Penn Figure Skating Club placed ninth in its debut at the US Figure Skating National Intercollegiate Final, which took place from April 12-14 at the Lake Placid Olympic Center in New York.
This appearance comes at the end of the program’s best competition season since its founding in 2016. While the club started out with just a handful of members, the group has now expanded to encompass over 100 skaters with a large variety of skill levels and interest.
“I was surprised by how quickly it became a community,” College first year Kenzie MacDonald said. “I've struggled with that in my skating in the past, and so just coming into a place that immediately embraced you was so welcoming.”
Due to the growing interest in the club, Penn Figure Skating’s competition team — a subset of skaters in the group that compete regularly against other colleges — has flourished.
“Last fall, [we were] begging people to compete,” Co-President and College junior Nick Bausenwein said. “Now it's hard. It's not the most fun thing to do. But we have the luxury of having people ready to be backups, which is really awesome.”
The amount of money required to rent out the Penn ice rink has required the team to cut costs where it can. Club leaders said that the largest impact of this is on the team’s coaching staff. Currently, Penn Figure Skating does not have a coach. Instead, Bausenwein and Co-President College junior Emily Zhang take on the duty of coaching in addition to competing.
Both Bausenwein and Zhang skated prior to coming to Penn and used their competitive skating backgrounds to their advantage. Together, the two work with skaters on their programs, which they perform at competitions. Bausenwein’s experiences performing internationally for an ice-skating group have made him adept at choreographing these programs, while Zhang focuses more on the technical aspects of things.
For the members of the competition team, this year was one underscored by redemption after the group came close to qualifying for nationals in 2023, ultimately falling just short.
“I'm really excited because we have been working toward this for so long,” Engineering and Wharton sophomore Cindy Zhu said. “I still remember the moment the organizer announced that we were going to nationals. Even after a month, [that memory] still makes me really excited.”
One major change made going into this year was with the lineup. Figure skating, as a sport, is a strategy-heavy one. The order that skaters compete in, the events they compete in, and the level at which they compete all impact the final score of the team. Because of this, Zhang spends much of her time off the ice, going over tape to understand how the other team’s are fielding their lineups. From there, Zhang then spends hours playing around with different groupings of Penn’s skaters to maximize the number of points the team could potentially earn.
“The great thing about collegiate skating is it values every single skater,” Zhang said. “So there's really a spot for everyone and a lot of strategy involved.”
Another new feature that Bausenwein and Zhang implemented ahead of this year’s competition season was mock competition skates, where the skaters complete a full run-through of their competition programs. Bausenwein and Zhang said that they did their best to simulate what the actual competition day would be like in order to maximize the benefits of the rehearsals for their athletes.
The changes were successful, resulting in the team placing fourth in its competition to secure the club’s first nationals appearance. As first-time participants at nationals, Bausenwein and Zhang entered the competition with no expectations. Placing ninth out of a field of 16 was beyond what the two were expecting, they said.
“Our goal was to place top-10,” Zhang said. “It was our first time at nationals, so that was like the best we honestly could have hoped for. … It was amazing.”
Moving into the next season, the goalposts for Penn Figure Skating have changed. The end goal is no longer to just qualify for nationals — Bausenwein is looking to also widen the gap between Penn and the other schools that compete in its region. Beyond that, Bausenwein echoes the club’s hopes of placing much higher than ninth at the national level, but remains true to the idea that skating at the collegiate level should be fun.
“Regular competitive skating is so gross and toxic,” Bausenwein said. “Collegiate skating is a really fun, supportive environment. And [we] want to make sure that that continues, whether we win or whether [we] lose.”
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