By Michelle Huang
On September 16, the National Solo Ice Dance Competition in Kalamazoo began. Despite the city’s Australian sounding name, the four-day competition took place in the state of Michigan and saw over 230 competitors at the Wings Event Center. According to US Figure Skating, this event is considered “premier,” meaning the most influential event of its category, drawing commentary from former Olympian Naomi Lang.
Naomi Lang has many distinguished achievements. She is a former Olympian, having competed at the 2002 Winter Olympics, a two-time Four Continents champion, five-time U.S. national champion, and made history as the first Native American woman to compete in the Olympics. By all means, she is a big name in the figure skating community. One interesting piece of trivia is that Lang competed at the same Olympics where Sarah Hughes won gold for the United States in women’s singles figure skating, 24 years before Alysa Liu took gold, as well as many fans’ hearts, at the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympics.
Coming back to the competition, Lang said “Coming back to Kalamazoo has been so amazing. I feel like I’ve fully come full circle as I actually started skating at this rink. So, to bring my students here has been really nostalgic.” According to local news station WWMT, this event is said to bring benefits such as increased visitors and money circulating throughout the community. It’s a win-win situation, as the Kalamazoo area thrives off the increased tourism, and the tourists can visit the splendid Kalamazoo Mall, which is known for being the country’s first outdoor pedestrian mall.
The competition consisted of solo pattern dance, shadow dance, and combined solo dance. Now these probably don’t mean anything to the average reader who isn’t obsessed with the wonderful world of figure skating, so here’s an explanation.
First of all, an important distinction between Solo Ice Dance and Ice Dance is that Solo Ice Dance has all the same fundamentals of Ice Dance, except, as the name suggests, it is done solo, without a partner. Ice Dancers must have a partner, which can be hard to find and maintain a working relationship with, thus leading to the rapidly growing popularity of Solo Ice Dance.
In Solo Ice Dance, skaters must perform a shadow dance (two skaters skate a pattern dance side by side, adapted for solo ice), Pattern dance (a sequence of steps, edges, and turns skated to specific music, usually considered more technical), and finally, a free dance (choreographed skate to music of the skater’s choice). It is pretty gnarly stuff.
Now that you know how tough these skaters have it, here are the final rankings. In first place for Senior Rhythm Dance, Junior Rhythm Dance, and International Pattern Dance are Lucas Appel, Cyrianne McReynolds, and Amal Israilova, respectively. Congratulations to all who competed!