Chad Salmela enters his 10th season as the head men’s and women’s cross country coach at St. Scholastica in 2025. Salmela had been the school’s first men’s and women’s Nordic ski head coach the previous 10 years prior to being named the cross country coach in 2016. He also assists with the men’s and women’s track & field programs as the distance coach.
Salmela led the Saints women in 2024 and men in 2023, to program-high third place finishes in the Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletics Conference Cross Country Championships. The men’s finish earned him the MIAC Men’s Cross Country Coach of the Year for 2023, only the second Saints coach in program history to earn coach of the year honors since the Saints joined the MIAC in 2021.
Salmela led Allison Hendrickson, Calvin Boone, and Lars Dewall, to the NCAA Cross Country Championships in 2023, with Senior, Lars Dewall, and junior, Calvin Boone earning All-American honors at the meet—the first two such honors in program history. It was the most Saints to qualify for an NCAA Cross Country Championships in a single season.
Before the MIAC era, Salmela led the women’s team to four consecutive UMAC Championships and guided the men’s team to the UMAC title in 2019. Salmela coached Casey Hovland to two NCAA Division III Championship appearances, including an All-America performance in 2016. Salmela is a three-time UMAC Women’s Cross Country Coach of the Year and 2019 UMAC Men’s Coach of the Year. The Saints qualified runners to the NCAA Cross Country Championships for the past four straight seasons, the longest continuous run in program history.
In his 10 seasons coaching St. Scholastica skiers, Salmela led both the men and the women to Central Collegiate Ski Association (CCSA) Championships in 2015, despite annually competing against scholarship programs Northern Michigan University, University of Alaska-Fairbanks and Michigan Tech University. He coached Paul Schommer to the program's only All-America honors in 2014. In total, under his tutelage, the Saints had 12 NCAA qualifiers in his 10 seasons, including 10 since 2012.
Schommer developed post-collegiately to be the ski program’s first Olympian alum, in 2022, in which Schommer competed in the Beijing Olympics in the sport of biathlon.
Salmela was an assistant under retired Coach Steve Pfingsten for the first two years at St. Scholastica and prior to that had coached boys and girls cross country at the Marshall School from 2002 to 2006. Salmela has coached elite and master-elite marathoners and continues to consult aspiring Olympic skiers as part-time high performance manager for Team Birkie.
As a junior competitor, Salmela was one of the Midwest’s top junior cross country ski racers as well as an all-state cross country runner for Mountain Iron-Buhl-Virginia, then switched to the sport of biathlon after high school at age 19. After eight years of competing nationally and internationally as a member of the United States Biathlon Team, he moved directly into the assistant coach position for the U.S. Biathlon Team in 1998, while finishing his college degree at Middlebury College in Vermont. After graduation, Salmela built and coached a national junior development program for biathlon, managed the 2002 Olympic Games biathlon competitions in Salt Lake City, served as assistant coach and wax technician for the U.S. junior world championship biathlon team, served eight years as an athlete representative for the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee, and announced ski events across the country and on television.
Salmela has served as NBC Sports expert and color analyst for cross country skiing and biathlon for 20 years, and commentates for FIS Cross Country World Cup and IBU Biathlon World Cup events as an English world feed commentator online.
Salmela was the biathlon color commentator for NBC's coverage of 2006 Torino Olympics and added cross country skiing and Nordic combined to his duties at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. To date, he has been NBC's color analyst for the past five Olympic Winter Games. He is widely known in American popular culture for his exasperated “here comes Diggins!” call of Kikkan Randall and Jessie Diggins’ gold medal finish in the team sprint at the 2018 Pyeong Chang Olympics. It has been hailed as one of the most iconic television calls in United States Olympic history.
