Edie Paterson walked into the Ann Arbor Ice Cube on Nov. 30, knowing she wouldn't see the sun for the next three days.
Her job — managing the trial judges at the 23rd annual Dr. Porter Synchronized Classic in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Dressed in multiple layers and a cup of hot chocolate in hand, she and her crew prepared to judge the programs of 177 teams made up of 2,582 skaters.
Like a well-choreographed free skate, the host Ann Arbor Figure Skating Club put team after team out on dual sheets of ice, cleared locker rooms for the next teams to prepare and fed hundreds of volunteers and officials with a touch of Midwestern hospitality.
The event, which started in 1996 as a one-day competition with fewer than 50 teams, has mushroomed into the largest nonqualifying synchronized skating event in the world, and has included teams from South Korea, Mexico, Canada and Finland.Â
Paterson could only smile as to how epic this competition has become, remembering the time in 1956 when she, then 12-year-old Edith Bateman, and some of her Ann Arbor junior high and senior high classmates took to the ice as members of the Hockettes, recognized as the original precision skating (now called synchronized skating) team.
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Cover of February issue of SKATING magazine
"Peggy (Reed MacDonald, another member of the original Hockettes) and I have talked repeatedly about it, and at that time, we never thought it was going to turn into anything," Paterson said. "We were just more playing than anything else. … It just started with a bunch of us trying to do things that we'd seen at Ice Capades."
Known since 1998 as synchronized skating, this burgeoning discipline now sports 615 teams throughout the country and hundreds more around the world. So popular, synchronized skating was recently considered for inclusion in the Olympic Winter Games.
The growth and popularity of this discipline is universally agreed upon to be traced back to the namesake of the Dr. Porter Synchronized Skating Classic: Dr. Richard Porter. For it was Porter who saw the opportunity for girls at the Ann Arbor FSC to be part of a regular skating chorus in which they could hone their skating skills and showcase their collective talent in front of large audiences.
"A group of 24 is essentially anonymous, and the sense of group participation, even by the real prima donnas, is marvelous," Porter wrote in SKATING magazine. "It is good for public relations for the club and for figure skating, because many audiences, including hockey game crowds, often enjoy a big chorus even more than a star skater."
How it all began
Porter, a longtime University of Michigan health department professor, loved skating. A lower-level judge, he skated himself during adult sessions and enjoyed sharing the sport with his daughters, their friends, University of Michigan colleagues and those associated with the Ann Arbor FSC.
"I think it was a labor of love and he was just good and patient with the kids," Paterson said.
The concept of precision team skating came to Porter in the fall of 1956 when he observed a group of teen girls — members of the previous year's skating chorus at the Ann Arbor FSC — choreographing steps and moves on the ice. Within a few months, the team of two dozen girls helped to create programs to perform between periods at two University of Michigan hockey games, and thus, the Hockettes were born.
"He came up with the idea of making this more than just an ice show extravaganza once a year, because he truly felt this might be an activity that could keep club membership, keep the girls skating," MacDonald said. "In that era for girls there was no Title 9, so we didn't have high school things beyond cheerleading and private gymnastics. It was his idea to keep us involved and skating and doing the things we enjoyed."
In that first season, the Hockettes grabbed all the scraps of ice time that they could for practice, which amounted to about an hour a week. Porter's wife, Pat, helped to create the signature navy blue dresses with the maize-colored "M" secured by an adhesive on the front. Pat was instrumental in virtually everything related to the Hockettes, from helping to choose music to dress-making to travel coordination.
"I think she made them (dresses) all," MacDonald said. "We didn't have mass production like we do today."
The exposure from those first performances at the University of Michigan hockey games propelled the Hockettes forward. Porter convinced the club's board of directors to give them a weekly hour of practice time. When six members of the inaugural team left, Porter held tryouts in front of U.S. Figure Skating judges.
The next year, they again performed at the club's Melody On Ice show, outdoors at a winter carnival in Alpena, Michigan, at four University of Michigan hockey games, and at a hockey game against University of Michigan's rival Michigan State University in East Lansing.
Their repertoire expanded rapidly as well in those early years, with the Hockettes performing "suicide pinwheels, whiplash runaways, spiral flares, spin-outs, inside-out loops, catch-on pinwheels" and other intricate maneuvers. They entertained the crowds with programs from the musical
Oklahoma, where they would take the "M" off their costumes and wear holsters and cowboy hats. They skated to "Seventy-Six Trombones," the Michigan fight song "The Victors," a number called "A Fling and a Jig," in which they would make a quick change from a Scottish to an Irish costume during a black-out, and many others.
The Hockettes became fixtures at area winter carnivals and performed at other skating clubs in the Midwest and Canada.
By that time, it was cool to be a Hockette, and the group grew from 24 to 32 skaters.
The precision movement gained a much wider audience after a color home movie of the Hockettes was shown at U.S. Figure Skating Governing Council in 1967. Delegates returned home excited to share the news of precision team skating. Now in greater demand, Dr. Porter negotiated performances with the Shrine Circus, and with Madison Square Garden to celebrate U.S. Figure Skating's 50th anniversary in a show titled "Champions on Ice," which was broadcast on ABC's Wide World of Sports in 1971.
SKATING editor Theresa Weld Blanchard asked Dr. Porter to write a story about his chorus team, which featured the now-iconic photograph of the Hockettes evenly spaced out, performing an "M" for the University of Michigan. He wrote in the article: "It is possibly farfetched, but we have even wondered if competition between chorus groups might be worthwhile."
Nearly a decade after Dr. Porter penned those words, that farfetched idea became a reality.
Read the full cover story in the February issue of SKATING magazine.
