Synchronized Skating Team Places Near Top Of East Coast Competition

A local synchronized skating team has been hard at work with a construction-themed performance that’s landed them high finishes in competitions throughout the season.

The Lower Cape Synchro team — 14 skaters aged 11 to 13 from Monomoy and Nauset Regional Middle Schools — placed fifth out of 21 in the preliminary division at the 2026 Eastern Synchronized Skating Sectional Championships on Jan. 16.

For their performance, the skaters wore costumes of pink high-visibility vests and skated to a soundtrack of “We Built This City” by Starship, “Workin’ for a Livin’” by Huey Lewis and the News — and the theme song for Home Depot. 

Competing at the event in Norwood against teams from New York to Florida, Lower Cape Synchro finished 2.5 points out of first place. That came after the group placed third out of eight teams at the Boston Synchronized Skating Classic, also held in Norwood, last November.

“They kind of get it, like the harder they work, the better their score is going to be,” said Hannah Kast, one of the team’s coaches. “So they really have jelled very nicely, and so they've been excited every time they get their score. They're thrilled to see it, which is great, and they worked for it so they should be.”

Synchronized skating differs from other figure skating disciplines in that the focus is less on jumps and spins than on the footwork, shapes and synchronicity between a team’s several skaters during the program. 

Lower Cape Synchro’s four coaches met in the summer to devise the construction worker focus of this year’s performances (last year’s theme was crocodile hunters, Kast said). After coming up with the theme, they worked with a dress designer to develop the costume. The skaters started working on the two-minute program last August and first performed it competitively in November, then continued to perfect the routine based on the feedback of judges and officials throughout the season.

“We're looking at music that works well for synchronized skating, but we're also looking for something that they'll get really into, and this group in particular really embraces kind of whatever theme we throw their way,” Kast said.

The Lower Cape Synchro preliminary team includes Ariya Dodge, Milla Eldredge, Emily Donovan, Sadie Blair and Dayton Flaherty from Monomoy and Harper Meads, Riley Jones Swimm, Quinn Van Tassel, McKenzie Lagassee, Sloane Young, Delilah Lord, Maia Adams, Addie Otis and Mimi Gibson from Nauset. Kast coaches the team with Lauren Mahoney, Victoria Valentino and Ashley Tortora.

The team members are all also individual skaters who hone their craft outside of synchronized skating. With the team, the skaters bring those skills together and work on performing them — fitting to the name of the discipline — in sync. The elements are already difficult on an individual level; synchro skaters have to execute them at precisely the same time as the rest of their teammates.

“The goal is to make it look easy, so hopefully people watch it and say, ‘Oh, that looks pretty effortless,’ but it's not effortless at all,” Kast said.

Lower Cape Synchro is a newer program. At the Eastern Synchronized Skating Sectional Championships, they went up against multiple longer-standing organizations that can sponsor many teams across many divisions. Even so, the preliminary team of Monomoy and Nauset skaters placed near the top of the leaderboard.

“It's rare for a team to kind of come together as quickly as this one has,” Kast said.

The team will skate one more time this season in Connecticut next month. Kast said that what made the group special is “how much they appreciate being on a team.”

“It's a very individual sport usually,” she said. “It can get very cutthroat and competitive with each other, and so I think this group is really very motivated by being part of a team. Because they're all such strong individual skaters, the placements are following, which is great.”