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A figure skating team based in Conception Bay South made history this month in their first competition.
Blake Faulker, 19, started the synchronized skating team, now known as Boys on Blades, last October. With weekly practices at the C.B.S. Arena, he soon formed a group of eight athletes ranging in age from eight to 19.
“The guys that are in skating, we’re all pretty good friends because we always compete against each other and stuff,” Faulkner said in an interview with CBC News.
“We were thinking about how, like, it would be cool if we could do something together.…At first it was a joke, but then we were like, you know, maybe we could actually make this happen.”
As Faulker puts it, what started with a laugh turned into something very real — something that made history.
Boys on Blades is the province’s first registered all-male synchronized skating team, Skate N.L. confirmed.
It’s the first team of its kind in the province. The synchronized skating group trains weekly on home ice in Conception Bay South. Their coaches say their friendship and their dedication is what makes the team such a success.
The team, which is part of the Conception Bay South Skating Club’s Everblades, won second place in their category at the 2025 Provincial Skating Championships in front of a home crowd last weekend.
Getting to that point took months of dedication.
“It’s viewed as a female-dominated sport,” said Faulker. “There’s not that many of us in it, but the few that are in it, you can tell that we love it… we wouldn’t be in it otherwise.”
Breaking barriers
Shaking the idea that figure skating is “a woman’s sport” is one of the team’s missions.
Coach Emily Mahoney has seen how hard the group works to break down stereotypes.
“It started as kind of a funny thing,” Mahoney said, sitting on the bleachers in a cold arena.
“It was like, ‘we’re going to start our own synchro team, but it’s going to be all boys.’ And to see them actually get it started and pull an entire team of eight male figure skaters together — and then they even wake up at like 5:00 in the morning to go to the rink so early — they’re just so dedicated.”
Fellow skater and coach Hannah Poole said the sport has come a long way from when she started.
“It was definitely predominantly female all the way up through when I was skating. But now, you’re starting to see more same-sex ice dance pairs and same-sex synchro teams like this one,” she said.
Faulkner and a teammate have been invited to tell their team’s story at an upcoming panel hosted by Skate Canada on Thursday, alongside Olympic skaters.
Now that the eight young athletes have a team to skate on, they need some more competition.
“A lot of guys, like myself, have competed in categories by themselves pretty much their whole career because there isn’t anyone else to compete against,” Faulkner said.
“If we have more guys, it’ll be more fun.”
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