South Orange skater wins gold at national championships

SOUTH ORANGE, NJ — The last few weeks have been a whirlwind for Mia Johmann but she now has two medals to hang around her neck.
One of them is gold, from the United States Synchronized Skating Championships, and one of the them is bronze, from the World Junior Synchronized Skating Championship. Her 16-person team, Skyliners Junior, ended its season on a high note with two big wins.

“It was our last competition, so it was fun,” Johmann, 15, said about the world championship that was held in Angers, France. “We had a lot of confidence going in after winning nationals, and we had really good performance.”

The South Orange resident began figure skating when she was eight years old as a singles skater. One day at the rink she saw a synchronized team practicing, and decided that was the direction she wanted to skate in.

Synchronized skating is similar to ice dancing in that there aren’t any jumps; the skaters do spins called “twizzles” and lifts in addition to dance elements.
Ice dancing is done in pairs while synchronized skating features a large team of skaters.

“In singles it’s all on you,” Johmann said. “In synchro, you all work together. I really liked the team aspect and being confident in each other.”
Skyliners is based in Connecticut and features skaters from New Jersey, New York, Connecticut

and one from Virginia. It was one of two teams selected to compete for the USA in France; the other was the Lexettes from Lexington, Mass. Typically, the highest scoring teams at the national championships qualify to represent the country at the world competition. Even though they are competing against each other again in the field of 23 teams, the skaters still consider each other teammates. So do the parents.

“The environment is a wonderful experience,” Johmann’s mother, Sukhee Ku, said. “You’re technically on rival teams, but both teams are representing the USA. The families all sit together in the stands. I think because you’re supporting your country and not just one team it’s a little more relaxing, at least for the parents.”

But the parents aren’t the ones on the ice. Johmann said the Skyliners choose not to watch the other teams skate at competitions, preferring to focus on their own upcoming program without distractions.

“We don’t want to watch because we don’t want to see other scores,” the Montclair Kimberley Academy freshman said. “We want to focus on ourselves and be in the moment. Then during the awards we get to meet other teams and people, and it’s fun to see them.”

The scoring at the world championships is broken down into different components that all add up to a final tally in both the short program and free skate: skating skills, presentation, program components and technical elements. The Skyliners finished with a final score of 117.23.

“Performance is just as important as the skating,” Johmann said. “Half of our score is performance, so we have to practice performance and the skating aspect equally. During a competition I mostly think about performance because the steps of the program are in my muscle memory. We also talk about not overdoing it and trying anything new in competition.”

From the other side, where the parents are sitting in the stands, Ku said at times it can be nerve-wracking to watch-especially when skaters are doing lifts while spinning and weaving around each other.

“It can get a little scary,” Ku said. “You’re just thinking, ‘Please don’t fall.’ You want every team to skate their best. They work so hard all season; they sacrifice weekends for seven months out of the year. Then they have four minutes, and you get to see where all the work was going.”

This season was Johmann’s last competing in the junior circuit; next year she’ll be old enough to skate on the senior level. It’s a big time commitment with a lot of travel, especially since figure skating isn’t typically a school sport. But it’s worth it to Johmann.

“The team is made up of people from a lot of states,” she said. “If I wasn’t on this team, I wouldn’t even know some of my best friends.”