EAST LANSING, Mich. - On Monday nights at Munn Ice Arena, the hissing sound of skates scraping against the cold surface fills the building. But it isn’t a hockey practice, it’s the Michigan State synchronized skating club team working on its routines for an upcoming competition.
Synchronized skating has 16 members of a team on the ice at once. The goal is to perform an intricate routine with all members on the same page and synchronized. There are two major levels in college synchronized skating, the collegiate and open levels, with MSU fielding teams in each division.
“The collegiate level team has a moves level requirement,” Coach Katherine Pudduck said. “You have to go in front of judges, you get judged on certain types of patterns. It is definitely a higher intensity level than the open level.”
These patterns include lifts or a feature element like a backflip. The collegiate level has more intricate moves and more attention to detail.
The open level is a bit different from that.
“The open level is a more inclusive level,” Pudduck said. “There isn’t a move requirement and we practice a little less. The open team ends up being a mix of those who are not at that skill requirement of the collegiate level or upperclassmen that have a heavy class load that can’t commit to the higher intensity level.”
The open team fits its performance within a 2:40 timeslot. The collegiate team gets a little bit more time, with 3:30 to perform.
The collegiate level team practices three days a week for around 10 hours total: Sunday evening, Monday evening and Thursday morning. The open level team practices twice a week for around six hours total: Monday evening and Tuesday evening.
Although the evening practices start at 10 p.m., the late start doesn’t bother the skaters.
“Growing up a lot of us have been used to getting inconvenient times for practice, because as a figure skater, hockey takes over most of the world,” junior Hadley Cloer said. “And for practice, it was either 6 in the morning or 10 at night.”
For Cloer, this is nothing new.
“I am from North Carolina so we had to share ice with three other teams at my rink every year,” Cloer said. “And all three teams are all on the ice at the same time, which is not desired, because you have to split up the times you take up the full ice. We practiced once a week, maybe twice a week before competition. But it was early mornings for practices because it wasn’t seen as a big priority.”
Some of the skaters on the team fell into the sport accidentally.
“One of my friends in elementary school invited me to an ice show and synchro was a huge part of it,” Club President Caitlin Kaleta said. “I ended up going to a learn to skate event and I’ve been skating synchro ever since.”
There are a few skaters who compete on both teams, but the majority stick to only one.
Amira Shaikh does double-duty.
“Being on both teams is a challenge, but a good one,” Shaikh said. “You are learning two different programs which are in two different environments. The themes are different, the music is different, the skating is different.”
Shaikh said she initially found skating for two teams to be challenging especially in time management and getting proper rest. Throughout the season so far, she has found ways to manage time between practice, rest, and classwork.
Both teams start practicing as soon as they arrive back to campus in August. The teams attempt to compete in five or six competitions a season. Their first competition was in mid-November and their last one in early March.
The creative process to take a program from an idea to the ice takes a lot of planning long before the season even starts.
“Sometimes the idea just hits you early on,” Pudduck said. “For me, I have to have music, vision, and dresses all planned out by early August. You have to get dress designs in because it takes 6-8 weeks. For these guys, I measured them the first day they got back to campus and their dresses just made it in time for our competition last week.”
The cost of competing for both teams is quite large, as the open team usually pays around $3,000 and the collegiate team pays around $5,000. The club does a lot of fundraising to offset the costs.
For the team, full synchronization doesn’t really set in until later in the year.
“Right now I think we have a good backbone of what we want to do,” Kaleta said. “We don't expect to be perfect right now, but by the second semester is when we really start kicking it into gear and start getting compliments on the impressive stuff we are doing.”
Some of those impressive things include doing backflips and lifts at the collegiate level. Those moves are banned at the open level but the team still likes to do other tricky moves.
“Our goal is to try and do the things that look the scariest, but aren’t actually scary,” Cloer said. We will basically do anything as long as we can do it safely.”
And even though they compete in a sport not many know about, they are still proud of how they come together as a team.
“I think that’s what makes working with these girls amazing,” Kaleta said. “You are working in a niche sport and you want to represent it well and you want to represent the school well. It's my senior year so I’m glad if I’m going to end it after this, I’m ending it with this team.”