Northwestern’s Synchronized Skating Team took home a medal for a fourth-place finish at the Midwestern Sectionals in Broomfield, Co., in late January.
That event was the final competition for the team this season. Still, the season is not quite over for the club team.
“The team skated fantastically,” president Emily Medvin said of the performance. “Our main goal was to skate as well as we could. We nailed our elements and this fourth-place finish was a vast improvement from our eighth-place finish at the Mid-American Championships two weeks ago.”
The team placed eighth out of 11 teams at the Mid-American Championships earlier in the month in Fraser, Mich.
Medvin said that the team’s disappointing finish was largely because the team was still in the process of changing their program and “cleaning up the elements.”
Coach Kathy Janik and assistant choreographer Carol Kim choreographed this year’s program to music from the movie “Footloose.” Kim serves as both the assistant choreographer and the “on-ice liaison between the team and Janik.”
To train for its three performances a year, NUSST practices twice a week in both Highland Park and Niles. Once the team enters competition season, they increase practices to three times a week. Practices consist of two one-hour sessions: an off-ice training session and an ice choreographing session to run their program.
The NUSST began in 2004 when then-freshman Brittany Bettendorf founded the team so students would have the opportunity to continue figure skating in college and be able to explore a potentially new realm of team skating.
This year’s team, led by Janik and Medvin, is composed of 15 skaters.
Medvin, a psychology major and one of two seniors on the team, has been skating throughout her tenure at NU.
NUSST is currently competing at the Open Collegiate level, so anyone with skating experience can try out for the team.
There are two levels of experience for college teams with no varsity program: Open Collegiate and Collegiate. The Collegiate level requires team members to pass a “Juvenile Level Test” before joining the team, according to Jaimie Vaillancourt, a Medill sophomore and a returning member of the team.
The final performance of the season will be the Northwestern Exhibition Show at the Robert Crown Community Center and Ice Complex in Evanston on Feb. 21.
Unlike their other two competitions this season, the final performance is just for show.
“The exhibition serves as a nice end to the season so that our friends and family can see why we come back from practices so late and see what we’ve worked so hard on all season.”
