Figure skaters come to Cedar Rapids to compete in championship

They anticipated a bunch and got even more.

“Sometimes you've got to be careful what you ask for,” Tammie Hoover said with a laugh.

Hoover is president of the Eastern Iowa Figure Skating Club, which is hosting the 2010 Midwestern & Pacific Coast Synchronized Skating Sectional Championships this weekend at the Cedar Rapids Ice Arena. Teams practiced for the event Thursday morning, with competition all day today and Saturday.

Buses filled with competitors and coaches from as far away as California pulled into and out of the Ice Arena on Thursday afternoon. This is largest combined championships ever held, according to U.S. Figure Skating, with just shy of 2,500 athletes representing 173 teams from 15 states.

There are five teams from Iowa, two from Cedar Rapids. Synchronized skating involves eight to 20 members on a team.

The discipline involves 13 levels of competition, with participants ranging in age from six to adult. The vast majority are females.

“We've been planning for this since last January,” Hoover said. “We've always wanted to host this event. Then the floods occurred in 2008, and we thought to ourselves ‘We probably won't get it now.'

“But (the United States Figure Skating Association) didn't even contact us. They just went ahead and gave it to us. They still had that confidence that we could pull this off.”

The Ice Arena has hosted two prior regional figure skating competitions, but they don't compare in size to this one.

“This was something the Eastern Iowa Figure Skating Club really wanted to bring to Cedar Rapids because of (the flood),” said Mary Lee Malmberg of the Cedar Rapids Area Convention & Visitors Bureau. “This is something very positive for our community.”

The EIFSC helped arrange hotel rooms in the Cedar Rapids-Iowa City corridor for competitors, coaches, officials and families from the first of July through the end of November. It also recruited several local citizens to work the event. Hoover said 400 volunteer hours a day are needed.

People like Michelle Catlett of Cedar Rapids are soaking up several of those hours.

“Let's see,” said Catlett, whose daughter, Ashton, is competing in the event. “It's 5 a.m. to midnight yesterday, today, tomorrow and Saturday.”

That doesn't leave much time for sleep.

“I think I got a couple of hours last night,” she said.

Malmberg said the championships are expected to bring in $1.3 million. “That's tremendous,” she said. “We're talking about January in Iowa.”

“We do hope to continue on and bring in other events like this,” said Hoover, whose daughter, Shawna, is a member of one of the two local teams competing. “Unfortunately, there are still people out there who don't even know the Cedar Rapids Ice Arena exists. We're doing what we can to bring people into the arena.”

Tickets to the event are $15 for adults and $8 for children 10 and younger and can be purchased at the door.

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