LAUREL WALKER; IN MY OPINION; New Passion Warms Old Skaters; Team Members Leave Age at Ice Rink Door

By LAUREL WALKER

Town of Brookfield Most people this age look at glare ice and see a broken hip. Carl Scheid of Delafield, who is 75, glides with grace on two thin blades across the frozen glaze, having the time of his life.

He first strapped on a pair of ice skates when he was 70, he said.

“I tried to get my granddaughter interested,” he said, explaining his late start. “She wasn’t, and I was.”

Now he’s the oldest member of a synchronized skating team of a dozen or so members who practice at Eble Ice Arena on Blue Mound Road. The skaters are as young as 33 but mostly are in their 60s.

Come to think of it, they’re “mostly” synchronized, too.

The aim is fun and exercise, and if they look like they’re in unison along the way, then so much the better.

Ginger Abram, 69, of Grafton skated when she was a little girl and didn’t come back to it until she was 60.

“My husband thought I needed an outlet,” she said.

She’d been taking care of her aged mother and needed both a physical and mental release.

A woman fit enough to windsurf and both water and snow ski, she easily was back in skating form and her time on the ice proved perfectly medicinal.

With a uniform of red sweaters, black pants and focused expressions, the synchronized skaters practice their routine under the watchful eyes of their coach, Craig Bodoh of Wauwatosa.

The lines were hardly ever straight and their vine-like weaving pattern was a little ragged when I watched them at practice recently. But come to think of it, the only one who took a tumble during the practice was their coach. And that’s only because I never made an attempt to step on the ice myself.

Barbara Applegate, 55, of Waukesha is credited with getting the synchronized skating team going. She’d started to skate 10 years ago at the Pettit National Ice Center in Milwaukee for one reason.

“I hate to exercise,” she said.

After she quit work, she figured skating would keep her active and she’d need to practice three or four times a week, which would make for a good exercise regimen.

She took lessons from Bodoh, who’s certified to teach freestyle and group lessons, and they both worked with the Pettit synchronized team.

When that folded, they moved to Eble and started the team three years ago with eight skaters.

That first season, Bodoh said, the focus was on “basic forward skating.”

Season two? He said they worked out enough of a routine that they skated in an exhibition.

This season, “I want to take them to competition,” he said. One’s coming up in February in Beaver Dam, and they just might go even though there might be only one or two senior teams participating.

They’ve got some work to do, but they’ve come a long way.

Scheid could barely skate around the rink when he joined the team. Others are a little more experienced.

Larry Spleas, 55, of Waukesha goes back to the days of the Mayfair Ice Chalet and then moved on to Wilson Park and to the Pettit before his current sessions at Eble Ice Arena. Same with Judy Slattery, 67, of Dundee in Fond du Lac County, one of Spleas’ favorite partners for ice dancing, though both are also on the synchronized team.

“I’ve always skated,” Slattery said, and her graceful form shows it.

“I feel totally free when I’m skating,” she said. “I forget everything. It’s a mental challenge as well as a physical challenge.”

The synchronized team which welcomes new members practices two mornings a month for about an hour.

Senior skaters who freestyle and ice dance take to the rink twice a week.

The practices bring skaters from all over southeastern Wisconsin, and the group socializes with twice-a-year parties as well.

Bill Kuwahara, 76, of Milwaukee depends on a bus to get him out to Waukesha County for his regular skating session. He’s been coming to Eble Park since it opened more than 10 years ago.

A skater for 60 years, he used to do freestyle skating with jumps and spins as a younger man.

Ice dancing “is a little bit easier when you’re older,” he said, “because you don’t have to leave the ice.”

Still, I asked him. What about those falls? And those hips?

“Hopefully, we don’t fall,” he said, which can’t be as easy as it sounds. In fact, he broke a wrist back in 1993 while he was practicing.

“I got too fancy,” he said.

The hardest part of synchronized skating, says Bodoh, is not the skating. It’s the coordination and keeping movements in sync.

The most important thing to remember?

“PRACTICE!” a half-dozen of the team members within earshot loudly proclaimed in unison.

Naomi Jehly, 33, of Milwaukee, the youngest in the group, bent forward into a perfect-looking spiral at the end of one line, balancing on one skate while arching her back, leg and foot so it stretched back and up, higher than her head.

Impressive, even for a 33-year-old, I said.

“She was a gymnast,” her fellow skaters explained in unison.

More impressive yet was the 63-year-old on the other end of the line, Eve Farrell of Elm Grove, who did a spiral if a bit more cautious one.

As the shortest skater, Farrell said she always ends up on the end of the line since skaters are usually arranged tall-to-short, with the tallest in the middle. As the line of skaters moved around the rink, Farrell had to hustle, caught in a sort of crack-the- whip.

“You have to move faster on the end,” she said, “and you have to slow down faster.”

Sally Kehl, 63, of Franklin said she started skating at the age of 50 when she served as a chaperon at the Pettit Center for her husband’s class. He was a teacher, and skating was a field trip.

“As you age,” she said, “this really helps with balance. I want to have a decent life when I’m 90,” she said.

If anything helps you get there, skating just might be it.

As I watched Farrell, pumping like crazy to catch up from her end- of-the-line position, I couldn’t help but appreciate Abram’s view of skating as an antidote to aging.

“As long as you keep moving, it doesn’t catch up to you,” she said.

Call Laurel Walker at (262) 650-3183 or e-mail lwalker@journalsentinel.com

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