2011 US Nationals - Greensboro, NC!

[Isk8NYC]

Story on US Figure Skating's site - Greensboro, NC will be the site of the 2011 Nationals. (Jan 22-30, 2011)

I think I'm going to watch my first Nationals! Wheeee!

http://www.usfsa.org/event_story.asp?id=42674

Anyone have volunteer info?

[looplover]

Woo hoo!!! I cannot wait!

I think I might buy tickets for this though because I really want to watch it...

Tickets on sale very soon, March 9!
8O

[Isk8NYC]

I can't decide what type of tickets to get. I don't think I need an all-access pass. What advantage is it to attend practices and such?

Any suggestions from people who've gone to previous nationals?

[Terri C]

While I do see myself there... the ticket buying will have to wait b/c of AN!!

[Isk8NYC]

Funny article in the Greensboro newspaper, lol.

http://www.news-record.com/content/2009/02/26/article/skating_well_why_not_well_figure_it_out

Hardin: Skating ... well, why not? We'll figure it outThursday, February 26 ( updated 7:20 am)

GREENSBORO — We have some studying to do.

In two years' time, Greensboro will become the center of figure skating in America, an honor bestowed on only the most adaptable of Southern cities, a trait that eliminated such backwater places as Charlotte and Raleigh and Winston-Salem. You know, the towns we slammed into the dasher boards during our old ECHL days.

For that matter, you can include every other city in the South (except Atlanta, which gets a reprieve here because, well, it's not in North Carolina).

But we digress.

We have work to do, and with all the other responsibilities we have as citizens as a result of all the mistakes made by the aforementioned centers of banking and politics, we now have to learn figure skating. It's not punishment, either.

The 2011 U.S. Figure Skating Championships will be held in our coliseum, which means that for eight days in January, two years from now, the entire skating universe will be watching. Already, our mayor is on record as saying this goes with our history of hosting huge events, and she's right.

We hosted a Final Four, three Bassmaster Classics, 21 ACC men's basketball tournaments, along with numerous women's ACC tournaments, NCAA tournaments, Olympic Festivals, Olympic training sites and trials and exhibitions and Elvis. So we can handle this.

The governor weighed in, too, saying Greensboro has the best coliseum and the best people, or something like that. So there's a fair amount of pressure involved in being the host of the premier event in all of U.S. skating. Joey Cheek is proud, too.

Between now and the third Sunday in January two years from now, we have to get ready, get more than 160,000 tickets sold (because that's the record), get sponsors lined up that might include some of those banks that have been getting all that free money lately, and educate a city already steeped in sports.

Granted, we're talking Tobacco Road basketball and auto racing, but if we can pull off hosting three fishing tournaments the size of the 1964 Winter Olympics, we can probably handle this, too. We actually had less time then to get ready for the fishing tournament, and we didn't have a lake! That's a little-known story of how we landed the big one, and it had to do with Tom Ward and Bodie McDowell and some people whose job it was to inform the public that, no, we were not going to fill the floor of the Greensboro Coliseum with water.

We filled it with 23,000 screaming bass fishermen who changed the way people looked at Greensboro, its coliseum and its people. The 1994 Classic is still the biggest event to come here, bigger than the Final Four, bigger than Elvis even.

This will be bigger.

So it's time for all of us, as citizens of the Gate City, to do our part to get ready. Let's just throw out some terms to see how ready you might be:

Salchow. Know what that is? Look it up.
How about a Camel Spin? No, it's not what Junior did to Vickers last week.
That was a Red Bull Spin. Different thing altogether.

Do you know who won the U.S. women's title last month in Cleveland? I didn't, either, before I researched it. Her name is Alissa Czisny. She can't rebuild an engine like Tonya Harding could, but neither can you. She has her own Web site (figureskatersonline.com/alissaczisny). Look it up yourself. Get to know her.

Tara Lipinski came here after she won the gold medal at the 1998 Winter Games. I studied skating before I interviewed her. She said Greensboro was "cool beans."

Listen, our people went out and got this thing for us, much to the chagrin of Kansas City, and now it's kind of on us to do the rest. That means we have two years to figure out what a Salchow is and why it matters, and who Alissa Czisny is and why she's the darling of American skating right now. We have the Winter Games coming up in 2010. Know where they are? No, not Greensboro. Look it up.

We have a responsibility here to live up to the words of the mayor and the governor and the men who looked into the future all those years ago and built the coliseum knowing full well it would lose money over the long run and built it anyway. That's why Elvis came. That's why the Final Four was here and why the ACC tournament held anywhere else is never the same and why they still talk about the 1994 Bassmaster Classic like it was yesterday and why the National Hockey League hung out here for a couple of years and why the U.S. Figure Skating people came here and looked around and saw how nice we were and sort of shrugged and said, "Why not?"

Why not us? Why can't we still do big things? Why can't we bring the biggest skating championship in the country to Greensboro and make it the best it can be?

We have two years to get ready, two years to figure out the terms and the personalities and the rules. Hey, if I can do it, you can, too. Well, maybe not the rules. Skating's a little like NASCAR when it comes to scoring, so I'll have to get back to you on that.

Ed Hardin

[looplover]

Yikes! Tickets are a fortune. I'm already cutting back on skating due to economy - this is not in the cards! Hoping for a volunteer spot or to buy single event tickets. But would LOVE to splurge on the all event tix...:halo:

[Isk8NYC]

A friend in Raleigh sent me a news report link and asked about the tickets. I said the same thing - I'll either take my chances and wait for the single-event tickets to go on sale or volunteer. My kids would love to be sweepers/slushers again.

[Debbie S]

I agree the prices are too high, given the economy and current state of skating fandom among the general public. But the prices are actually a bit lower than in past years. For Cleveland this year, lower bowl tix (excluding the front row) were $595. For St. Louis in '06, I think they were $560. In L.A. in '02, they were $500. So it appears that the USFSA is moving in the right direction on prices, just not far enough.

I just went to the site to see how they were handling the ordering, and the online ordering is done through Ticketmaster. So if you order the $495 tix, you get charged a "convenience fee" of $41 per order. If you order via mail or fax, which you have to do if you're doing the 4-payment option, the "handling fee" is only $15 per order. Even if you're not doing the installment plan, it seems like it's a no-brainer to order the 'old-fashioned' way.