Unconventional Athletics: Ice Dancing

Being part of the Sacred Heart community means constantly being surrounded by sports teams and the camaraderie that comes along with playing a sport. Events like Valpo Bowl are crucial to the Sacred Heart experience. However, many athletes at SHP are not found in SHP’s athletic department. Sports like softball and men’s volleyball are some well-known sports that do not find a place in SHP’s wide range of athletics, but other more unconventional athletics are also found in our community — namely ice dancing.
You may be familiar with ice skating, the overarching term in which ice dancing falls. Ethan Darnell, a junior, has been an ice skater since he was three years old. He describes ice dancing as “ballroom dancing on ice” for those who do not know what it is. Ice dancing is the only figure skating subset not to include jumps, but the sport does include lifts and emphasizes the partnerships between skaters during a dance. Uniquely, ice dancing requires skaters to never be more than two arm lengths apart from each other.
The skate partners perform two routines at each competition. Each team does the “rhythm dance” which must include designated steps from a pattern dance — think a waltz in ballroom dancing. Darnell states this portion of the competition “directly relates footwork and skating ability because everyone has to do the same set of steps.” The second routine is “free dance’”which is what the name implies — the choreography is the choice of the coaches and skaters.
Both the free and rhythm dance include specific elements such as lifts and spins that gain athletes points. Scoring involves two panels of judges: one grades artistic elements while the other consists of technical specialists who replay the routines to score performance ability and execution based on difficulty. When asked to compare both ice skating and ice dancing Darnell replied that “ice dance is more precise. Rather than doing just cool tricks, there is a level of difficulty because of how precise the scoring is.” He even emphasized that “one mistake can cost the medal.”
Darnell began ice skating after his sister found a passion for the sport at a friend’s birthday party. He originally started skating as a singles figure skater before switching to partner ice dancing at the age of 12. Darnell states that the partnership is more difficult because “you have to skate with and around another person well enough that it almost looks like you can read each other’s minds.”
Darnell notes that most competitive skaters are homeschooled, so it begs the question of how he can balance a rigorous athletic schedule with academics. He says a typical day of training starts with waking up at four or five in the morning and driving to one of four rinks in either San Mateo, San Jose, Fremont, or Dublin, followed by an hour and a half of training — all before arriving at school for the day. He says in total he does “more driving than skating.” While this seems to be a difficult schedule to keep Darnell states he is, “no different than any other athlete who plays a sport like football, except instead of practicing after school [he] practices before it,” which means he often goes to bed early to prepare for morning training sessions.
Beyond just training before school, Darnell spends many breaks training rigorously. Over this past summer, he spent the break in Michigan training with Charlie White and his wife Tanith. White is a three-time Olympic medalist, two-time World Champion, a six-time US National Champion, and a five-time Grand Prix Final Champion. Darnell says that, while training in Michigan, he and his partner were skating alongside some of the best competitors in the country. Over the same summer, he competed, in Austin and New York. However, Darnell and his partner are one of the only ice dancing teams in the entire Bay Area — making it difficult to find coaches and choreograph routines for new seasons.
Darnell says the most difficult part of ice dancing is “having the discipline to do the same thing over and over again while only changing minor details and simultaneously remembering all of it.” Despite its difficulty, Darnell says it has been an amazing experience. One day he hopes to compete internationally to represent the United States.
Sports like ice dancing may not be part of the athletic department but it is a testament to SHP’s diverse range of students with many different skills and passions. Athletes like Ethan Darnell remind us that SHP students are achieving great things off campus.