“Coach Matt and the Outdoor ‘Cats,” from Adrenaline Films, starts at 5 p.m. Saranac Lake native Coach Matt Dougherty, along with members of the team, will be in attendance after recently competing in Nordic and biathlon at the FISU Winter World University Games in Italy.

The feature-length film directed and produced by Robert Jury chronicles the Bobcats over the course of almost two years during the 2023 and 2024 seasons as they train at the on-campus E. Philip Saunders Nordic and Biathlon Stadium, preparing to travel around the world to compete against some of the top colleges in the sport.

Tim Ranzetta, a California-based entrepreneur, PSC donor and friend of the college, was visiting home on nearby Spitfire Lake in early 2023 when he stopped by the training facility and saw a newspaper headline about the team winning a national championship.

Ranzetta has connections with Adrenaline Films and pitched the idea of a documentary to the college. Dougherty was surprised but honored.

From left, Paul Smith’s College Nordic ski head coach Matt Dougherty, Aidan Ripp, Diego Schillaci, Gustav Whitcomb, Paul Smith’s College trustee E. Philip Saunders, Logan Jensen, John Thompson, Brady Miller, Jack Fogarty, Timothy Ziegler, Charles Forbes and Dawson Dunn. The Paul Smith’s College men’s Nordic ski team received rings in January 2023 for winning the United States Collegiate Ski Association National Championships in Lake Placid in March 2022. A documentary about the team will be screened at the Harrietstown Town Hall on Saturday at 5 p.m. (Enterprise photo — Parker O’Brien)

“I mean, we are a small college,” he said. “What the college has been able to do with (this program) is phenomenal.”

They have seven athletes from a school of under 700 students.

He said they are punching way above their weight and performing well against big teams.

To call it “surreal” undersells how crazy it was to be followed around by a camera crew for almost two years, Dougherty said.

Adrenaline Films Founder and President — and Head Cinematographer on the film — Mike Murray compared it to nature photography, telling Dougherty, “Eventually the animals don’t notice you’re there anymore.”

Dougherty saw that happen with the Bobcats. After the first few days, the team felt normal and natural being observed by the cameras.

Dougherty feels the crew was able to capture the team as they were. He said it was wild to live it, and then see their story told as a narrative on the screen. They didn’t know what story was going to be told as it was being filmed. The crew was collecting the footage and finding the story in real-time.

In the 1950s through 1970s, the college was dominant in skiing, Dougherty said. The program ebbed and flowed and then stopped for around a decade as athletics programs across the country were being reduced as schools made cuts. The program got a massive boost of energy in 2017 on the day after the 2023 Lake Placid FISU World University Winter Games were announced.

PSC Board of Trustees Chair Phil Saunders wanted to increase enrollment with athletics and approached Saranac Lake native, former U.S. National team bobsledder and sportscaster John Morgan with the idea. Morgan said he was in, if the area could land the FISU Games, and suggested creating a Nordic center on the college’s 15,000 acre campus.

The region won the bid for the 2023 Games in 2017, and with Saunders putting in his own money, they renovated the trails at the college’s Visitor Interpretive Center up to Federation of International Skiing standards, becoming the only college in the country with a biathlon range on campus in 2020.

Dougherty came on to lead the program in the fall of 2020. When he arrived, there was one skier on the team and no recruited skiers. He had to completely rebuild it.

The startup was slow. Dougherty said athletics programs’ history is measured in decades. But PSC’s happened faster than expected.

Now, the team’s earned two national championships, 14 team titles in different events and three overall national champions.

Dougherty’s been coaching for 25 years and specializes in going to schools with small or nonexistent programs and building them.

“I knew what I was getting into,” Dougherty said with a laugh. “It’s a lot though, when you’re building from the ground, up.”

The skiing world is small, he said. There’s a small pool of coaches, programs and athletes. To recruit, he needed to earn the athletes’ trust, so show that the college and program will “do right by them.” To earn trust, Dougherty said the college needed to provide athletes with what they need to grow, as well as space to grow. He said development blossoms at different times. It’s out of the coaches, and even the athlete’s, control. It can’t be demanded immediately, he said. But what they can do is provide the right environment for that development to occur.

In 2018, PSC partnered with the then USA Nordic and U.S. Biathlon, which provide scholarship programs.

“That’s why Paul Smith’s got so good so quick,” Morgan said.

Morgan said the film is a “gift from the heavens” and hopes it will be good promotion for the college.

The through-line for the movie is the team’s battle to win national championships last year, a fight Dougherty called “intense and meaningful.” (Spoiler warning for those who haven’t been following the team.) In March, 2024, the women won their first-ever national title at the United States Collegiate Ski and Snowboard Association National Nordic Championships in Lake Placid. The men lost out on the title by two points.

“You find just as much value in the struggle to achieve something that is audacious as you do sometimes in winning it,” Dougherty said.

The film also follows star Bobcat skiers Aidan Ripp and Dolcie Tanguay, who have now graduated. They both had big goals and fought to achieve them. A portion of the documentary focuses on Tanguay competing in 11 races in 14 days on two continents.

Dougherty said the documentary also features open discussions of mental health.

“As a coach who’s been doing this for 25 years now, I greatly appreciate that we’re now in an era where we can begin to talk about that openly,” he said. “The athletes who talk about it, I’m super proud of them. I think it’s really brave.”

Mental health has been a problem in the sports for a while, he said, and now that people are talking about it, action is started to be taken addressing it.

Dougherty’s favorite moments of the film are when he’s standing with an athlete at a time of need. He’s proud of those. Dougherty also said his middle-school age kids are in the movie. The athletes are their friends and role models, he said. As a dad, this makes him happy.

The team’s success wouldn’t have happened without the support of the college and community, Dougherty said.

“It’s the families that send their kids to Dewey. It’s the people who ski at the VIC all the time and come out and cheer,” he said.

He said the film is a tribute to the team and to what the college has done. He hopes people are moved and impressed by these athletes’ stories.

“The work’s not done,” Morgan said. They have a goal to be the top Nordic college in the country.

Dougherty said he has a young team this year. College athletics are about always rebuilding. Over the past few years, he’s developed a good “framework” to set up the program for the future. And he plans to remain “Coach Matt.” Supporting and pushing the Bobcats is his “retirement job.”