“It’s sparkly.” This is how senior Sophie Pressman, a figure skater since the age of six, describes the elegant sport. As the snow falls, the ice freezes and anticipative skaters come out of hiding to grace the ice, moving skillfully and rhythmically, drawing intricate swirls with their blades on the frozen water, embracing the cold winter season in all its grandeur.

While for leisure skaters, figure skating is more popular during the colder months of the year, dedicated figure skaters find an indoor rink to practice and train inside when higher temperatures make it impossible to ice skate outdoors. “Normally, [my practice times are] about equal, maybe a little bit more [during the school year],” Pressman said.

Sophomore Joel Tibbetts began figure skating six years ago after experimenting with many sports, including dance and swimming. While he played hockey, his interest was caught when a teacher suggested that he try figure skating. After an original reluctance to participate in a supposedly more feminine sport, he tried it out and “it just stuck. I had fun with it,” Tibbetts said.

Pressman’s figure skating career began in a similar fashion. “My mom signed me up for it because my sister did it. I’ve done it for so long that it wouldn’t make sense for me to quit,” Pressman said.

As a male figure skater, Tibbetts is part of a minority in the figure skating community. There is actually a different figure skate designed specifically for guys, Tibbetts pointed out. Their style of skating is different from that of women.

While both figure skates and hockey skates focus on speed, figure skates give a more creative aspect to skating, while hockey skating revolves a lot more around briskness and clean runs. “What I like about figure skating is you have a lot more maneuverability and there’s a lot more versatility to it. If you want to throw a spin in there somewhere, you can do it. It’s not all practicality,” Tibbetts said.

However figure skating in general is not composed of a minority community. “There’s always a couple people that I’ve known to skate or have skated. There are quite a few people at SPA who I know go to the [St. Paul Figure Skating Club] rink. I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s a small community,” Pressman said.

There is some debate about whether figure skating is a sport or not. This is due to the aforementioned focus on creativity. This could be countered by the fact that there is a large community of competitive figure skates who attend figure skating competitions that they practice frequently for these competitions. While Pressman hasn’t been competing for the past two years, she still has strong feelings when it comes to the classification of figure skating as a sport.

Pressman believes that “what makes a sport a sport, personally, is if you have to be athletically able to do it. It takes practice, there’s a winner and a loser, there’s a technical way to judge who wins.”

To Tibbetts’. the most distinct downside to figure skating is the toe pick, which provides more control for the wearer of the skate, but not as a means of stopping. When the ice catches the pick, placed on the front of the blade, the skater does stop, an experience Tibbetts describes as “[falling] flat on your face before you know it.” Pressman’s chosen flaw of figure skating is the cost and constant maintenance of skating gear, although she acknowledges that a lot of sports have similar hindrances.

Recently, Pressman had to have her skates repaired because rusty screws had come loose on her skate’s blade. “ I didn’t hurt myself, but I realized when I got off the ice that I heard a clicking noise, and then I realized that something was wrong with my skate, and it was loose and that’s super dangerous,” Pressman said.

Although Pressman no longer skates competitively, she participates in an annual Roseville Figure Skating School annual show as a soloist, a part available to the higher level skaters. “It’s pretty fun because it’s just you versus having a bunch of other people on the ice with you, and you get to pick your own dress and music, and do your own routine in front of an audience, with spotlights and a huge curtain and decorations,” Pressman said.