From Gore Ranger gals to U.S. Alpine Ski Team pals, Part 1: Kjersti Moritz has worked hard to come back from ACL injury
The Vail Mountain School graduate has recently got back on snow and has been training with the U.S. team at Copper Mountain since mid-November
Kaia Moritz/Courtesy photo
Kjersti Moritz has been through some dark days the past 10 months, but her fire hasn’t flamed out.
A week after finishing as the top American — ahead of athletes with World Cup starts to their names — and fourth overall at the Stratton Mountain NorAm Cup slalom, the soon-to-be 19-year-old tore her left ACL and meniscus in the super-G at Burke Mountain on Jan. 8.
Her rookie season on the U.S. Ski Team’s D-team was over, and before it had even begun, so was her last Vail Mountain School soccer campaign. Moritz spent the long winter and spring grappling with where her identity was truly rooted.
“Yeah. A ton,” she said. “Because I feel like my whole identity is just being an athlete, (and) I was just a normal girl at school, so it was kind of tough. But I tried (last year) to just enjoy being a normal high school girl, hanging out with my friends and seeing a different side.”
She spent seven weeks on crutches and watched from the bench as her two sisters, Solveig and Liv, guided the Gore Rangers to a 13-2 record.
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“Especially for her, standing on the sidelines and watching is particularly tough,” said Liv, currently a first-year D-Team athlete and star soccer player at DU.
“It was pretty tough watching her injury earlier this year, but she has been working extremely hard.”
Sitting inside Copper Station last Saturday, Moritz’s first day at the U.S. Ski Team’s multi-week pre-season camp, the recent VMS graduate can now confidently say the word ‘athlete’ defines what she does, not who she is.
“I just want to kind of get back on my skis and feel confident again and be in a place where I can keep building — becoming faster — but I also want to try and enjoy it a little bit more,” Moritz said.
“Live in the moment and have fun with what I’m doing.”
Skiing, soccer and silver linings
The early summer saw Moritz, who will take a gap year before heading to Middlebury next fall — to ski and play soccer — gradually return to strength training, jumping and running. She spent June and half of July in Park City with the D-team but stayed back while they flew to the annual New Zealand on-snow camp in August. In September, Moritz returned to Utah for another three-week block with her U.S. teammates. In between, she zoomed down to Denver as often as possible to watch her twin sister lead the Pioneers on the pitch.
“I feel like our relationship has strengthened throughout this whole process,” stated Liv, who thinks being “forced to take on different schedules and challenges” has made the sisters become each other’s No. 1 cheerleader instead of “always competing with each other.”
“I know she’s been extremely supportive and excited for me and my soccer season, and I’m very excited that her recovery is paying off.”
A few days before arriving at Copper Mountain last weekend, her mom posted a video of Kjersti carving her first turns post-injury … right on the Vail slope where she started as a 3-year-old.
“It was really weird being back on snow. I was pretty much like sliding around and learning how to stop again and turn my skis,” Moritz said of the 90-minute session.
“It felt kind of foreign at the beginning, obviously, but then it quickly felt normal again.”
She’s been drilling on-snow for five days since, with a Nov. 18 practice constituting her first day spent “carving a ton.” Moritz said starting from scratch again has offered an opportunity to refine certain technical components.
“It’s kind of fun because I kind of have to relearn how to ski, so I can kind of change my movement patterns from what they were before,” she said.
“You have to pressure the ski at the top of your turn and in the beginning, I kind of had a hitch in my turn. It was not fluid; so that’s what I was trying to work on.”
Moritz’s injury-rehab status has cultivated a unique appreciation for what Foreste Peterson offers in her dual strength and on-snow U.S. Ski Team coaching roles.
“I think it’s really helpful because she gets to see how we’re doing on the hill and off the hill,” Moritz stated regarding Peterson’s knack for translating ski-specific movement patterns in the gym to the hill.
Moritz isn’t pressuring herself with a strict return-to-competition date, but thinks it will be mid-December at the earliest.
“It’s pretty much when I feel good and confident enough when I’m training,” she said.
Her main objective is to simply “feel good on skis again,” but she’d like to be a consistent podium-threat on the NorAm circuit, the competition calendar existing just below the World Cup level. Another goal is to mimic Liv’s dual-sport approach next year.
“I think skiing helps my soccer and soccer helps my skiing,” Kjersti said.
“The agility and quickness you get from soccer and the fitness — I think that helps skiing. And the strength you get from skiing, and the confidence you get when you’re going super fast down the hill – I think that translates to being aggressive on the field.”
The prospect of missing her freshman soccer season was one reason Moritz opted for a gap year. Since her crash occurred in January, she received an injury-discretion slot on the 2024-25 D-Team as well.
“So, I’m kind of using this year to kind of get back,” she said.
She was thrilled to watch her sister, Liv, make the D-Team this past spring, and enjoys the camaraderie with Kaitlin Keane and Allie and Emma Resnick, other fellow former Gore Rangers currently on the U.S. Ski Team.
“I’m pretty close with them. We just spend a lot of time together; we’re with each other all summer,” she said. “They’re kind of like family.”
Lately, injuries has been a frequent topic of conversation amongst the group. Back-to-back injuries have kept Emma Resnick out of competition for two full seasons, while Keane spent a portion of this off-season with a knee brace on one leg and a boot at the end of the other.
“We’ve all been injured kind of around the same era. (We) help each other out with just saying, ‘hey let’s look at the silver linings. This is a time that you have forced away from skiing, but what can you do with that time?” Resnick said.
“I know (Kjersti) also saw it in a way as a time, a blessing, to learn about yourself beyond the sport and get some things done that you wouldn’t necessarily have time for.”
Moritz’s advice to other athletes battling injury is to resist the temptation to dwell on the past.
“Focus on how you can get better each day, and just work back towards where you want to be,” she said.
“And just enjoy the time you have off, because you don’t have it often.”
In reflecting on the personal impact of her injury and rehab process, Moritz said navigating rough patches has sharpened her vision to see what really deserves her attention: the here and now.
“You don’t know what’s going to happen in the future and the past has already happened,” she said.
“When you focus on the present, I’d say it makes me feel like I have some sort of purpose.”
