Eric Harlow enters his sixth year as Colby's Head Coach of Men's and Women's Alpine Skiing with the start of the 2025-26 academic year.
In the 2024-25 season Harlow coached four Mules, one men and three women, at the NCAA Championships with three placing inside the top-30. This marked the first time the team qualified a full squad (3 skiers) in any gender since 2015. Carissa Cassidy, the seasons EISA Slalom Leader and Harrison Digangi were named All-Americans for their efforts in the NCAA Slalom.
Prior to coming to Mayflower Hill, Harlow served as director of alpine programs at Sugar Bowl Academy located in Lake Tahoe. In his more than 20 years of coaching elite athletes, Harlow has developed and led teams and individuals who have consistently excelled at junior levels, top-ranked NCAA teams, the U.S. Ski Team, and international teams.
Colby alpine skiing competes at the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I level. The team concluded each of the past three seasons ranked in the top 15 nationally and is well-positioned to become one of the premier alpine ski programs in the country.
Early in his career, Harlow was the women’s development team coach for the U.S. Ski Team, taking talented skiers, including three-time Olympian Megan McJames, to the World Junior Championships in 2006. Later, in 2007, he joined the Stratton Mountain School in Vermont as head women’s coach, where he developed multiple U.S. Ski Team athletes, including 2018 Olympian Alice Merryweather.
In 2012 Harlow became the head alpine coach for Burke Mountain Academy in Vermont, where his athletes continued to excel and progress to the U.S. Ski Team and colleges with the strongest alpine skiing programs in the country. A year later he became the Eastern Region development director of U.S. Ski and Snowboard and led the team to a Region’s Cup victory at the U18 U.S. National Championships in 2015.
Most recently, at Sugar Bowl Academy, his program developed multiple NCAA athletes, several OPA Cup and World Junior Championship competitors, a U.S. Ski Team member, and a World Cup giant slalom winner, Alice Robinson of New Zealand.
Tracey Cote, Colby’s head coach of Nordic skiing, works alongside Harlow competing in the EISA and at the NCAA Championships. “Eric’s experience coaching athletes at the highest level of U.S. skiing has quickly benefited our ski program,” Cote said. “He is well known throughout the ski community for his creativity, work ethic, and sustained success at multiple levels.”
Harlow has a bachelor’s degree in history from Colby-Sawyer College in New London, N.H., where he competed on the ski and baseball teams. He is also an alumnus of Gould Academy in Bethel, Maine. He and his wife, Catherine Blanchard, have a daughter, Mia, and son, Jacques or “Jack.”
