It’s 4 a.m. on a Saturday, and while other teens her age are still snug in their beds, 16-year-old Nicole Poulsen of Beach Park is already awake and packing her skates into a sports bag. By 4:30 she and her mother, Terri, have buckled themselves into the family minivan and are on the road to the Barrington Ice Arena, more than an hour away. “My husband thinks we’re crazy,” Terri Poulsen tells a reporter as she negotiates her van through the darkened streets of a still-sleeping neighborhood.
By 6:50 a.m. Nicole Poulsen is in her costume and out on the ice with her precision ice-skating teammates. The 20 skaters lock arms and proceed to cut circles through the ice in synchronization, performing a graceful ballet on sharp blades. “Turn your heads and lean back,” shouts assistant coach Judi Schag as they whiz by her in unison. “That’s a good speed. Come on, smile!”
When practice ends for her several hours later, Poulsen packs up her gear and heads for the Zion Ice Arena, where she continues to work out individually that afternoon. And with a growing number of hockey teams, precision teams and individual skaters vying for ice time, the members of her team must practice at different rinks and at unusual hours. So come Sunday, Poulsen and her teammates will repeat their Saturday practice ritual at ice rinks in Northbrook and Crystal Lake.
This exhausting schedule is a way of life for Poulsen and other members of the Barrington-based Starlets precision skating team. This dedication, in addition to their powerful speed and fancy footwork, recently helped the junior Starlets team (one of four from the group) clinch the United States Figure Skating Association national precision team skating championship in their division for a third straight year.
Held at the OnCenter War Memorial Arena in Syracuse, N.Y., in March, the championships drew 80 of the best precision teams from across the country. Despite the intense competition, the Starlets, outfitted in eye-catching costumes of brilliant turquoise, purple and gold, commanded the ice and beat out 13 other junior teams, placing second in the two-minute technical program and then skating a perfect 4 1/2-minute artistic program to win.
“We were all crying before they even announced we were winners,” said Poulsen, who has been skating for 13 of her 16 years.
“They had black mascara just running down their faces,” added her mother, who is also the team manager. “There was so much pressure because everyone kept telling us (no team had ever claimed three victories in a row at the junior level).”
“They had a very intricate, fast-moving program with good flow and a good degree of difficulty,” according to Lee Ann Miele of Narragansett, R.I., who is chairwoman of the U.S. skating association’s precision skating committee and a chief referee for the nationals during the performance. “The content was very well done. They went from one maneuver to another with smooth transition.”
Besides their stunning “three-peat” victory in New York, the team represented the United States in the International Precision Competition in Montreal over Christmas break last December, where they ended up in fourth place by one-tenth of a point behind three Canadian teams. Both the junior and senior Starlets also traveled to the Spring Cup in Milan, Italy, in February, where the juniors placed fourth and the seniors placed eighth out of 12 and 20 teams, respectively.
Although the Starlets have established themselves as a dominant team in the sport, the sport itself is fairly new. Precision team skating was introduced competitively in the United States, Europe and Canada during the mid-1970s. Similar in style to synchronized swimming, it involves a team of 20-24 skaters gliding across the ice in synch to music using fast-paced, intricate footwork. During competitions, the teams are judged on their strength, speed, coordination, footwork and formations, such as pinwheels, lines and circles.
“It takes awhile for a team to get recognized,” said Starlets precision director and coach Beth Sisofo of Cary. A former national pairs competitor herself, Sisofo began the precision team 17 years ago through the Barrington Area Figure Skating Club. Precision skating “was something brand new at the time,” she said. “The club had heard about it through some local competitions and thought it would be fun.”
The assistant coach, Schag, of Grayslake, skated with the Starlets for six years herself before leaving for college in the mid-1980s. After graduating from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1989, she eventually returned to the Starlets to assist Sisofo with coaching responsibilities. While Sisofo choreographs the routines, Schag scrutinizes footwork, facial expressions and poise.
“Beth’s voice doesn’t project at all, so I do the yelling,” Schag said with a smile.
The team is affiliated with the Barrington club and the Wagon Wheel Figure Skating Club, based in Rolling Meadows. “The commitment is large and time-consuming,” explained Terry Paige of Lake Zurich, who is president of the Barrington club and whose 15-year-old daughter, Heather, is a third-year member of the junior Starlets. “You really have to learn how to split your time.”
The Starlets have four age and skill levels: juvenile for ages 11 and younger; novice for 14 and younger; junior for 12-19; and senior for 12 and older.
Initially conceived for recreational sport, the various teams now compete at both a recreational level through the Ice Skating Institute, a worldwide recreational skating organization based regionally in Buffalo Grove, and on a competitive level through more rigorous events sponsored by the U.S. association, the Colorado Springs-based governing body for all figure skaters, including Olympic skaters. Their competitive season generally runs from December through March, and skaters must try out each year to keep a spot on the team.
The national champion junior Starlets hail from Algonquin, Arlington Heights, Barrington, Beach Park, Bloomingdale, Cary, Chicago, Crystal Lake, Glenview, Hoffman Estates, Lake Zurich, Marengo, Palatine and Wheaton.
Poulsen was picked to join the Starlets after an extensive four-week tryout process two years ago in which she competed against 75 other skaters from Lake and Cook Counties. She is one of 14 skaters who compete on both the junior and senior teams.
Created only two years ago, the senior Starlets exceeded even their own expectations this year when they placed fifth in their division at Syracuse. As a result of their performances at the nationals, both the junior and senior teams qualified to compete internationally and were recently selected by the U.S. skating association’s governing board to represent the United States at next February’s International Precision Competition in Rouen, France.
But success has its price, and members of the Starlets have made sacrifices to be the best. They say it’s difficult to cultivate a social life or participate in extracurricular school activities when their weekends, as well as many of their weekday evenings, are filled with practice sessions. Poulsen used to be a cheerleader and a skater in the Zion Park District’s annual ice shows. Now there’s just no time.
“She’s given up a lot, but she was willing to stick with it until she found her niche in precision,” said Pam Lecheler of Kenosha, Wis., Poulsen’s personal skating coach for the last nine years. Lecheler, with whom Poulsen trains three times a week, credits the teen’s mother for her success as well.”Nicole’s mom is just wonderful,” Lecheler said. “You hear so many negative stories about athletes and how their parents pushed them for their own glory. It’s nice to have parents like Terri who are so supportive. She’s there for Nicole 1,000 percent of the time.”
But though they may not have time for boyfriends, movies or the mall, many of the Starlets are as determined to excel in the classroom as they are on the ice. Despite a demanding schedule and competitions that sometimes cause her to miss classes, Poulsen is currently a superior honor roll student in her sophomore year at Zion-Benton High School.
In addition, senior team captain Alison Martinez of Barrington and junior team captain Jenny Lee of Arlington Heights were two of only 11 skaters selected nationwide to the U.S. skating association’s Scholastic Honors Team. Martinez, a 16-year-old Barrington High School student with a 3.7 grade point out of a possible 4.0, even manages to squeeze in some volunteer work at both JFK HealthWorld in Barrington and a local homeless shelter.
“It’s the choices you make that make you who you are,” Schag said. “The friends I’ve kept in touch with are other skaters. There’s a kinship on the ice, and for what (the Starlets) give up, they get so much more in return. It’s a lot of dedication, but they get to travel all over the world, meet different people, learn different languages. I don’t regret one minute of it.”
“It was so exciting to represent the U.S. internationally,” agreed Heather Paige as she recalled the junior Starlets’ trip to Sweden for the World Championships last year. “It was our first international competition, and we got to see a different country and meet new people.”
“You go in with no expectations, just hoping to get a ranking,” said Karen Wolanchuk of East Point, Mich., the U.S. skating association representative who accompanied the Starlets to Italy. The team had wanted to place within the top 10 in their division, so when they placed third, she said, they were ecstatic. “We all broke out crying in the locker room,” Paige remembered.
As the sport gains popularity, more precision skaters are seeking colleges and universities that will afford them the opportunity to continue their skating careers.
Although universities such as Michigan, Michigan State, Ohio State and Bowling Green in Ohio have precision teams, at least nine former Starlets have chosen Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, the only university in the country that offers precision team skating as a varsity sport sanctioned by the National Collegiate Athletic Association.
“We have about 50 girls involved in our program right now,” according to skating director Vicki Korn, coach of Miami’s nationally ranked collegiate precision team. Korn, who serves on the boards of both the U.S. skating association and Ice Skating Institute, said the aforementioned universities are trying to pull together a Midwestern conference next year that will offer precision competition as well as freestyle skating events. “Hopefully precision skating will go on to become an Olympic sport,” Korn said, “and then the U.S. Olympic Committee can actually start funding us at the collegiate level.”
And money would help, because being a precision skater doesn’t come cheap. Because Poulsen skates on two teams, she and her mom estimate their expenses at about $5,000 a year, with the money used to cover coaching fees, ice time, costumes (skaters who are on two teams must have four, two for each team), travel costs and incidentals such as makeup, stockings and even blade sharpening, at $12 a shot.
(By the way, those sharp blades can be dangerous. Terri Poulsen recounted an incident that occurred during the Italian competition in which a girl on one of the opposing teams was slashed across a thigh by another skater’s knife-like blade, requiring more than 40 stitches.)
According to Miele, there are 375 precision teams registered in the United States, including 113 teams from the Midwest. She said the U.S. skating association has targeted the junior and senior Starlets as two of the nation’s top nine elite teams to train at a special association-sponsored precision camp in preparation for the 2000 World Championships. There also is a possibility that the sport may be picked up as an exhibition sport in the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan, and as an official sport in the 2002 Olympic Games in Salt Lake City.
Although she would like to skate in the Olympics, Poulsen has other aspirations as well. The teen, who loves to cook and would like to be a chef, recently was accepted to the College of Lake County’s culinary program. In the meantime, however, she plans to keep skating.
“For two years I’ve been waiting for her to get up at 4 a.m. and say, `I’m tired and I don’t want to go to practice today,’ but it’s never ever happened,” her mom said. “Never.”
