Regionals Are Underway, Plus #tbt

Regional Championships are the gateway to success in competitive figure skating. It's the first hurdle on the way to Nationals.

There are nine regions in the country, each of which hold a regional competition every fall. Some of them are underway as I type.

The top four finishers in each event (levels Intermediate through Senior) advance to Sectionals, which take place six weeks later. There are three "sections" of the country, and the top four at Sectionals advance to Nationals.

Representing a skating club in the state of New York, I competed in the North Atlantic Regional Championships, or as they're commonly referred to at the rink, "Norths," each year (for a total of four years). I'm proud to say that I won my first year competing. But the victory was bittersweet.

That first year I competed at age 13. That made me too old to compete at the Juvenile level (the top two automatically advanced to Junior Olympics, the national-level competition for Juveniles), but I was not good enough yet to be competitive at the next level up, Intermediate. So I was stuck competing in the one event they had at the time for skaters like me, the only embarrassingly non-qualifying event in the whole competition: "Pre-Intermediate."

I won that pretty easily, earning first-place ordinals across the board. And I got that magical glass trophy I'd dreamed about getting that I saw in all the Skating magazines I got in the mail each year. I used to fawn over all the pictures of the happy top-four finishers in each event at regionals. I was SO excited when they handed me that silly trophy (pictured above), and had me pose for the picture. I couldn't wait to see it in the magazine! But alas, when I finally got my copy of the magazine a month later, mine was the only picture left out. All the qualifying levels had pictures, and they only omitted those losers in Pre-Intermediate. As if we didn't work our tails off and didn't matter. I continue to think that was poor judgment on the part of the editorial staff there.

The next year I entered at the Intermediate level. I made finals, but only finished something like 7th or 9th. I can't even remember. The following year I did Intermediate again, and made finals again. But tanked in the short program and got like 12th overall. The year after that, as a Novice, I made finals, but I could only manage 6th overall (there's a sketchy story behind the judging on that one, but that's a story for another post). So I never made it past regionals as a singles skater. As a postscript, I did get to go to Easterns in pairs, and that was awesome, but I'll save that story for when Easterns happens in six weeks.

The reason I've gone on this long tangent is that Norths just concluded this past week in Hackensack, New Jersey. And I wanted to say congratulations to all the skaters who advance to Easterns, and to all the skaters who triumphed at the non-qualifying levels!