Colby Ski Team Patch, Waterville, Maine — c. 1970s-80s

A vintage Colby Ski Team patch from Waterville, Maine, estimated to date from the 1960s or 70s, a triangle with a blue merrowed border and a cream ground carrying COLBY over SKI TEAM in blue block caps. No mountain, no skier, no snowflake. Team issue, and it shows.

Team patches went on the parka once and stayed there. That is why so few of them ever reach a table.

A resort patch circulates. It was bought as a souvenir, it gets traded, it ends up in a shoebox with forty others and eventually somebody sells the shoebox. A team patch was issued to one person, sewn onto one jacket, and then that jacket sat in a closet for fifty years because of what it represented rather than what it was worth.

These come out one at a time, usually when a house gets cleared. There is no other supply.

Carnival racing was also, for a long stretch, genuinely the top level of the sport in this country. Before the national team had money, the fastest skiers in America were at Middlebury, Dartmouth, Colby and Williams, racing each other on weekends in front of about forty people. The patches from those programs are the hardware of a period when college skiing was the whole show.

Embroidered on twill, merrowed edge. Photos are the condition report.