Katie VanKoughnet likened it to an offence in football executing a play to perfection.
Numerous moving parts work in unison to pull off a designed plan.
Except it’s on ice in VanKoughnet’s world; there are no helmets or shoulder pads, and no angry 300-pound lineman is trying to tackle her.
The Carman product was referring to the Starlites’ recent gold medal performance in synchronized skating at the 2025 Skate Canada Cup Championship in Waterloo. Ont.
VanKoughnet and the Starlites, based out of the Mount Pearl Paradise Skating Club in St. John’s, N.L., triumphed in the open category to claim the program’s first national title since 2022.
“The patterns are so precise. To have everything line up exactly the way you want it to, you practise things for so many hours, and you have one shot to pull it off,” VanKoughnet said.
The 16-person team, all women and ranging from teenagers to adults, executed their four-minute, ten-second program almost flawlessly, earning 200.82 points and comfortably clearing the closest team by 13 marks.
There are many moving parts in synchronized skating—each skater performs different jumps, twists, turns, and lifts at a designated time—and one mishap can set the entire plan ablaze.
“It’s so validating and satisfying. And the fact that we do it so collectively with each other and that we’re all so involved in the process, it’s another level of being proud of what we’re able to accomplish in it,” said VanKoughnet.
VanKoughnet joined the Starlites in 2016, shortly after moving to St. John’s to complete her master’s in applied psychological sciences at Memorial University. The Manitoban competed in synchronized skating in Morden as a kid from 2008 through her teenage years and with the University of Manitoba’s Ice Intrepid.
“I had been doing synchro as a sport already for 10 years by the time I moved here and wanted to find a team where I could continue to skate, make friends, be involved in the sport, and I joined the Starlites and I have continued to be with them since,” she said.
The Starlites are more competitive than the average recreational sports team. For two decades, the club has dominated the open division—the highest domestic category before international competition—in Atlantic Canada and is a perennial contender at nationals.
This season, the Starlites are undefeated through four competitions and, being the only squad in their division for the last event of the season, are guaranteed to go five-for-five.
“The work has been, in many ways, years in the making. We’ve had pretty low turnover on our team, which is, I think, a good contributor to our success,” Vankoughnet said.
“The things we’ve been talking about for several years, we all know and get to keep and keep building on.”
A gold medal at nationals often brings another level of satisfaction to this group. Like other clubs on the East Coast, the Starlites don’t have the same resources as teams in other provinces.
The team doesn’t have a designated coach and is run by its athletes.
The club pays for a professional choreographer to fly out each summer and spend 20 hours installing the routine for the upcoming season. From there, it’s up to the skaters to refine it.
“We do that collectively as a group. It’s a democracy to make those decisions because we don’t have one head coach who would be the person who makes that call,” VanKoughnet said.
The Starlites spend four hours per week on the ice, working on the same routine.
It’s common for the group to fly to Ontario to test their work against elite competition. They’re judged on technical elements, like the degree of difficulty in their stunts and their skating precision during twists and turns.
The hope is that they can execute that program seamlessly by the end of the season.
“In September, we’re already thinking about, ‘How are we going to want to achieve this at nationals?’” said VanKoughnet.
“All throughout the year, making our polishes and our changes, that’s the kind of goal post that we’re always setting as we’re working our way to be as perfect as we can for this moment. So to finally get to that point, to have all of the background work we have done, and then have it pay off in the way that we had been hoping that it would, it’s a fantastic feeling.”
Unlike football, VanKoughnet can play this game for as long as she wants. The 31-year-old completed her master’s degree in 2019 but has continued to live in St. John’s.
There doesn’t appear to be an end in sight for her stay with the Starlites.
“Getting to continue to be involved in it has been really fun,” she said.
“I just really love synchro, and I want for more people to know about it and to be involved in it… because I think it really has a lot to offer anyone who skates or wants to skate and gives the chance to be active for life in a way that individual figure skating often doesn’t allow for.”
