CHARTIERS VALLEY REVERSES ITS FORTUNES
When Hunter Williams placed first in the 200-meter relay at the 2015 PSAC track and field championships, the former Slippery Rock University runner never would have imagined the life he lives today. And before that, the 18-year-old version of himself who won a WPIAL 400-meter championship while at Seneca Valley never would have envisioned where he’d be 10 years later.
Williams, now 28, barely knew about the sport of skeleton back then. He certainly didn’t pay attention to it.
But now, it’s his passion — a source of unrivaled calmness garnered from zooming down a narrow, sharply winding 1,300-meter ice track headfirst on a sled that hits speeds as fast 85 mph. During those precious moments, it’s almost as if he’s flying. The stresses and anxieties of everyday life go out the window.
“You can’t really hear anything else,” said Williams. “You’re focused and in the zone. It’s just you, the track and the sled — just trying to manipulate the pressures of the track to go as fast as possible and put the sled in the right spots to make it down.”
Williams is a member of the Team USA Skeleton Development Team, which races in national and international events around the world. He has competed everywhere from Lake Placid, N.Y., and Park City, Utah, to most recently the Intercontinental Cup (Jan. 16) races in Altenberg, Germany, where he placed 21st in a field of 31 — some of whom were current Olympians — on one of the world’s most challenging courses for new riders. The race marked Williams’ seventh of his young racing career that first began in November 2019.
“Hunter is still very early in his career, but a couple weeks into this season he notably showed a better comfort and understanding of skeleton,” said Team USA skeleton coach Lauri Bausch. “This can be both an exciting and challenging shift because the added awareness can make a slider overthink and overwork, but so far I am impressed in his ability to take on new challenges this season.”
Williams was introduced to the sport by a former college teammate at Slippery Rock. In the summer of 2017, he took part in a combine held by the Team USA Development Program that tested everything from 15, 30 and 45meter sprints to a shot put toss and one-rep power clean max. He trained six months for the test and passed, which led to an invitation to attend Team USA’s rookie sliding camp in October.
That following January, Williams took his first run during a sliding camp at the Team USA course in Lake Placid. The first time down presents a significant amount of danger for inexperienced riders, as they fly down the track with their chins just centimeters from the ice. One wrong twist or turn of the body can be deadly — so much that the Olympics banned the sport for 54 years before reinstating it in 2002.
Williams’ first crash came three weeks after his first run, on the track’s notorious 10th curve to be exact.
“I came out too early, hit the wall and kind of went cartwheeling down the track,” he said. “I had so much adrenaline at the time that it didn’t really hurt. I got up, went back up to the top of the track and did another run. You can’t let it get in your head.”
In the time since, Williams’ commitment to the sport is reflectant in his steadfast desire to compete on its greatest stage. His ultimate goal is to qualify for the 2026 Olympic Games in Italy, which would require him to place among Team USA’s top-3 racers. As of now, he ranks ninth out of the team’s top 11 skeleton athletes.
“To make it to the 2026 Winter Olympics, Hunter needs to continue to embrace the pursuit of excellence,” said Bausch. “He has made it past the point of ‘making it down’ tracks and being in the mix for his level of experience. We compete in a sport that comes down to fractions of a second over multiple runs, so you need to know you did everything you could to be your best.
“The winningest skeleton athletes on the highest tours aren’t just good — they excel, consistently. They are the fastest off the top and they school people down the track. So to be consistently fast on about eight different tracks in a given season — he needs to find fractions of a second at the start. And he needs to be resilient, because it’s not going to be a perfectly linear improvement. If he can take away something each time and apply to the next experience, then by the 2026 Olympic Trials he may be able to piece it together.”
For Williams, skeleton is not his day-job — instead a passion-project that is entirely self-funded. He’s a fulltime GIS Analyst for Cabot Oil & Gas, which allows him to work remotely while inseason, and sells apparel, holds fundraisers and accepts donations through his personal website to pay the high costs associated with equipment and travel. To him, the ambitions, relationships and experiences the sport has given him are worth every dollar.
“It’s every child’s dream to compete for Team USA with the flag and those letters on your chest,” said Williams. “And it’s also about proving to myself that I’m capable of competing at the highest level and the experiences that come along with it.
“It’s definitely an honor to race against and learn from some of the best in the world.”