Work, Church, School — Why Not The Paralympics Too? College Freshman Michael Kneeland Is Giving It A Shot

Michael Kneeland has stayed busy this summer between working at Home Depot, training as a Paralympic hopeful and preparing to start his freshman year of college.

It has been a lot for Kneeland to juggle, and he’s had to shuffle his schedule around to find the time to get everything done. Things will almost certainly get busier for the teenager over the next few months as he looks to qualify for the Paralympic Winter Games Milano Cortina 2026.

Kneeland, 19, has trained this offseason with fellow sit skiers Ty Wiberg and Nicole Zaino, who are two of his teammates on the U.S. Paralympics Nordic Skiing development team. The three of them have regularly gotten in two workouts a day in his hometown of Bozeman, Montana, where U.S. Paralympics Nordic Skiing is based.

“There are times where we do intervals or just time trials. We get a little excited and then start just doing head-to-head races for practice,” Kneeland said. “And ironically, because of last year’s training with them, Ty and I are pretty close together, just our time wise, in all the races, so that’s great.”

Kneeland, however, hasn’t been able to train with Wiberg and Zaino on the weekend. He instead goes to his job helping customers as an associate at Home Depot on Saturdays, and he spends his Sunday mornings at church.

“We just rearranged a little bit,” Kneeland said. “And then my coach did take Sunday off for me, so that I’m able to have a day off.”

As a promising sit skier, Kneeland said he’s focused on making his Paralympic debut in Italy in March. It would be the next step in his fast rise in Para Nordic skiing.

In January of 2024, Kneeland traveled to Italy and competed in his first two world cup events as an 18-year-old high school junior. He continued to progress this past season, and he earned his best finish at the IBU Para Biathlon World Championships in February when he placed 19th in the 7.5-kilometer biathlon pursuit race in Pokljuka, Slovenia.

Three months later, Kneeland was unable to attend a training camp that U.S. Paralympics Nordic Skiing holds every May in Bend, Oregon. He had a good reason for missing it — he was graduating from high school that week. He also had AP exams to take to earn college credit.

Kneeland said he’s been working this offseason on trying to improve his ski technique to get faster on snow and help his chances of qualifying for the upcoming Winter Paralympics.

“I’m going to focus on little steps in front of me, which is the Games now, because I think it’s good to kind of take it one step at a time and one goal at time instead of taking a giant leap.”

If only his life were so simple.

Kneeland is now a freshman majoring in data science at Montana State in Bozeman. In addition to juggling his work and training schedules, he spent this summer filling out paperwork and getting things done in order to start classes on Aug. 20.

At one point, he missed three days of training to attend his freshman orientation.

Kneeland was one of only 20 high school graduates to be awarded Montana State’s Presidential Scholarship, the university’s most prestigious scholarship. To maintain his scholarship, he must take a full courseload of classes and maintain at least a 3.5 GPA during his freshman year.

At the same time, Kneeland said he’ll continue to train in Nordic skiing and attempt to compete in as many world cup events as possible this winter to qualify for Milano Cortina.

“It’s just been great trying to absorb all the information, trying to manage my time and trying to be on top of everything by reaching out to professors about this kind of stuff,” Kneeland said.

As if that weren’t enough, Kneeland plans to pursue two minors in college in addition to earning a degree in data science. With minors in financial engineering and computer science, he said he hopes to learn more about the business world and how to write computer codes.

“For me, there’s a balance. I want to be more competitive and be able to excel in academics and sports,” Kneeland said. “On the other hand, I know that it is not the end of the world if I fail in one of them or if my academics didn’t go well or if my training or my sports didn’t go well.”

As much as he wants to earn a high GPA in college and qualify for the Winter Paralympics, Kneeland said it’s more important to him that he maintains a positive attitude and continues to be humble and nice to everyone he encounters.

“So, I just learned that those two things (school and the Winter Paralympics) are important to me,” Kneeland said. “But I’m not going to make it as too important, where my life is (based) all around them and then I don’t really love other people.”

Alex Abrams has written about Olympic and Paralympic sports for more than 15 years, including as a reporter for major newspapers in Florida, Arkansas and Oklahoma. He is a freelance contributor to USParaNordic.org on behalf of Red Line Editorial, Inc.