Members of the St. Albert Skating Centre strutted their stuff during this year's Christmas concert on Saturday at Servus Credit Union Place.
The event returned after a one-year COVID-imposed hiatus and was an overwhelming success.
Deb Lyon, an organizer and coach with the skating centre, said the event focused on giving their members a chance to get in the holiday spirit and have some fun.
“Prior to COVID we always did a Christmas concert, so [we wanted to offer] a holiday and festive concert for our academy skaters,” said Lyon. “Basically we feature our star-one to gold and competitive skaters in the concert.
“This is what we call a pop concert. Skaters present their solo [routines] sometimes to holiday music and our little guys, who don’t have solos, do a little group number to start up the show.”
Lyon said they put in some extra work to make this year’s concert a bit more special.
“It went really well, we have a really great crew to work with,” said Lyon. “We tried to do a bit of a light show with some lasers this year. It’s pretty hard to change arena lighting, but we tried our best to give everything a bit of ambience to show the skaters that it was a show and not just a regular day on the ice.
“It was a lot of fun and we had some cute numbers at the finale to give people a bit of a laugh.”
Olivia LeDrew, 8, is star-one skater who said she had an absolute blast performing.
“Our theme was Frosty the snowman,” said LeDrew. “It was really fun when we did warm-ups before we went on the ice. I pretty much liked everything about it!”
Besides fun, the event was also an opportunity for skaters to get some practice in front of a crowd before they move on to more competitive events in front of judges.
Senior competitive skater Alisha McCann, 21, said many skaters definitely performed with future competitions on their minds.
“All of our star skate kids started their competitive season; I believe they have a competition coming up right after Christmas,” said McCann. “For them to go out there and do their solo a few more times is really beneficial for them.”
McCann worked with the younger skaters in the event and said all she could see were smiling faces.
“The star-one kids had a blast, they got to perform in front of their parents,” said McCann. “We had a bunch of different soloists that the star-one kids got to see and it was really their first big show.”
