Latest Scoop on the Crystallettes!

Hey everybody! Since the last time I blogged we have competed in two major competitions! The Senior Crystallettes got the opportunity to compete in London, Canada at the end of December with some of the top teams in the world. We had lots of hard practices to get prepared for this competition because we knew we were competing with the best of the best. We arrived on the 27^th of December and immediately got to work. We had just enough time to drop off luggage at the hotel and change into our practice clothes before we had our first practice. All of our practices were productive and went well.

The draw in London was exciting! In order to find out what number we were skating, we had the draw ceremony where myself and another member of my team, Meghan Quigley, were chosen to draw. The setup of the draw was absolutely beautiful! It was called “Synchro in the City” and was decorated incredibly girly with pink everything and wonderful chocolate covered strawberries that were gone in seconds.

One of the best parts of the draw was prince charming that escorted Meghan and I to draw our number. Instead of drawing numbers, we had to select a fashionable pair of shoes. We were the third team to go up and select our shoe. There was this darling sparkly gold heel that we both did love and wanted to pick. However, something inside me told me because it was the prettiest shoe it was number one. So, I told Meghan that we should pick the black heel with the flower on top because I had a really good feeling about it. After a short huddle with prince charming, I picked it up and it was number eight, which meant that we skated last! We were so happy with our selection and relieved because, shortly after us, another team chose that gold sparkly heel and it was indeed number one. After taking many pictures with prince charming, all of the teams dismissed to get ready for the next day of competition.

Competition day was here! Official practice for the short program was in the afternoon and then we competed our short program to “Footloose’ that night. We had a fairly good skate and did not receive the scores we wanted. However, sometimes you have to roll with the punches because we still had a long program to do the next day. We went out to eat with the Haydenettes after the competition of the short program where I got to finally meet some of the fellow DREAMers! After our nice dinner, we returned to the hotel and went to sleep. The next morning we had official practice and then had time to rest and get ready for our free skate program. We skated earlier in this segment of the competition and performed a beautiful, spunky long program. At this point, we focused on our effort. We poured every ounce into that performance. No matter what happened, we were going to be proud of what we did. We received a good score and ended up 5^th for the free skate and 6^th place overall. The Crystallettes were pleased to have participated in this competition. It was a great experience and we loved meeting the different members of all the different teams. After our coaches spoke to the judges, they warned us that there would be big changes when we got back to Michigan and indeed there were.

We all enjoyed our couple days off for the New Year and then got back to work. At the end of our competition in Canada, our coaches said that there would be big changes and we were all dying to know what that meant! The following weekend we had the opportunity to work with Cathy Dalton. She was amazing! After 2 days and 10 hours on the ice, they dropped the bomb on us that we would be changing our music for our short program. All of our jaws hit the ice. We were stunned and weren’t sure how to react. I was personally sad because the program to “Footloose” was my favorite program. The coaches explained why we had to change the music and we all understood. Now, we were begging to know what it was going to be. Our coaches started to put on different pieces of music for us to try our choreographed short program to. Cathy Dalton suggested a piece of music when she was here to work with us and it is called “Mercy” by Duffy. As soon as they put on “Mercy”, we began the program and it fit like a glove. We only had two weeks to get this program ready for Midwesterns. It was a tough two weeks but we did it!

Midwesterns was in Plymouth, Michigan from January 26^th-29^th. That was a very busy weekend for me as a skater and a coach. My Open Juvenile team was also competing in the competition that weekend and trying to coordinate all of the practices between OJ and Senior was stressful, but I managed. The Open Juvenile competition was on Friday around the same time as the Opening Ceremonies. I was performing the Flashmob that myself and three members of my team (Donae, Poe, Alyssa Shomsky, and Sharon Neff) made up with our ballet constructor Simone Calvas. The Crystallette senior team led the stadium in this activity, which was part of our Opening Ceremonies. Seeing people doing the dance in the audience made all those hours of making it up worth it. Later that night was the senior short program competition. This would be the first time we were putting out our program with new music. We were very excited and ready to rock and roll. We skated a sassy, amazing short program that got the audience excited to watch us. We were incredibly proud of what we had accomplished in only two weeks! We were given our highest score of the season- 64.11. We got wonderful compliments from many different people about our new program and the judges LOVED it. After the short program, we were in first place and we were ready to attack our long the next day.

Saturday arrived and on to the free skate! Of course, we had official practice in the morning and drove back to Dearborn to practice. Competition time came quickly. We arrived at the rink, warmed up, did some last minute primping and lined up in the tunnel to take the ice. We had a couple minor mistakes in our skate, but besides those minor errors we had a fabulous performance. For our long program we received most of our calls and our overall total score was 177.98 We received 1^st place overall and we were excited with what we had accomplished that weekend, especially with a two week old short program! We ended our competition with a nice awards ceremony and a pizza party. Next stop for the Senior Crystallettes- SWITZERLAND!