With grace and flare, the Queen’s Varsity Figure Skating (QVFS) club concluded their 2023-24 season in Thorold, Ontario on March 6, finishing fourth overall.
“Everybody had a really great outlook on the competition,” Co-Captain Colleen Tordoff, ArtSci ’24, said. “[The team] going into the competition had a good attitude and mentality about what we were going to do and kind of how we were going to strategically prepare ourselves.”
Jade Paganelli, ArtSci ’24, and Juliana Ye, Comm ’24, were awarded the gold medal for their Star 8/9 Pair Dance. Zander Neilson, ArtSci ’26, won silver in the Gold Artistic event. Tordoff won bronze in the Gold Solo Dance event, and the team was awarded bronze in Synchro.
“Synchro was kind of the big takeaway in terms of the big result. It was the perfect emotional climax to the end of the two days of competition,” Co-Captain Aidan O’Connor, ConEd ’25 said.
QVFS participated in two additional meets this year. The first was their 2023 Ice Show on Nov. 26 at Slush Puppie Place (formerly the Leon’s Centre) and their second was the Brock University Figure Skating Invitational on Dec. 5.
Competing for QVFS provides unique experiences not typically found at other levels of the sport. Individuals can compete in multiple disciplines including free-skate, dance, and synchro—all of which have their own events at competition.
This year, an additional event titled Gold Artistic was added, creating even more flexibility for athletes to compete in the events they want to compete in.
“We do a really great job of creating and fostering a really collaborative environment where students get to choreograph their own programs, with coaching assistants, and you really get to see and run with what you want to learn,” Tordoff said.
The team had a lot of ups and downs this season, with new rule changes, difficulty scheduling additional meets, and getting many rookies up to speed, but O’Connor said the team found success in the change.
“We ended up doing a lot of kind of mixing and matching [with pairings], and in the end, it ended up working out really well,” O’Connor said. “It was a very long process, and a lot of mornings were spent with long, hard hours, but it ended up paying off in the end.”
As co-captains of the team, Tordoff and O’Connor played pivotal roles within the team and helped build an environment are proud of.
“What we really did an excellent job of this year was getting everyone in the moment. When everybody got off the ice this year, they were very proud of the skate they had, no matter what the score ended up being,” Tordoff said.
Tordoff will be graduating this year, but O’Connor will be returning to Queen’s for the 2024-25 season.
“Looking ahead to next year, I think there’s going to be even more time and opportunity to experiment a little bit with cross disciplines [and] people trying out new things that they hadn’t done this year or in past years,” he said.
Tordoff said the fourth place finish was QVFS’ best finish in years. Though Queen’s hasn’t won an OUA Championship since 2006, the team is building momentum to bring an even higher level of competition to next season.
Tags
Aidan O'Connor, Colleen Tordoff, OUA championships, Queen's Varsity Skating Club
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