Clara Neal (CAS’27) has been ice-skating since she was five years old. Last year she joined the Haydenettes, one of the nation’s top-ranked senior-level teams, realizing a life-long ambition. Photo by Vincent Desiderioscioli

FIGURE SKATING

BU Freshman Heads to US Synchronized Skating Championships

For Clara Neal, competing at the senior level is the culmination of a lifelong dream

On a recent Saturday evening, Clara Neal is gracefully gliding across the ice at the Skating Club of Boston rink in Norwood, Mass.

Every facial expression, every graceful movement on the ice, the timing of each leap, lift, and death spiral had been carefully choreographed to the soundtrack of the Tenors’ “Who Wants to Live Forever” playing in the background.

Hours and hours of early morning practices and off-ice work had led to this moment, but Neal’s mind is clear.

“It becomes like muscle memory,” Neal (CAS’27) says. “I’m like, just perform, enjoy it, because I feel like that’s when you stay best, when you’re projecting how you truly feel about skating and you want to be there.”

Neal and her synchronized skating team, the Haydenettes—one of the top-ranked senior-level teams in the nation, based in Lexington, Mass.—were performing their free skating program at the send-off show for this weekend’s 2024 U.S. Synchronized Skating Championships in Las Vegas.

Neal has been attending the National competition since middle school, but this year is different—it’s the first time she’ll be competing in the event’s senior level. “The senior teams—everyone is cheering for them because they’re awesome, so the crowd is crazy,” she says. “I’m excited because being at Nationals is definitely a really awesome experience.”

Neal first learned how to skate at age five after attending a school skate night. She was instantly hooked and recalls thinking, “I need to be able to do this. Sign me up for lessons, now.”

She drew inspiration from watching her favorite skaters on TV, such as Ashley Wagner and Jason Brown, and also from watching the Haydenettes, the 30-time U.S. National Champions and 5-time World Bronze medalists, currently the most decorated synchronized skating team in the country. She pursued both solo figure skating and synchronized skating, but preferred the latter because of the opportunity to be part of a team. “If you did synchro, you knew who the Haydenettes were,” Neal says. Making the team last year was “unbelievable because it’s been on my vision board for years.”

But first, the Bethesda, Md., native had to work her way through the synchronized skating ranks, practicing both on-ice and off-ice work, day after day, year after year. She jokes that she now skates better than she walks. She played lacrosse and field hockey as well (she also plays the ukulele), but her number-one passion has always been synchronized skating.

“I really like being on a team and having other people to share that joy—and also sadness,” Neal says. “There’s nothing comparable—we call it the kiss and cry, when you’re waiting for your scores and hearing your best score and being able to jump up and down as a team and just celebrate that moment.”

Eventually, Neal joined DC EDGE, the largest synchronized skating program in the DC metro area. She vividly recalls winning her first national medal—her team skated to bronze in the 2019 U.S. Synchronized Skating Championships.

“I remember our reaction to hearing that we got a medal,” Neal says. “None of us expected it going into the event”

After DC EDGE won its first international competition, in Nottingham, U.K., Neal began to believe that her childhood dream of skating with the Haydenettes might be possible. Last spring, she tried out for the program, and she was so anxious to find out if she had made the cut that she stayed awake all night before the notification emails were scheduled to be sent.

“I wish I could relive that moment. Every time I’m with the team, I feel that same joy,” Neal says. “I grew up watching them, and now I’m one of them.”

So last May she immediately packed her bags, left high school early, and moved to Boston to start training with the team. She’d planned to attend Boston University, but joining the Haydenettes, she says, proved to be a case of “everything coming together.” She’s currently the third youngest person on the team.

In this video, recorded at their February 17 send-off show, the Haydenettes begin the short program they’ll perform at the Nationals. Video by Brendan Nordstrom

Her schedule is intense. Every Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday, she gets up around 5:15 am to drive out to the Skating Club of Boston’s rink in Norwood for 6:30 warm-ups, followed a half hour later by on-ice work. After three hours of skating, the team then lifts weights and works on exercises to improve mobility and facial expressions.

All of that’s on top of a grueling academic schedule: Neal is double majoring in history and Spanish in pursuit of her goal of being an immigration lawyer. .

“It’s definitely tough but my professors have been fantastic about it,” she says. “I definitely have to make sure I’m on top of my work, and especially with this team everyone is mostly in college or doing some sort of studious activity, so we’re all like, ‘It’s time to go do our homework.’”

So far this season, the Haydenettes have earned gold medals in three competitions, including an international cup in Poland. Neal describes how that feels: “You’re just looking around, you’re seeing everyone cheer for you and you just have this feeling of a full heart.”

She says she plans to prepare for Nationals as she would for any other competition, walking around the city to calm her nerves and listening to her warm-up playlist to get in the zone. Then, time to take to the ice. If the Haydenettes win at this weekend’s Nationals, they’ll qualify to represent the United States at the World Championships in Croatia in April.

“We’ve been working really hard this season, and I think it’s starting to pay off,” Neal says. “Just never stopping, keep going. Yeah, clean programs, putting our best out there and just being proud of our skates.”