individual Nordic NCAA Championships including a pair of four-time winners in Thorodd Bakken and Laura Wilson and a pair of Olympians in Joe Galanes and Kerrin Petty. Former DU Nordic coaches Knut and Trond Nystad were also All-Americans under Cranmer’s tutelage while at Vermont.
Cranmer also coached for two U.S. Olympic Teams, the 1994 squad in Lillehammer, Norway, and the 1998 team in Nagano, Japan. Outside of skiing, Cranmer spent time as a Quality Control Engineer on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline and as an Outward Bound instructor in Bertchesgaden, Germany.
Born Sept. 15, 1950, in Denver, Cranmer graduated from Aspen High School. He won NBC’s Survival of the Fittest in 1985 and won the overall Great American Ski Chase in 1986. He is also a Class 5 whitewater kayaker. He is married to the former Patricia Drislane.
National Champions Under Cranmer
Mari Storeng (2002, women’s classical)
Jana Rehemaa (2006, women’s classical and freestyle)
Kit Richmond (2006, men’s freestyle)
Maria Grevsgaard (2008, women’s classical and freestyle)
Vegard Kjoelhamar (2009, men’s freestyle)
Matt Gelso (2010, men’s classical)
Eliska Hajkova (2011, women’s classical)
Reid Pletcher (2011, men’s classical)
Joanne Reid (2013, women’s freestyle)
Rune Oedegaard (2013, men’s classical; 2014, men’s classical)
Mads Stroem (2014, men’s freestyle; 2016 men’s classical and freestyle)
Petra Hyncicova (2017, women’s classical and freestyle)
