After their first meet and first win over Bloomington, senior and synchronized swimming captain Lily Kulevsky said the team will continue to work on figures as the season progresses.

“We’ll just keep on working on figures because it’s pretty time consuming to significantly improve at them, so it’s a process throughout the whole season — improving a little bit more each meet, so we’ll just keep working on that,” Kulevsky said.

According to synchro coach Rose Evensen, the first meets of the season are called figure meets, where each swimmer is assessed on their individual skills.

“For upcoming meets, we’re just working on improving all our figure skills to put ourselves in a good position for when we have routine meets coming up,” Evensen said. “We have three figure meets to start and then routine meets after so we have to start with the not-so-fun stuff.”

According to Kulevsky, there are two different types of synchro meets: figures and routines.

“Figure meets are the individual component that is scored. Routine meets are the team routine that lots of people perform or there are duets and trios routines as well,” Kulevsky said. “Basically figure meets are just super boring and routine meets are a lot more fun to watch and participate in.”

Evensen said the March 21 meet was held at the middle school because of the construction at the high school.

“The meet went really well. Our first one is always a little bit like getting it all together and remembering how we do everything,” Evensen said.

According to Evensen, figure meets are intended to test the swimmers on different elements of synchro.

“Everyone is wearing a black suit and a white cap, and they individually go out in front of a panel of judges,” Evensen said. “We have four different figures so they all are kind of different elements put together to challenge different synchro skills. They wait in line, swim out in front of the judges that are watching, do their skills and the judges will give their score and they have to do that four times.”

Kulevsky said while the team has already begun working on routines, figures take precedence early in the season.

“We just got our team routines recently so we started writing those that we haven’t practiced them a ton because at this point in the season figures need to take priority,” Kulevsky said.

According to Kulevsky, the team will also need to focus on the two new figures introduced this year.

“Every four years, two of the figures switch and that was this year so we got two new figures that we’ve been drilling kind of hard because a lot of us haven’t done those before, so that’s different from past years,” Kulevsky said.

Evensen said in each four-year cycle, two figures, ballet leg and walkover, remain a requirement. The two new figures this year are kip and heron.

“There are two figures, ballet leg and walk over, that we always have, and then the other two we swap out every 4 years,” Evensen said. “You have the opportunity to be on the team for six years, starting in seventh grade. Hopefully, if you swim seventh through twelfth grade, you would have had a chance to try both of them in the four-year cycle.”

According to gopark.org, synchro’s upcoming meets are March 28 and April 12.