Teen Phillip Proctor Fell For Nordic Skiing, And A California Ski School Embraced Its First Para Skier

Cal Proctor and his 14-year-old son, Phillip, have a weekly routine that they started earlier this winter and will continue doing for at least another month.

The father and son pack up their ski equipment every Friday so they can leave first thing Saturday morning from their home in Vacaville, California, which sits in between Sacramento and San Francisco. They then make the two-hour drive north to Soda Springs, California, hopefully avoiding any snowstorms along the way.

Once they reach the Royal Gorge Cross-Country Ski Resort, Phillip goes skiing with the Sugar Bowl Ski Team and Academy from around 9-11:30 a.m. every Saturday and Sunday. Then, when training is done, Cal and Phillip load up their stuff and head home.

As time-consuming as their weekend trips are, the Proctors have been excited to make them this winter. They’ve given Phillip, an eighth-grader who was born with cerebral palsy, the opportunity to go Nordic skiing again after being introduced to the sport early last year.

“To see the commitment in a 14-year-old boy who would probably rather be spending his time playing video games and hanging out with friends, that every weekend we’re off to the snow and he has nothing bad to say about it, it’s pretty cool,” Cal said.

“He’s already talked about wanting to go to the Paralympics one day, and that’s a goal he’s had in the back of his mind, I think, since he started doing this at least this year.”

Thanks to some coordination between Cal, U.S. Paralympics Nordic Skiing and the Sugar Bowl Ski Team and Academy, Phillip has been able to pursue his passion for sit skiing despite living in a part of California that rarely gets snow.

He’s the only Para skier among the approximately 35 kids who train with Sugar Bowl. He’s a member of its Under-14 team, and in mid-February, he competed in his first race on a rather challenging course at Royal Gorge.

“There’s honestly almost no discussion about able-bodied versus Para athlete. He’s just another member of the team,” said Will Sweetser, the athletic marketing manager and Nordic ski team director for the Sugar Bowl. “(The other kids) are high-fiving him if he catches the winning goal in a game or they’re cheering him on when he’s double-pulling in a relay with them. … I think it’s enriched everybody.”

Phillip has good use of his arms, and he likes to try new things, push the limits as an athlete and go as fast as possible. It doesn’t matter that his fearlessness sometimes leads to him crashing again and again on his sit ski.

When Phillip got his first wheelchair at age 4, he told his father that he wanted to someday do a backflip on it after watching extreme athlete Aaron Fotheringham land the trick on his wheelchair.

Phillip started going to a local skate park at age 7 to learn new tricks, and he won his second consecutive WCMX amateur division world championship in 2023.

In January of 2023, Phillip took part in a two-day ski clinic hosted by the Challenged Athletes Foundation in Truckee, California. He had never gone skiing before, and even though he fell a lot, he had fun alpine skiing on the first day of the clinic.

“But once we got out the second day and he got to do the Para Nordic (skiing) day, I could see something switched in him. It was just immediate that he really was having a good time,” Cal said. “(He) came in for lunch and quickly ate and then got back out there by himself without anybody else ready to go.”

Cal said Phillip felt a sense of freedom while moving around on his sit ski, and soon afterward, he participated in a nearly weeklong ski camp that U.S. Paralympics Nordic Skiing held in Park City, Utah.

Phillip, however, didn’t get another opportunity to ski last year. Cal, who admitted he isn’t a skier, could tell his son wanted to go again and reached out to BethAnn Chamberlain, a development coach for U.S. Paralympics Nordic Skiing.

Chamberlain then called Sweetser to see if he’d be willing to work with Phillip.

Sweetser had coached Para standing skier Omar Bermejo leading up to the Paralympic Winter Games Sochi 2014. He had also talked over the past few years about getting some adaptive athletes involved in the Sugar Bowl Ski Team and Academy.

“I really didn’t want to run a standalone or a parallel program (for Phillip). I wanted to run a program where he was more integrated into what our entire program is doing,” Sweetser said. “And so I had to do a little bit of coming up with ideas and running them by BethAnn or some other coaches I’ve worked with. …

“I just wanted to make sure I could do a valuable service for him, not just have him show up and flail along and hope for the best.”

Cal said he and Phillip initially wondered what had they signed up for, especially after they hit big snowstorms during the first few weekends they drove up to Soda Springs this winter.

But Phillip has made noticeable improvements as a sit skier since then. He has also joined a gym in Vacaville where he can use a SkiErg to train when he’s not on snow during the week.

“It’s been really rewarding for him to realize that he’s capable of these things,” Cal said. “He’s really proud of himself.”

Alex Abrams has written about Olympic and Paralympic sports for more than 15 years, including as a reporter for major newspapers in Florida, Arkansas and Oklahoma. He is a freelance contributor to USParaNordic.org on behalf of Red Line Editorial, Inc.