SIX students from Cathedral College Wangaratta recently competed in the Australian Interschool Snow Sports Competitions and came 16th out of 35 schools.

Llewela Browne, Rhylee Turner, Zahli Books, Amelia Malkin, George Walker and Zanna Vietz competed in slopestyle, moguls, ski cross and giant slalom (GS) events from September 3 to September 8.

The Cathedral students have all been skiing for a long time and spend most of their time training, even travelling overseas to improve in their disciplines.

“Zahli and I have been training with Mt Hotham since we were really young and that brought us to competing at different levels,” Amelia said.

“I’ve been away the whole term and training full-time to prepare for the competitions,” George said.

Rhylee and Zahli said it was a great opportunity to compete at a national level.

“Competing at nationals was a really fun experience where you really pushed yourself against everyone in the country,” Rhylee said.

“I enjoyed the atmosphere that you can feel at nationals and the competition you have against the other schools," Zahli said.

Teacher and coordinator of the snow sports program, Tina Howman, said it was a huge achievement for an independent school like Cathedral College to rank so high in the national competitions.

“We topped some of the elite Melbourne and Sydney schools which is amazing,” she said.

The six students who competed were selected from the school’s state team, where they competed alongside 30 other Cathedral College students against 200 schools in Victoria from August 19 to August 25.

In the state competitions, they came 11th out of 25 schools and Tina Howman said she hopes to expand the school’s snow sports program.

“It’s just an ongoing process of growing the team but we’ve got a really strong team from prep to year 11 this year,” she said.

“Being so close to the snowfields its really niche little pocket that we’ve got here, so we may as well tune in to it.

“One third of the team qualified for nationals however only six went and it’s my aim to support all students who qualify for nationals in future years.”