No worries; I love to talk about Synchro. I think it's the best discipline in figure skating for good mental health
as well as physical fitness, so I want to support it and spread the word so that we can \get NCAA recognition for it -- so that Hockey doesn't hog all the college ice time. (These kids may be a little obsessed with their sport and spend a lot of money and effort on it, but I've never personally seen a kid's psyche in any way damaged by synchro.)
NotUrsula - is the mif and freestyle testing for synchro the same as individual figure skating or are they synchro specific? Do most skaters keep up with individual testing as well as synchro? Does synchro have college students, high school students, and younger all together. I know Theater on Ice separates by under/over 18.
The tests are all the same; standard USFS test series. Most synchro skaters concentrate on MIF and Dance tests, but there are quite a few who also keep up with their Freestyle levels as well.
The age levels depend on the competitive level of the teams; USFS created so many levels so as to allow new skaters to enter the sport older, so the open levels are very mixed age, but the so-called developmental levels (Formation, Beginner 1-2, Prelim and Pre-Juv have much tighter age limits. Of the IJS-level teams, Intermediate is the broadest range; anything under age 20 as long as you have passed Juv MIF; however, in practice, most competitive teams won't put anyone under age 12 on Intermediate, because of the height issue. I know of a club that once decided to field a USFS Intermediate team and left the age limit open; they had a young gifted skater make the team, but she was 2 feet shorter than everyone else, and she spent half the program with her skates literally off the ice, because she was being lifted by centrifugal force. Really broad height differences tend to hurt a program, so good coaches try to avoid that.
If you are interested, here is a PPT that USFS distributes to clubs for parent meetings; it's informative:
https://www.usfigureskating.org/Content/Understanding SyS & Its Value for Parents.pdf
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Also, I want to make something clear: my DD is no kind of phenom. She's a very average skater who has to really bust her chops to make the teams that she does. Two seasons ago she got lazy about practice and got rewarded for that with a second year on her lower-level team, when most of her friends moved up to the next level. Last year her team coach sat us all down and told her that if she wanted to stay she needed to get serious, because the best use of her abilities would be on a somewhat higher-level team, and that the program wanted her on that team for the two years until she aged out, but that it was going to be a long shot for her to make it. She did make it, but by the skin of her teeth; she is on the ice playing catch-up as we speak. (She's a very social kid who is great about making friends, and the coaches like that about her because she helps bring the teams together, but her edges are inconsistent and her twizzles are kind of weak yet. However, she is very fast and has really good Spread Eagles and a decent 135, which doesn't hurt at this level, LOL.) We are sending her to camp at a college progam this summer to get her skills sharpened up for the challenge that this season will be for her.
Nancy, I'm sorry about your DD's push back to an Open team, but let me ask you, is
she as broken up about it as you are? If that team competes USFS, she will still be with her friends at every competition except Nationals (assuming they get there.) When DD was held back, she groused about the earlier curfew and the childish program, but otherwise had just as much fun as always, and her coach made her a team leader, which gave her some semi-coaching duties on certain moves, which helped a lot. She knows what her weaknesses are and how she stacks up against other kids in the program, and she's good about putting the good of the team over her personal wants. DH & I do our best to leave her skating issues between her and her coach (because while we love the sport, too, we don't skate it, which makes us rank amateurs in her eyes.) Also, FWIW, we give our Senior recognition at our Holiday Show because that has the largest audience, so they are not in Synchro dresses when they receive it.
You are right about the learning experience at Porter; that's the biggest non-championship competition in the US. We only send our IJS teams to Porter; we don't send the younger ones because we don't want them too intimidated early on (& to reduce the travel budget). We actually had a lackluster season last year, worst in a long time, and our coaches are SUPER determined that that won't happen again. Lots of new rules, including mandatory individual practice logs.
Nancy, I'll send you a PM with more info about some of our club processes; maybe that will help.
PS: I'm not sure there is any skater that truly *likes* 135's , LOL.
(Edited to remove some details that were TMI.)