Cross-country Skiing in Edina

Photo: Emily J. Davis

Mark Schaefer (rgiht) and sons Carl and Tom hit the trails at Hyland Lake Park Reserve for some cross-country skiing.

A vicious check left Tom Schaefer motionless on the ice. The crowd at Braemar Arena gasped when the 13-year-old Edina hockey player didn’t see the cheap shot coming his way. His nervous father Mark stared intently at the rink in search of a sign that his boy was OK.

This heart-stopping scene set the stage for a story about how giving up the contact sport allowed for more contact between a man and his two boys in another sport—cross-country skiing. Edina families praise the longevity allowed by skiing, and how easy it can be to get the whole family together for a skiing outing.

“It’s really a lifetime sport,” says Jan Guenther, an avid cross-country skier who taught Mark, the elder Schaefer, some skiing skills during her classes. “People come back to it in a variety of ways and all variety of time periods. And in the Minneapolis area, it’s so easy to ski the groomed trails around here with the park district and the amount of groups available.”

From Skates to Skis

Before that scary incident at the ice arena in 1998, every activity Tom Schaefer participated in was compared to hockey. His dad called the sport his “gold standard.”

“When we went to Disney World, he said, ‘This is almost as fun as hockey,’” Mark recalls. “He loved it.”

Tom was a lanky but strong-skating defenseman for one of Edina’s peewee teams, but his affection for the sport ended after the big hit. Tom was conscious as he lay on the ice, and he moved his feet because he knew his dad was watching.

“The injury was so frightening, and he thought he had injured his neck or had some sort of spinal injury,” Mark says. “He actually tore a ligament in his neck and had a concussion, but it was still frightening … When everyone left the locker room, he fell into me and sobbed. [He] said, ‘Dad, I’m not going to do that again.’”

Tom had suffered three concussions in his eight-year hockey career, but he didn’t want to stop competing in sports. To parlay his strong ice-skating ability, he considered speed skating and skiing as possible options. He settled on skiing, not thinking about how it would keep bringing him, his brother and his father together more than a decade later.

Tom’s younger brother, Carl, didn’t have the same love affair with hockey and wanted to be like his older brother, so he clipped his feet into skis as well. They both went on to compete for the Edina High School varsity nordic ski team.

“That desire to win is still a large motivator,” Tom says, of putting down the hockey stick and picking up ski poles.

The Schaefer boys have since grown into men and their old man is nearing retirement. Tom, 27, works for Wells Fargo in San Francisco, where he’s working on an MBA from Berkeley. Carl, 22, recently graduated from the University of Minnesota. Mark, 59, is a psychologist and part-time professor at the university’s medical school. Their lives have pulled them in different directions, but they come together to ski.

Share this Article

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
•