On Sunday 8 March, we competed at the Steel City Trophy in Sheffield. Now in its second year, the event has grown significantly in size and this year hosted 74 teams from across the world.
The adult category was the biggest of the whole event with 15 teams. As well as the usual teams from all across the UK, it was fantastic to see two international teams – Lady Moz from France and Team DizHarmony from Sweden.
Skating fourth, the team were in very high spirits knowing that this would be the last performance of our ‘Lone Digger’ routine before we create a new program for next season. We’ve put in a lot of hard work in the few weeks since taking the gold in Scotland at the Trophy D’Ecosse in order to refine the levels and squeeze every potential point from the choreography and our performance. We had a clean skate with genuine smiles, and it felt as though some of our elements are the strongest we have skated them all season.
We scored 22.49 which was higher than our score at the British Championships in January, but a number of points lower than our score in Scotland. We went into the silver medal position behind Altrincham’s Bladerunners. We enjoyed watching the other teams in the adult category (one of the great things about skating near the beginning!) and soaking up the atmosphere! Lady Moz were outstanding with complex choreography, and Team DizHarmony brought the house down with their 70s inspired routine.
We ended the category in 6th place – when we studied the judges scores, we were a little disappointed to see that we dropped points on our triangle intersection which has been a strong element all season so far, but nothing could take away the satisfaction that we had with our skate and our performance. We were also pleased to see that we were one of only 3 teams in the whole category to have an element (our wheel) scored with a positive ‘grade of execution’ score – the other teams were Lady Moz and Orion who took the gold and silver medals.
Congratulations to all the teams, and in particular the top 5:
1 – Lady Moz – 30.45
2 – Orion – 27.41
3 – Bladerunners – 26.31
4 – Illusion – 26.13
5 – Team DizHarmony – 25.04
6 – Northern Stars – 22.49
We’ll be having a well-earned week off, but then we have our recruitment session followed by lots of training and playing with elements until the new rules come out around May/June. Come and join us!!
We’d like to thank all our friends, family and supporters for all the lovely comments, and for cheering us on both from home and the rink side. It’s a huge motivation for us to do our best, and we feel truly lucky to be so wonderfully supported!