When Peter Carter ’69 first arrived at Harvard, he planned to join the men’s ice hockey team. A five-year starter in high school at Milton Academy, Carter expected his college experience to be defined by his time spent at the rink. But after losing the starting position to the other goalie in his year, he decided he did not want to spend his collegiate career on the bench and pivoted to an entirely different sports team: alpine ski.
“My brothers and I started skiing pretty much as soon as we could walk decently,” Carter explained in an interview with the Independent. For him, this meant stepping into a pair of skis at age two under the supervision of his father, a member of the U.S. Ski Team in the 1930s. Carter grew up skiing year-round on Cannon Mountain, N.H., staying at his grandparents’ house in Jefferson; this house would later house the Harvard Ski team during their East Coast competitions. He began skiing competitively at age twelve, following in the footsteps of his family members.
After switching to the ski team, Carter shifted his schedule to be on the mountain as much as possible. “I had a combined studies program of economics, government, and history with a Latin American flavor… It worked perfectly for me, because I had no requirements other than the requirements that I proposed to the different departments,” Carter said. Frontloading his classes on Mondays and Tuesdays, he trained up north the rest of the week.
Carter’s undergraduate career was extremely successful, including a team near victory in the Eastern Championships in 1969. In his three years on the team, Harvard qualified for the NCAA every season and ranked in the top three in the country. After graduating, Carter worked with an MIT professor to develop a new system to make artificial snow. The machines they developed proved highly successful, and after selling the company, he returned to Harvard—this time not as a student, but as the head coach of the team.
Upon his return, Carter was faced with the challenge of continuing a nationally competitive program while on a minuscule budget. “While I was coaching, I think we never spent a night in a hotel, as our budget was very meager at that point… We would mooch off of friends for sleeping arrangements we didn’t have [and] we didn’t have a van or anything at that point. Fortunately, there were enough local people that we could use local cars, so that the ski team was functioning on a shoestring at that point.”
Despite budget constraints, Carter arranged international travel for the team, taking them to train in Argentina and Chile alongside international teams during the summer. Carter recalls one particularly eventful trip in September of 1973, which found the team in Santiago, Chile, during a military coup.
“When we got to Santiago the day before our flight back home, there were major riots in response to General Augusto Pinochet and the military trying to take over the government. Naively, we walked around the city until people started getting shot. At that point, we immediately headed for and holed up in our hotel. The next day, we caught the last plane out of Chile before President Salvador Allende was assassinated with the support of the CIA,” recounted Carter. Had they failed to make that flight, the team would have likely been imprisoned in a local soccer stadium along with other foreigners.
Beyond the stories from his coaching tenure, one of Carter’s lasting impacts on the program was to combine the men’s and women’s teams. While the men had operated at the Division I level since its founding in 1934, the women’s team was functioning more akin to a club sport.
“When I started coaching, the women pretty much had a caretaker, not a coach. They didn’t have anybody who knew skiing,” he said. “So I joined the women’s and the men’s teams together so that they could train with us, and it really brought the level of the women’s team way up, because they had not had decent coaching and no recruiting or anything. That was one thing I was proud of, which was really bringing the women up to the level of the men’s team.”
After four years as coach, Carter decided to step down and focus full-time on pursuing his law degree; during his tenure, he was concurrently taking classes at Harvard Law School. While his time as head coach was short, his impact on the program was significant, as the coaching position title was renamed after him in 2020. “I was very surprised and shocked, and pleased. It was a real honor that I hadn’t expected at all,” shared Carter. He said that Paul Finnegan ’75—the man who donated the money for the endowment—did so as a dedication to the positive atmosphere coach Carter was able to create.
The balance of being both serious and having fun was a defining principle of Carter’s tenure—an approach that resonated beyond collegiate athletics and offered a valuable life lesson applicable in any field. “They’re not mutually exclusive. No, in fact, I think you do better when you’re having fun,” Carter said.
Kate Oliver ’26 (koliver@college.harvard.edu) learned how to ski on an artificial mountain in the middle of Missouri.