Masters Win the Crowd at Nationals

After our early morning flights from Laguardia Airport, we had some time to spare in snowy Plymouth. Some of us explored art museums in downtown Detroit, while others sampled sandwiches in Ann Arbor.

Our first team event was official practice at the USA Hockey arena. We did one runthrough and some sections to get our feet under ourselves in the competition arena, and aiming to give the technical panel a clear look at our attempted levels. In our practices after Easterns we spent time focusing on raising our program components score.

We ate dinner and reconvened at the hotel for a team “party” since many of us were heading back to New York right after our competition skate. We exchanged crazy socks and revealed our Secret Psychers, while the coaches presented superlative awards to each skater as one more confidence boost before our final competition of the season.

On Thursday morning we had 30 minutes of unofficial practice. It’s nice to have an opportunity to be in our skates on competition day, before the actual competition. We used our time focusing on sections and basic skating skills as to conserve our energy for our long day ahead.

Heading into our final time skating our energetic David Bowie program, we were nervous and excited. We thought less about the technical aspect and let our training do the work, and we enjoyed being in the moment and performing to the crowd. With a score of 36.74, we did not have as great of a skate as we did at Easterns, but we were proud of our clean skate and 9th place finish - the highest that Gotham has placed at Nationals since 2015!