Like the Rockettes on blades, the 16 skaters grabbed one another’s shoulders, heads held high and backs taught. The formation resembled a chorus line, legs raring to kick alternately in the air.

But instead, the skaters spun into a circle, moving their feet in unison. Each stride swiftly slit the ice, hissing like fast writing against a chalkboard.

The Syracuse University synchronized skating team spent seven months perfecting the circle, the beginning to a four-and-a-half-minute program that features the graceful movements of figure skating and the rapid dynamics of synchronized swimming.

The first-year club team will travel to Lake Placid on Friday to compete at the 2002 U.S. Synchronized Team Skating Championships. The competition is their final event this year and a chance to show how far they have come as a team.

‘Our goal is to skate clean and have fun,’ said Coach Carolyn Quinn. ‘Being a first-year program, our expectations are not to come in first. It’s to get our names out there to let our younger skaters know that Syracuse has a program now.’

The team has practiced every Sunday evening for one hour at the Tennity Ice Skating Pavilion since September. It recently began practicing Tuesday nights for the last two weeks to prepare for nationals.

Quinn said the team could have used three to four hours of practice time during the season, but the sessions were limited to an hour because of short ice time at Tennity.

‘If we had more ice time we wouldn’t be cleaning up as much so late in the game,’ Quinn said at last week’s practice. Quinn, who coached the synchronize skating team at the State University of New York at Oswego last year, instructed her skaters to perform various moves together. She blew her whistle when line or circle formations broke down or were not in sync. Most of practice was dedicated to correct footwork on the studio ice at Tennity.

‘They’ve really worked hard and, being a first-year program, it’s been difficult combining all the various skill levels,’ Quinn added.

Go figure

Melissa Panzer rubbed her wrist uncomfortably. She also pointed out the body missing at the end of the formation for the program. Panzer sat out Tuesday’s practice because she injured her right wrist during an earlier practice.

‘See how the number of people should be equal on one line,’ Panzer said. ‘That line is shorter because I’m not there.’

Panzer, a freshman theater major, joined the synchronized skating team this year after hearing about it from a close friend. Panzer, and most of the team’s 16 skaters competing next week, come from a figure skating background, she said.

The challenge was bringing everyone’s skating skills and talents together, as most teammates have never been involved with synchronized skating before joining the club, Panzer said.

‘Most of us were single skaters and so we can all skate by ourselves,’ Panzer said. ‘The hardest thing for our team was coming up with the synchronized footwork and your heads are supposed to look and turn the same way. There are girls who have skated their whole lives and most of them have never synchronized skated before and when we come together it’s more difficult.’

‘There are girls skating at different levels. But watching the team now, they look really sharp, a lot better than we did in September,’ Panzer added.

The elements

Judges look for five elements in synchronized skating. One of the most basic figures is a line where skaters perform footwork and head movements in unison. The line must be kept straight and skaters must have the same kind of hold (hand to shoulder) as the next skater in the line.

A block combines a series of lines. Circles feature skaters moving within a circle, while a pinwheel is made up of straight lines rotating around a common pivot while skaters tag each other with the same kind of hold. The move itself is representative of synchronized skating, Panzer said.

Intersections, also called splices, involve one part of the team passing through another part of the team.

All five elements must be incorporated into the program, Quinn said. Judges also look for the movements and interpretation to the music. Footwork and attitude are also crucial in a performance.

When skaters come together as one flowing unit and glide into lines or pinwheels, the performance may be amusing. The routines are fast-paced and the choreography highlights speed and synchronization. The sport is harder to do than it looks.

‘It’s like synchronized swimming,’ Panzer said. ‘We stay together, 16 of us skate at the same time and that’s really important because we have to work as a team and we literally skate and hold on to each other’s shoulder and arms.’

Coming together

So far, the team has competed at Easterns in Lowell, Mass., where it placed third, out of four teams. Last month, they performed an exhibition skate with SUNY Oswego. The team never really gelled until early December, said co-captain Jennifer Mikus, a graduate student studying art education.

‘We had our program together just before we left for the winter break,’ Mikus said. ‘When we came back, we started running through the whole complete program. We had our full and complete team by October. We were still juggling our roster from September to October.’

Synchronizing skating at the college level has just one program compared to the short and long programs for senior and junior teams, which are determined by the combined age and number of skaters.

Mikus hopes that Panzer’s wrist will heal in time for the competition next week because the presence of each skater is important to the program.

‘You need 100 percent of the time just like any team does,’ Mikus said. ‘But because we have different positions and different maneuvers on the ice like a splice, you need all of the girls there in order to accommodate where they are one on the ice. It makes it hard because if you’re missing one or two girls it can confuse everybody. But with injuries and sicknesses, we try and do the best we can.’

Published on February 27, 2002 at 12:00 pm