As Northwestern students pine for a frozen, unslushied Norris Ice Rink, skaters on the Northwestern University Synchronized Skating Team (NUSST) travel to Niles three times a week to get their ice skating fix.
Members of NUSST, affectionately known as “The Purple Line,” spend six hours a week training on and off the ice during competition season. The team has just returned from the 2012 Midwestern and Pacific Coast Synchronized Skating Sectional Championships Saturday, where they placed seventh.
“This is our biggest competition of the year,” said Weinburg junior and assistant choreographer Amy Mangum. “Teams from all over the area come to compete. It was a good time.”
Synchronized skating is a form of figure skating in which a whole team of eight to 20 skaters is on the ice for the duration of the program. A comparison to synchronized swimming may not be the best, though.
“I found the best way to describe it to people is it’s like a dance line, but on ice,” said Katie Amys, a Weinburg junior who is the current president of the club.
For many figure skaters looking to continue skating in college, synchronized skating teams offer them a chance at a competitive level. But the synchronized skating team at NU is technically a club, not a school sanctioned-sport.
One of the challenges NUSST faces is that many of their skaters come in as single, freestyle skaters, without much synchronized skating experience Mangum said.
“When you’re a single skater you have your own space and you’re not used to skating right next someone,” Amys said of her own transition from single to synchronized skating. “I think the biggest challenge is the space bubble kind of issue.”
Coached by Kathy Janik, a Chicago native who also coaches for Chicago Skates, NUSST works off-ice as well as on the ice in order to perfect the details of their performances. They step through the program to nail the timing, down to when they lift their heads, Amys said. Details are important in synchronized skating.
“It’s crazy when you think about how you are putting in how many hours of practice to go into a three-minute-and-15-second performance and that’s all your time and that’s all you’re judged on.”
The U.S. Figure Skating Association has outlined a list of the elements required in an official synchronized skating program, and teams are judged on the clarity and unity of their moves. These moves include terms like blocks, wheels and intersections.
“Even coming in as a single skater into synchro, the coach is saying these things, and you’re like ‘Um, don’t know what that is,'” Amys said.
Even so, the team has managed make its way through competitions since its founding in 2004, including a silver medal at the Midwestern Sectionals two years ago.
“We were going into it not placing so well,” Mangum said. “But our coach told us to skate with our hearts and put our personality in the program. We didn’t really skate better; we just put everything in it and got second place.”
The team’s personality, as well as their collective love of skating, gives NUSST its cohesiveness and allows the members to skate, and work, together.
“We’re all in college and our time is spread thin, [but] all of us are really passionate,” Mangum said. “We’re all there because we want to be there.”
–Simone Alicea
