HANOVER — As a young downhill skier at Storrs Hill, Benton Smith was hitting every possible bump in the snow and trying to get air under him. His instructors noticed this and suggested he try ski jumping.

Five years later, Smith, a Canaan resident and a freshman at Ledyard Charter School in Lebanon, is representing Mascoma High as the Royals’ only varsity jumper.

“I didn’t have any idea what was involved in getting him into high school ski jumping,” said Marilyn Smith, Benton’s mother who became Mascoma’s de facto coach. “There doesn’t seem to be a centralized organization for it. There’s a meeting at the beginning of the season, but that was before I realized that I needed to start doing something about it. Everybody’s very supportive of it. It’s a little bit different than club jumping.”

New Hampshire has long been the only state to offer high school ski jumping, but not many schools have the resources to field large teams. Defending state champion Hanover was one of just five schools to compete at last year’s championships, along with Kennett, Plymouth, Merrimack Valley and Concord, and even among those, Merrimack Valley had a mere two competitors and Concord just one.

Three new teams have joined the pot this year, though, including two in the Upper Valley. In addition to Smith competing for Mascoma, freshmen Angelo Goodwin and Helena Mielcarz have formed a team at Lebanon, with Goodwin’s father, Ron, as the Raiders’ coach.

Ron Goodwin was a ski jumper at Kennett in the 1980s, and his son has been involved in cross-country skiing for several years. He gave ski jumping a try at Storrs Hill around five years ago and liked it, and now competes in Nordic combined, which involves cross-country skiing and ski jumping.

“Helena and Angelo had some interest in it, so we pursued it,” Ron Goodwin said. “(Lebanon athletic director) Mike Stone was a big part of it, he said it was no problem. We’re going to see if we can make it grow a little bit.”

Lebanon last had an official team in the ‘80s, under coach John Farnum, Goodwin said. In Stone’s seven years as athletic director, Ayla Weale was the Raiders’ only jumper, but she was supported by the Hanover team and their coach, Thomas Dodds.

Dodds, in his 11th year coaching the Bears, said around half of all high school jumpers in New Hampshire are new to the sport. At Hanover, it has become a tradition for the senior captains of the alpine skiing team to also try jumping.

“We’re probably the only state where you see kids learning and trying out ski jumping at an older age,” Dodds said. “That’s the one thing that high school programs offer that club programs don’t, is you’ll see older kids pick it up.”

Smith typically practices with the Lebanon team at Storrs Hill, which still has the larger, 50-meter jump after the 25-meter jump was demolished in October (the number refers not to the length of the ramp, but the distance between the end of the platform and the point where the hill flattens out). Mielcarz, who prefers the shorter jumps, will generally practice with Hanover on the 32-meter Roger Burt jump, where Thursday’s competition was held.

The coaches expressed hope that the Lebanon and Mascoma teams can continue to grow — Ron Goodwin said a friend of Angelo’s is interested in joining next year, and Marilyn Smith said a current eighth grader in the Mascoma district has significant jumping experience and plans to join once he enters high school.

“All the high school coaches, we’ve been working to try and grow the sport again,” Dodds said. “We remember back in the ‘70s and ‘80s and ‘90s when you had dozens of high school teams with 10 to 20 athletes on each team. We’re trying to grow back to that stage. It’s good to see the enthusiasm of veteran jumpers and parents (doing) everything they can to promote it at the high school level.”

Benjamin Rosenberg can be reached at brosenberg@vnews.com or 603-727-3302.

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