Last year, Sebastian Lam and his synchronized skating teammates finished 13th out of 13 teams at the Eastern Synchronized Skating Sectional Championships. A year later, 10-year-old Lam and the Shooting Stars Preliminary team fared quite differently in the same tournament.
They won.
Now skating on the Shooting Stars Pre-Juvenile squad, one level above preliminary, the team competed again at the 2026 Eastern sectional.
Six teams from Lexington’s Hayden Synchronized Skating took to the ice at last month’s competition. Several finished at the top and qualified for the U.S. Synchronized Skating Championships.
The Hayden Synchronized Skating Teams were founded in 1979 by Lynn Benson, a former national singles figure skater and Ice Capades performer. That same year, Benson launched the Haydenettes, a senior-level synchronized skating team that eventually became one of the country’s premier teams.
Under her leadership, the Haydenettes won 15 U.S. titles and competed in 22 national-level championships.
With 32 U.S. national wins and several top tier finishes at international competitions, the Haydenettes rank as the nation’s most decorated synchronized skating team, according to U.S. Figure Skating.
Hayden Synchro is also home to the Lexettes and Hayden Select, two other elite squads, along with the Haydenettes, which are members of the U.S. national team.
According to the Synchro Center website, 134 teams competed at the Eastern sectional, a qualifying event for the U.S. Synchronized Skating Championships.
Sectionals ran from Jan. 14-17 at The Skating Club of Boston’s three-rink facility in Norwood, according to Ray Lam, a Hayden Synchro board member. Two of his three children skate with Hayden Synchro. Sebastian Lam is Ray Lam’s son, and his daughter, 12-year-old Johanna Lam, skates on the Mini Mates team.
Hayden Select skater Kadynce Morton said she was nervous but confident before stepping onto the ice at sectionals.
“Before Easterns it kind of was a mix of both [feelings], “ Morton said. “We were so fortunate to be skating at Easterns in our home rink. The Skating Club of Boston is where we practice so it felt like every other morning. We walked in knowing that this is our house, we own this and so there was that shared confidence—but it’s also nerve-racking to stand in the tunnel and go, ‘OK, everyone’s out there watching’ like we gotta go out and do the thing.”
Before taking to the ice, Morton said she squeezed her coach’s hand for focus.
“We have a great connection, so whether you were nervous or excited or any mix of all of the emotions we were definitely all there for each other,” she said.
Morton grew up in Huntington Beach, Calif. She started skating at age 5, and is a sophomore at Boston University majoring in lighting design at the College of Fine Arts and pursuing a minor in human physiology. This is her first season with Hayden Select.
Hayden Synchro’s free skate choreography was inspired by Eve, the biblical figure. Instead of performing to a pop or rock song, Morton said, the team skated to a poem written by a former team member, with music in the background. The performance was titled, “Theme — Eve Reimagined.”
“We have this like serpentine, mischievous story,” she said. “We’re skating to a poem that was written by one of our alumni skaters and it’s about Eve reclaiming her curiosity and not just settling for the expectation that was set for her.”
Morton said Hayden Select’s choreography was also inspired by Madison Chock and Evan Bates’s snake charmer-themed performance from January 2020.
Overall, Hayden Synchro’s teams turned in a strong performance, according to results published on the U.S. Figure Skating website.
Star Mates finished fourth out of 12 teams. Ice Mates claimed second out of six, Mini Mates finished fourth out of five, and Shooting Stars Preliminary finished 11th out of 21. Hayden Select was the only team to compete in the senior division.
The Shooting Stars Pre-Juvenile won its 16-team division.
“I was surprised, excited and proud of how the team did,” Sebastian Lam said. His father, Ray Lam said the competition marked a comeback for the skaters on Shooting Stars Pre-Juvenile.
“A lot of these skaters [in Shooting Stars Pre-Juvenile] were in the preliminary team last year,” Ray Lam said. “And because that’s their first competition experience … they had a few mistakes and had a hard time recovering.”
Not only did Shooting Stars Pre-Juvenile finish first, he said, but their performance at the Eastern sectional set a benchmark.
“At Eastern, they got [a] seasonal high of 37-plus points, which is their seasonal best,” Ray Lam said. “And that says a lot about how hard the skaters work, how encouraging, how effective the coaches were.”
The Hayden Select team also posted its best free skate score of the season.
“I think we felt pretty good,” Johanna Lam said. “We got a pretty good score. I think we’re happy with that.”
Alicia Wang, a skater on the Haydenettes, watched parts of the Eastern sectional from rinkside. She said the younger teams were impressive.
“I thought they looked great,” she said. “I thought that their coaches were doing a great job of training them with the synchro basics and building their roots in the synchro.”
Wang also said the younger Hayden Synchro teams had the cleanest performance, despite not every team placing in the top four of its division.
Wang grew up in Chapel Hill, N.C. She studies human physiology at the Sargent College of Health & Rehabilitation Sciences and plans to minor in public health.
The top four teams in each section advance to the 2026 U.S. Synchronized Skating Championships.
Hayden Select, Star Mates, Mini Mates and Ice Mates will all compete at nationals, along with the Haydenettes and Lexettes, which qualified directly without competing at sectionals.
“We’re aiming to do as well as we did last year where we got third,” Johanna Lam said. “I think we’ve been having a lot of practices and I think we’re pretty confident.”
The 2026 U.S. Synchronized Skating Championships run from March 4 to March 7 in Salt Lake City. More than 80 teams from around the country will compete.
“Regardless of whether they win or don’t win, the skaters just continue to work hard and continue to excel,” Ray Lam said. “Nationals is definitely a big stage, but on the other hand, we won’t just let the competition … take over the mentality of being a good athlete.”
The U.S. Synchronized Skating Championships began in 1984. Four years later, Hayden Synchro won the national competition.
As of 2023, the Haydenettes have won five bronze medals at the World Synchronized Skating Championships, and 15 U.S. titles, according to U.S. Figure Skating.
Hayden Synchro fields nine teams and more than 100 skaters.
“It looks like a very soft, beautiful sport,” Ray Lam said. “But behind it, there’s a lot of resilience, a lot of tough mentality to make it happen.”
Although synchronized skating isn’t an Olympic sport, it is popular worldwide and is the fastest-growing figure skating discipline in the country, according to U.S. Figure Skating.
Johanna Lam said she hopes to join the Haydenettes and continue the lineage of championships.
“If synchronized skating is an Olympic sport at that time,” she said, “then I’d want to go to the Olympics with them.”
This story was written by a journalism student in BU’s Newsroom program, a partnership between the university, The Lexington Observer and other news organizations in the Boston area.