Shooting Stars - Day 1

Last weekend was my first skating competition of the 2012-2013 season - Shooting Stars, or Interclub, is a fun competition held for clubs in our region.  It was in Frankford this year, which is really close to home, and I loved that I didn't have to travel far.  And, because it was nice and close, all nine of my skaters participated - two of my skaters only skated in one event, but the rest of them did four or five each, so it was a VERY BUSY weekend!  I was at the rink from 7:30am to 10pm on Saturday, and 8am to 5pm on Sunday!

Things got off to a great start on Saturday morning - the first event was Junior Bronze Shadow Dance, and the group was skating the Ten Fox.  My skaters Leah and Britteny came in 2nd!  One of my other skaters, Jillian, was paired with another girl from our club, Gabrielle, and they came in 3rd!  So, Tweed was well represented on the podium.

The next big event of the morning was the most exciting one of the day :)  I had four skaters competing in Intermediate Team Spiral.  Now, when I saw this event listed in the competition announcement I immediately thought about a similar event that I participated in back in the day...so, I interrupt this post to get a little nostalgic for a moment... 

My team was comprised of myself, Debbie, Kristin and Caitlin - we knew we were competing against another team from Acton and we wanted to WIN!  I remember it being very competitive at that time...so maybe it was right around the time that we left Acton to skate in Guelph?  Anyway, we didn't work on our team spiral in Acton, we only worked on it in Guelph so that the other girls couldn't see our position.  Our dance coach Jeff actually came up with our position, and we LOVED it and thought it was really unique.  And, drum roll please...the day of the competition comes, we skate our team spiral and place...FIRST! 

So, back to Shooting Stars...I didn't have time to work with the whole team until the Thursday before the competition, but I wasn't worried because I knew exactly what we were going to do :)  I was bringing back 'The Jeff Spiral'!  So, I figured out who was doing the forward spirals and who was doing the backward spiral, explained the position, and let them practice it a few times.  The girls weren't overly excited about it until they were watching the other teams at the competition...when they realized theirs was actually quite different, I think they realized they had a good chance.  They actually ended up outdoing themselves - Leah's back spiral was higher than ever and they held the position much longer than they had in practice!  They came off the ice EXCITED...and were thrilled when the results went up and they were FIRST (out of five groups).  I have to admit, I actually saw the results before the kids did, and I had to hold back a little myself :)

And, from the most exciting event of the day to the most disappointing...Leah and Britteny did a Similar Pairs number on Saturday night.  Unfortunately, they had a pretty poor skate and ended up last in their flight.  They skated to 'Footloose' and we all had a lot of fun putting the duet together!  They skated it really well in practice, and we had a throw axel in there, that looked great when done right.  But, that element wasn't going well in warm up, so we changed it to a throw waltz jump...and, they had a really hard time staying in unison.  The one element that was in perfect unison was their side-by-side axel, which they fell on...but they fell in unison?!?!

I had a number of other events on Saturday, but the results were average, nothing too exciting.

And now for the only two pictures that turned out OK...

Alyssa and Hannah after their Similar Pairs.  They skated to the theme song from 'Happy Days' - their choice!

Britteny and Leah after their Similar Pairs.

Tune in tomorrow for a post on day two of the competition :)