When junior Amber Wright missed four days of school, it was not to go to a beach and relax. Wright was headed to Michigan to compete in nationals with her skating team Synergy.
Wright participated in the National Synchronized Ice Skating Championship on Feb. 26 with her team, Synergy.
Going to nationals takes a lot of skill, practice, and dedication. Wright has been skating since she was six. Since then she has a rigorous routine of six practices a week, with each of them lasting two-to-four hours, depending to the day.
“I don’t remember what life was like without skating,” Wright said., “My teammates are my second family to me.”
Ice skating is quite an expensive sport to play. Wright’s mom pays for three of her kids to skate. For all of them combined, it is around $12,000, which doesn’t include travel expenses and private tutoring. For the Wright family, it is $65 an hour for each kid. Ice skating comes with a big price tag.
“It’s so expensive, because we have to travel for almost all of our competitions,” Wright’s mother, Amy Fatzinger, said. “We have to pay for bus and plane tickets, hotel rooms, and to enter a competition there’s a fee. We have to also pay for ice time, which is really expensive, then we have to buy a new dress and makeup for every season.”
A lot of money and time is spent in order to be a successful ice skater, including time away from school. In order to go, she had to miss four days of school and even a math test in order to participate in the competition. Luckily Feb. 28 was a snow day, which helped her not have to make up as much work.
“I was so grateful for that snow day,” Wright said. “I was supposed to take my math test three days ahead of everyone but due to the snow day I just took it when I got back.”
Wright and her team’s competition was taken place in Michigan. They flew out after school on Feb. 26 and stayed until the end of the week. On the first day in Michigan, the day was filled with practices for the final performance, which happened on Feb. 28. The rest of the days were filled with fun until their departure on March 3.
“We got to go play laser tag, and then we went back to the rink and watched one of our teams go again,” Wright said. “On Saturday, we watched our final team and then we got to watch the best teams in the U.S. and that was amazing to watch and see who would win.”
Overall, the team got seventh at Nationals.