Norwich: One Tiny Vermont Town's Secret to Happiness and Excellence - Softcover

Crouse, Karen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1501119907 ISBN 13: 9781501119903

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2019

Synopsis

The extraordinary story of the small Vermont town that has likely produced more Olympians per capita than any other place in the country, Norwich gives “parents of young athletes a great gift—a glimpse at another way to raise accomplished and joyous competitors” (The Washington Post).

In Norwich, Vermont—a charming town of organic farms and clapboard colonial buildings—a culture has taken root that’s the opposite of the hypercompetitive schoolyard of today’s tiger moms and eagle dads. In Norwich, kids aren’t cut from teams. They don’t specialize in a single sport, and they even root for their rivals. What’s more, their hands-off parents encourage them to simply enjoy themselves. Yet this village of roughly three thousand residents has won three Olympic medals and sent an athlete to almost every Winter Olympics for the past thirty years.

Now, New York Times reporter and “gifted storyteller” (The Wall Street Journal) Karen Crouse spills Norwich’s secret to raising not just better athletes than the rest of America but happier, healthier kids. And while these “counterintuitive” (Amy Chua, bestselling author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother) lessons were honed in the New England snow, parents across the country will find that “Crouse’s message applies beyond a particular town or state” (The Wall Street Journal).

If you’re looking for answers about how to raise joyful, resilient kids, let Norwich take you to a place that has figured it out.

About this title

About the Author

Karen Crouse is an award-winning sportswriter who has been on the staff of The New York Times since 2005. She is a graduate of the University of Southern California. Norwich is her first book.  

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Norwich PROLOGUE

The road to the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, runs through a pocket square of a town tucked between two interstates in the northeastern United States. Near the 89 and 91 interchange lies the town of Norwich, a hilly and wooded family-oriented farming community in rural Vermont. With a main street lined with white clapboard colonial buildings and a landmark steepled church, Norwich could be a set designer’s rendition of a small New England village. It is a cartographer’s challenge, barely registering on the map with its roughly 1,440 single-family households, including mobile homes, and a musty gymnasium contained within a brick meetinghouse. What it has in abundance is room to roam; Norwich is about a four-hour drive from New York City and two hours from Boston, but it’s not all that popular as a second-home destination—the people who live there really live there.

Yet despite its apparent ordinariness, Norwich is home to a probabilities puzzle for the statistics students at Dartmouth College, less than two miles away as the hermit thrush flies.

This town of roughly three thousand residents has accounted for three Olympic medals, and, since 1984, has put an athlete on every US Winter Olympics team except one. Like a groundhog poking its head out of its burrow each February, every four years the Norwich athletes leave the cozy, caring cocoon of their small town for the glare of the world’s grandest sporting stage.

The town doesn’t lie fallow once the snow has melted; it has also sent two athletes to the Summer Olympics. In all, Norwich has produced eleven Olympians—an even dozen if you count the snowboarder Kevin Pearce, and the townspeople would never dream of overlooking Pearce, who sustained a career-ending head injury a little more than a month before the 2010 Winter Olympics, where he was expected to contend for a gold medal. To put Norwich’s bountiful harvest in perspective, consider that Spain, with its population of 46 million, has won two Olympic medals in winter sports since 1936. New Zealand, home to 4.7 million people, majestic mountains that served as a backdrop for the Lord of the Rings film trilogy, and a wide range of adventure sports, has earned one Winter Olympics medal. In 2010, the freestyle skier Hannah Kearney became the first Norwich athlete to strike Olympic gold when she won the women’s moguls in Vancouver. With her milestone achievement, she supplanted Bob Keeshan, the actor who played Captain Kangaroo on the eponymous children’s television show, as the town’s most celebrated resident. “Supposedly, one out of every 322 residents is an Olympian,” Hannah said during those Winter Games. She added, “I don’t know if it’s the well water or what.”

The well water in Norwich is perfectly delicious, but the town’s outsize success in Olympic sports has more to do with the way it collectively rears its children, helping them succeed without causing burnout or compromising their future happiness. It’s how harried parents across America would like to bring up their children if not for the tiger moms and eagle dads in their midst. The town has much to teach us about ensuring that our children grow up to live meaningful lives in both victory and defeat.

But before exploring the phenomenon of Norwich, let me make one thing clear: The town is not representative of the country as a whole. It is overwhelmingly white and mostly middle class, with a median household income of eighty-nine thousand dollars, well above the national average of fifty-six thousand.

With its population of professors and doctors, Norwich has the demographic—the wealth and the driven personalities—to be at the vanguard of the helicopter-parenting movement. And yet the town has largely opted out of the athletic and academic arms races being waged elsewhere.

Situated across the Connecticut River from Dartmouth College, Norwich used to be dismissed as a cow town by the people in Hanover, New Hampshire, where the university is located. The father of Norwich’s first summer Olympian, kayaker Brett Heyl, who also grew up in the town, recalled many of his classmates, the children of farmers, showing up at school with manure on the soles of their shoes from mucking horse stalls. Such a scenario is unlikely now, but despite its growing affluence, Norwich has retained its bedrock agrarian values and rustic charm.

The children of Norwich still have the physical space and parental distance to explore, and discover, their place in the world. Its adults, generally speaking, have traded the acquisitive treadmill for daily nature walks and other grounding experiences. The residents look out for one another, and their connectivity provides a social safety net that no amount of money can buy. Numerous studies have shown that wealth and isolation are two sides of the same gold coin; the more money people have, the more cut off they feel from the friendships and support that can help them navigate difficult times. Niobe Way, a professor of applied psychology at New York University, told me that the social tapestry of Norwich represents a triumph of nurture over the natural order of the modern world, which has given us a wealth-and-acquisition model that favors autonomy over relationships and independence over community.

Norwich succeeds as a guide for overwhelmed parents—no matter where they put down their roots—on how to rear kids to be happy champions, resilient competitors, and contented, productive adults. Of course, not everybody conforms to the Norwich model; the town has its share of hovering parents. But almost by accident, the town has created a culture that seems to serve as the perfect incubator for developing the ideal Olympic athlete.

Its residents seem to have absorbed a saying passed down through the generations by farmers in the area: “Never going to make biscuits out of them kittens.” The parents of Norwich are not inclined to try to mold their offspring into something they are not. They’re taking their cues from their children, rather than conducting and scheduling their children’s lives. As a result, the town has succeeded in preparing its athletes not just for professional achievement but for fulfillment in their post-sports lives. The Norwich athletes that I came to know seemed to have sidestepped the substance use, anxiety, and depression that often plague Olympians in retirement. Dr. Steven Ungerleider, a sports psychologist who has served in several capacities with the United States Olympic Committee, conducted a study, published in 1997, in which he interviewed fifty-seven retired United States Olympians in twelve sports. Forty percent of the group reported having serious post-Olympics problems. “Many reported that this was the only life they knew and it was inconceivable to do anything else,” Ungerleider wrote. With one notable exception, the Norwich Olympians have managed this difficult transition better than most.

Jim Kenyon, a columnist for the local Valley News, described Norwich to me as “Disney World with maple trees.” He would know. He brought up his family in town, and though he is no longer bound to the place by his children, now grown, Kenyon continues to live in Norwich, where his neighbors run the spectrum from mansion owners to yurt dwellers. That he pokes fun at the place but is in no hurry to leave is telling, as is the fact that the town’s unofficial den mother is neither a coach nor one of its celebrated athletes. Her name is Beth Reynolds, the children’s librarian at Norwich Public Library who tailors reading recommendations to each youngster’s personality and whims. Even more than the athletes who compete all over the globe, it is Reynolds who opens new worlds to the children of Norwich.

Yet as extraordinary as the town seems, the seeds for its success can be planted and cultivated anywhere.

·  ·  ·

Norwich started producing Olympians at the advent of the television age. A young woman named Betsy Snite won a silver medal for America, and Norwich, at the 1960 Olympics in Squaw Valley, California, the first Games to be televised live in the United States. CBS aired thirty-one hours of coverage over the eleven days of competition. In 2014, when the most recent Norwich Olympian, Hannah Kearney, competed in her third and final Games, in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, Russia, NBC showed fifteen hundred hours over eighteen days. The town has had a front-porch seat to the rise of the commercialization and professionalization in the Olympic movement. Betsy retired from skiing shortly after the 1960 Olympics, and only then was she able to endorse and promote skiwear without fear of losing her amateur status. By the time Hannah arrived on the scene some forty years later, the model had changed. She was paid as a product endorser for clothing and ski equipment while she competed, but most of her sponsorships dried up after she retired.

Television turned out to be the Games changer. The exposure from global broadcasting partners attracted transnational corporate sponsors, which turned competitors into commodities and muddled the original message of the Olympics as a worldwide celebration of sport. I was reminded of how much the Norwich model matters when I returned home from covering the 2016 Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro. Several of my friends told me they hadn’t bothered watching the competition. They were over the Olympics as must-see TV and were talking about the event as if it were a reality show they had once enjoyed immensely but now found fraudulent. So many unsympathetic characters! So many farcical story lines! How could they root for athletes with cartoonish muscles who were likely to win medals only to later fail tests for performance-enhancing drugs? They expressed a nostalgic longing for the star swimmers and runners of their youth, who seemed more accessible and personable and less greedy and entitled. The consensus was that the Olympic movement was buckling under the weight of its excesses.

Norwich is why all is not lost. How can you not root for the ski jumper Mike Holland, who progressed from “a flying sack of potatoes”—a label slapped on him when he was an ungainly young jumper—to a two-time Olympian? Or Andrew Wheating, who found his way to the track as a high school senior and less than three years later ran in the Summer Games in Beijing? And what about Hannah, who overcame her aversion to backflips to become a trailblazing moguls skier? Mike, Andrew, Hannah, and the other Norwich Olympians went for broke in their sports but didn’t get rich—and they didn’t much care. The sports enriched their lives, and that was what drove them.

Norwich probably will not like that it has been made the subject of a book. This is a town with such an aversion to publicity that it tried to ground Mary Poppins. The Disney character may be perfect in every way, but several Norwich residents did not take to double-sided commercial banners for a 2015 holiday production of the musical with a spoonful of sugar. The signs appeared like a row of floating dominoes that stretched from the Ledyard Bridge one mile outside Norwich to the library in the town center. On an Internet community board, posts decried the banners as visual litter threatening the town’s natural beauty, and a few people said they would boycott the production in protest. I talked to parents in Norwich who have banished televisions from their homes because they don’t want their children to be exposed to commercials.

Norwich is a place with deep agrarian roots, and that still shows. The town was founded in 1761 as a farming community. While farmers were eventually replaced by doctors, academicians, and white-collar workers employed by Dartmouth and its hospital, Norwich remains true to the tenets set forth by the original homesteaders—hardworking people who did not manipulate their crops to make them turn out a certain way or try to accelerate the growth of their animals by injecting them with chemicals. Instead, Norwich’s residents have simply made judicious use of the resources on offer.

In the nineteenth century, fortune hunters flooded the area as part of the Bridgewater gold rush, only to discover that the land did not lend itself to quick riches. Those who stayed found a way to make the flinty terrain bear fruit.

Over the past half century, the same has held true in the quarrying of Olympians. For the most part, the Olympians of Norwich did not sacrifice their childhoods by specializing in one pursuit to hasten their progress. They grew up changing activities with the seasons. The sports that offer the greatest exposure in America, and therefore the greatest potential for fame and fortune, are not the sports that typically capture the imaginations of Vermonters, who are known for their fiercely independent, contrarian personalities. The chain of Olympians includes no figure skaters, perhaps the most glamorous of the winter athletes. Instead, Norwich is brimming with ski jumpers and freestyle skiers throwing caution to the wind and pushing the boundaries of risk and reward. In their pursuit of excellence, the Olympians of Norwich collectively have overcome a broken back, numerous concussions, and scores of broken bones. Kevin Pearce sustained a brain injury forty-four days before the start of the Vancouver Olympics in a training accident that ended his competitive career. But it did not really slow him down. The subject of the 2013 documentary The Crash Reel, Pearce now fills his days with motivational speaking and working with his nonprofit organization, Love Your Brain, to improve the quality of life for those affected by head trauma.

The Norwich athletes know the risks involved in their extreme sports but are undeterred. Nearly three years after her Olympic gold-medal performance, Hannah sustained a bruised liver, two broken ribs, and a punctured lung in a training accident. She returned to competition three months after the October 2012 accident and finished the 2013 season by winning one of her six overall World Cup moguls titles. Like Vermonters who make the best of their unforgiving winter climate, the Norwich athletes accept that growth begins where one’s comfort zone ends. Their fuel is renewable, and their drive was summed up by Hannah when she said, “A lot of satisfaction in life is cultivated by working towards a goal because you feel organically motivated and truly happy about your choices.” Sage words, because in the end, few Olympians are able to cash in on their medals in what has become an oversaturated market. In 1960, when Betsy Snite became Norwich’s first homegrown Olympic medalist, the Winter Games program included twenty-seven events. In 2014, when Hannah became the most recent, the program had grown to ninety-eight.

During my first visit to Norwich, I attended a reading by Deirdre Heekin, a local restaurateur, farmer, and author, at the town’s two-story clapboard bookstore. There to promote An Unlikely Vineyard, Heekin read from a chapter that focused on the five factors she identified as key to farming success...

Edition details

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1501119907
• ISBN 13: 9781501119903
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 288