Liberty University Club Sports Athletics
Meet USCSA national champion snowboarder Coleen Leja
8/23/2021 6:40:39 PM | Ski & Snowboard
Coleen Leja, a Liberty University women’s snowboarder from Rockford, Mich., has found the Liberty Mountain Snowflex Centre (LMSC) to be an ideal place to sharpen and showcase her skills.
As she explains in this “Meet the Player” interview produced by Liberty’s Club Sports videography staff, Leja grew up skiing through the harsh winters of Michigan.
“My parents took us out when we were like 4 and at first I skied, but skiing was not it for me so I switched to snowboarding when I was 9,” Leja said. “I wanted to get competitive with it, so I actually started USASA and then coming here, I knew I wanted to be on the team.”
Now a senior studying marketing and sales through the School of Business, she has thrived on LMSC’s plastic carpet-covered slopes made slick by an underground misting system since joining the Lady Flames as a freshman.
Leja became the ski & snowboard team’s first national champion in Spring 2020, winning both the women’s Rail Jam and Slopestyle events at the United States Collegiate Ski & Snowboard Association (USCSA) National Championships at Lake Placid, N.Y. That event took place in mid-March, the same week COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, cutting the competition short by a day. Still, combined with her fourth-place finish in women's boardercross, Leja was the highest-scoring women's freestyle snowboarder in the competition.
Leja, whose twin brother, Chris, competes on a ski team at a college in Michigan and younger sister, Ainsley, is a freshman goalie on the Lady Flames’ women’s soccer team, says the Christian environment at Liberty is what sold her on the school as an incoming freshman in 2019.
“I knew I wanted to go to a big school, I didn’t want to miss that college experience, but I also didn’t want to compromise my values and morals and I thought Liberty was kind of a good in-between,” she said.
Her favorite chapter of the Bible is Psalm 8, which declares the excellence of the name of the Lord in all the earth.
“It talks a lot about nature and God’s role in nature and His creation for us, and I really like that,” Leja said.
An informational meeting about Liberty's men's and women's ski & snowboard teams is set for Thursday at 6 p.m. at the LMSC lodge before tryouts for the 2021-22 teams begin on Tuesday, Aug. 31, at 6:30 p.m. on Snowflex's slopes.
Video by Hayden Robertson and Kylee Lilge/Club Sports Video & Media Assistants
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