By Tess Whittet
Sports Editor
Sophomore Shannon Kawalec glides into the figure skating season, with her club team “Fusion.”
Kawalec competes in synchronized figure skating through her team based in El Segundo. The team competes in various competitions across the United States.
“[My favorite part is] the friendships that I have made while doing it, and after doing if for so long, the rink is my second home,” Kawalec said.
Kawalec began skating when she was in kindergarten after going to a friend’s ice skating themed birthday party. Kawalec thought the sport looked intresting and begged her mom to let her have lessons. After that, Kawalec joined her current team, Fusion, and began her skating career.
“I have been doing it for what feels like my whole life, and a lot of the memories I have from my life are from skating and they are all happy memories,” Kawalec said.
Kawalec and her team spend a lot of time practicing before upcoming competitions. The team meets before school at 5 a.m. to practice their performances. The team does a lot of repetition of certain elements of skating to make sure their synchroniz is perfect, Kawalec said.
“The part of practice that helps the most is when we take individual sections of the program and work on them to make them cleaner and stronger,” Kawalec said.
Kawalec is still in the beginning of her season so she has not competed in many competitions yet. Her team competed in the 22nd annual “Porter Classic” a few weeks ago in Michigan. Her team placed fifth out of twelve teams competing.
“Before [the next competition] we want to work on motivating our team to put their final touch on our program and clean it up before we go and present it.” Kawalec said.
Kawalec will compete in the week of Jan. 24-28 in Kansas for the qualifying competition, Midwestern and Pacific Coast Sectionals. The team will compete against six to eight other teams from the West Coast. The team will need to place top four in the overall competition to make it to nationals, Kawalec said.
“I think we are definitely going to qualify for nationals,” Kawalec said. “I think we will do pretty well, like second or third because there is a team that is really good.”
Kawalec is not sure if she will continue skating at higher levels, but is considering attending some East coast colleges that have competitive synchronized skating programs. These colleges can qualify for World and compete in high levels against people from all over the world.
“It would be weird to stop doing [synchro],” Kawalec said. “They also have really great synchro teams that are very competitive and it would be a great way to automatically make friends in college. “
Leave a Reply