Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Kicking Off 2013 with Miami Skating


Hello again and happy new year from Sennett and Linnea! 

This past weekend teams from across the country crowded into Fraser, Michigan for the Junior World Qualifier and Mid-America competitions. In anticipation for these competitions Miami University's Varsity teams had been vigorously preparing over the two weeks prior to the completion from 2-7 hours day per day.  Everyone put in 100% effort and were very excited to be back together again; despite the fact that our winter breaks were cut two weeks short. We went into the weekend feeling excited and ready to show off our hard work.

On Friday the junior team competed the short program. The night before we all gathered in one of the hotel rooms in order to go through and talk about each part of our program to get us mentally prepared for the next day. We talked through element by element discussing things to think about; from key words or phrases, to our favorite parts of the program. The next day, we had a lot of energy and excitement going into the event. We really tired to focus on getting into character the second we left the locker room so we could be as animated as possible in our performance. We got off the ice still feeling the rush from the program and were even more excited to take the ice the next day. 


Saturday was the free skate event. As we were getting ready for competition, doing our hair and makeup we used the extra time we had to finish the music video we had started making over break.  Following living out our Hollywood dreams; we all gathered with our coaches and staff to review the video of our official practice.  We discussed key points of the program and got ourselves mentally prepared for competition.  We then loaded the bus to the rink and preformed our usual competition rituals on the way, including dancing and singing to our favorite songs.  As soon as we got off the bus we were in competition mode and headed to the warm up area.  We completed our competition warm up and ran through our programs and felt ready to take the ice.  We loved every second of our performance and felt very "glamorous" throughout the whole program! We were very happy with our skate and proud that all of our hard work over break had paid off. 





On Saturday night after the junior long competition was finished, the collegiate official practice session took place.  The five Miami junior/collegiate cross skaters gathered our things, had a quick dinner and headed to the warm up area to join our teammates.    We had a good official practice in which we skated a full run through then only a few sections the second time around.  Our official practice ice ended at 11:00pm on Saturday night, so we headed right back to our hotel to get a good nights sleep before the next day’s competition.  Sunday morning we woke up, packed our things and the collegiate team got into character for our “rocker chick” program.  With poofs in our hair and the usual amounts of competition makeup on we loaded the bus to head over to the rink.  Before leaving the bus we had a short team meeting.  We put our game faces on and prepared to enter the competition arena.  Before doing so however we all got out of our seats and let out our extra energy by rocking the bus!  Entering the locker room we were all very excited.  We got ourselves ready to skate and once we were set to go we let out the excess nerves by singing the Miami fight song.  Collegiate skated very well and we were very happy with the results!  We had a ton of fun skating the program and really embodied the theme of the program! 

We all cannot wait to continue our progress and work hard heading into our next competition which for the Collegiate and Junior teams will be the Midwestern/pacific sectional championships in Kalamazoo Michigan, and for the Senior team their international appointment in Goteborg, Sweden!

Best of luck to all the teams competing next weekend!

Love and Honor,

Linnea and Sennett


1 comment:

  1. My daughter and I share a miami beach rental once a year so that she can compete down there. We don't live far, but like to make a vacation out of it. I have always had an obsession with Miami. I can't wait to check this out.

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