CARRABASSETT VALLEY – All’s quiet up at Sugarloaf this time of year. Skis and snowboards sleep snug in the attic. Snowmakers have weeks before starting to hum. Visions of apples and hikes through fiery woods, not powder and cocoa, are running through skiers’ heads.

But inside the Antigravity Center at the foot of the mountain last week, voices echoed off the walls. In one corner, a girl jumped, knees bent, moving diagonally around a frame. If you didn’t see her sneakers hit the floor, you’d be sure she was skiing.

Across the room, teenagers sprinted, trying to beat beeps coming from a public address system. The tempo picked up, and runners dropped out to cheer from the sidelines. Finally only Robert Moss remained, running red-faced and sweating to the beeps.

The kids of Carrabassett Valley Academy were back.

This school year brings the biggest enrollment since CVA’s inception 25 years ago, with 123 students expected to be in classes by the time winter ski season starts, CVA’s head of public relations, Rick Bisson, said last week.

While more than 60 percent of CVA’s students are Mainers, the rest come from across the country and Canada. Three hail from overseas. Nearly 40 percent are on financial aid, helping their families afford the $33,000-plus full-board tuition bill, plus equipment, season passes, and travel costs associated with competition.

Moss, 17, found CVA on the Internet from his home in Ireland. “I’m an alpine racer,” he drawled. “And there’s obviously no place to ski in Ireland.”

Moss hopes to one day compete on the Irish Olympic team.

Being any Olympian is a dream most kids have at some point. Most grow out of it – it’s unrealistic.

But at CVA, it’s not so far off.

“You can walk down the halls here and look at a kid,” Bisson said. “He could be on the U.S. Ski Team in a year or two, but here he’s just a regular student.”

Regular for CVA, maybe – though CVA isn’t, exactly, a regular school.

This fall’s newsletter attests to that. The front cover is awash with quotes from USA Today and the “Today” show, and photos of then 29-year-old alum Seth Wescott, who became Maine’s first gold-medal winning Winter Olympian (in snowboardcross) last February.

A few pages in, nestled between the pages of a school calendar, sits a list of stats. Seventy National Championship titles, 15 NCAA and USCSA All-Americans, 20 National Team members, six World Championships, 10 Olympians – with one gold, two silver, and one bronze medal.

Last week, another alum left Farmington for the national team training facility in Utah.

With all the press the school received since grads Bode Miller and Kirsten Clark competed in Salt Lake City in 2002, admissions inquiries have risen by more than 60 percent, Bisson said.

“We got a call from a man in Japan who had just had a child. He wanted to know what to do to increase his son’s chances of going here.”

And after Wescott won last winter and the school was featured on NBC, the “Today” show, and national news publications, MTV came calling.

The person who called – Bisson couldn’t remember his name – wanted to know the school’s position on possibly doing a reality show there. CVA staff members turned them down. “We didn’t think it’d be in the best interest of the students,” Bisson said. Other producers have called since then, he said, with the same result.

Reality TV aside, CVA students – they train at least four hours almost every day and still manage to do well enough in school that they invariably get into college if they apply – are like kids everywhere. “We face the same struggles here that every parent, every school, everyone that has teenagers face,” Bisson said. But CVA teaches independence at an early age, Bisson said.

Which is necessary, given the amount of traveling the kids do: weekends away competing, trips overseas in the Alps or South America, weeks away at nationals, if they’re lucky.

CVA’s supportive environment and the huge amount of time the kids spend on the mountain has made the school one of the top snow sports academies in the country, US Ski Team senior correspondent Paul Robbins said.

“It’s a full-time academy, and they have a great year-round program,” he said. “They are top of the line.”

CVA staff are supportive, but they demand excellence, Robbins said. “It’s what you want your kids to have if you’re going to spend that kind of money with that kind of purpose.”

“Nobody’s going to CVA because you’re going to get a Nobel prize in chemistry. You are there to become a top athlete in whatever sport you do.”

For Bailey Sitz, 14, of Kingfield, all that is still years away. She’s dedicated to her sport, and she said she loves the community.

She also loves the schedule. “It’s really great to have this opportunity to…go on the mountain when everyone else is stuck in school,” she said. “When I’m on the chairlift, everyone always asks me ‘are you in school?'”