Highland resident Cali Roloson recently sat down with the Southern Ulster Times to describe her rewarding figure skating journey on ice.

 

Cali said it all started for her at the McCann Ice arena in Poughkeepsie when she was just four years old. When she turned 8 she began participating in figure skating competitions. This fall Cali starts her senior year at Arlington High School.

 

This past July, Cali returned to compete in the five-day Excel Nationals at the Skating Club of Boston in Norwood, Massachusetts. She said there were nine judges who rated all aspects of a skater’s performance.  

 

“I came in 2nd in my level of Senior Excel this year,” she said. “Twenty qualified, with six from each of three regions in the country, East Coast, Mid-West and Pacific, and two wildcards, who have the highest scores on the leader board can go.”

 

Cali said throughout this past season she racked up all podium finishes, with a mix of 1st through 4th place. She said these skating finishes took place in New Jersey, Connecticut, Westchester County, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts.

 

Cali said typically she is on the ice four or five days a week, for two hours at a clip, for a total of 8 to 10 hours of practicing and training. In addition, Cali has a personal trainer with whom she spends one day a week and a coach on another day.  She goes to Northstar Sports in Poughkeepsie with her coach to work on targeting specific muscles and to do circuit routines; “it’s just more attention each week, with a focus on legs or the upper body, which has helped a lot to get new jumps.”

 

Cali recalled that two years ago 400 people came to compete at the Excel Nationals and this year 900 skaters showed up.  

 

“The sport exploded over the last three years and this is only the 6th year of Excel,” she said. “As the competitions have gotten bigger they realized they have to use three rink facilities, of which there are very few in the country.   

 

Cali said the core of the sport of figure skating, “is Olympic Track [path] and they call it Well Balanced; you go to regional, sectionals and then nationals. It’s really fast-paced and the levels have huge gaps between them and you need two or three jumps to go up a level.”

 

Cali said Excel has opened up a new track, “that is somewhere between recreational and hyper-competitive. It’s still a very competitive track but it is more manageable because you only need a new jump every time you go up a level.”

 

Cali said there are six different types of jumps for skaters: salchow, toe, loop, flip, lutz and axel. She can perform double jumps of each of these and is beginning to work on mastering the Triple Salchow and the Triple Flip jumps.

 

Cali said, “every time you move up a level they add a double to the arsenal but they add a jump at a time, which makes it a lot easier for kids to learn them in a series...There is no real age group per level but you see a lot of kids around the same age at a level but you could be any age at almost any level.” She added that the age range in her group runs from 16 to 21, noting that Excel has a top age limit of 21 years. Skaters hitting that limit can then go back to the regular Well Balanced Track.

 

Cali said the Excel program requires at least two competitions a year and they combine a skater’s two highest scores and that is how one gets chosen to compete at the Nationals; “that would be my goal now.”

 

Cali said annually Excel comes out with their rules for jumping, spinning and other aspects of the sport, “and every year we work on new things specifically to put into a new program.”

 

Cali said skaters in the lower levels perform pieces of about 90 seconds in length, and at the Senior Ladies level, where she competes, performances last four minutes. She works closely with her coach, Sergei Sakhnovskiy who participated in the 1998, 2002 and 2006 Olympics. Cali said together they plan the choreography and music selections of her program. Although she is always in a kind of a preparation mode, “It take us about eight weeks to build a final program.”  

 

When asked what has kept her interested in figure skating for all these years, she responds definitively,

 

“I just love being on the ice and every day is something new. I love jumping, my favorite thing to do, and I love my coaches, they are great. I have friends there and a good team. Our club has about 20 members, about 10 are my age but I’m the oldest.”  

 

In the coming year Cali will be concentrating on the National Qualifying series and if she performs well at that level she could be invited to attend the challenging National Development Camp. This is what may lead to becoming a member of Team USA and having a shot at performing at the Olympics.

 

“I think it would be nice to go,” she said. “The next one is in two years but the one in six years might be a little more attainable. We’ll see how it goes.”