Over the summer, junior Luca Becker travelled north to Lake Placid, N.Y. for the Lake Placid Ice Dance International, an international figure skating competition including teams from Canada, Russia, Georgia and Poland.

Even though Luca normally skates in competitions such as the one at Lake Placid, he and his partner and sister, freshman Gigi Becker, did not participate in this specific tournament.

Luca went by himself to Lake Placid for the competition, twice the host of the Olympics. Since he was not competing and is interested in being a judge after his skating career, Luca asked his coaches if they could get him on a judging panel. They did, and Luca ended up judging the juvenile long program event, a contest in which 12 to 14-year-old dancers can choose their own music and routine as long as the music changes tempo once, has an audible beat and contains the elements that the skaters said they would perform.

Ice dance, the category of skating in which the Beckers compete and Luca judged, consists of two scores: execution and difficulty. Luca served on the tech panel, which determines the difficulties of the skater’s routines. He was an assistant tech specialist, the lowest ranking of the three judges on the panel, which gave him the opportunity to learn from other experienced panelists.

Luca called alongside judges Judy Blumberg and Bob Horen, the latter the highest ranking member of the panel Luca said. Horen serves on the International Skating Union Ice Dance Technical Committee, and helps decide the rules and standards of ice dance. Having someone like Horen, who Luca said has a lot of “power and respect,” on the panel benefited Becker as he learned the ropes of judging.

Luca said that being on the other side of the judges’ table both interested him and helped his own skating by giving him an inside scoop on what judges look for.

Aside from Luca’s week in New York, he and Gigi practiced skating together for much of the summer. The two skated once in the morning and once in the afternoon each day Monday through Saturday for between four and six hours. Sundays, however, did not mark a break from skating for Luca as he coached new skaters aged 5 to 13 at the Rockville Ice Arena.

Gigi, meanwhile, also had a packed summer, much of it filled with skating: “I skated about every day for around four hours,” Gigi said. While not skating, Gigi, along with Luca, worked with her mother at a program to help teach kids English as a Second Language over the summer.

Gigi thinks that while skating did prevent her from doing some things she may have wanted to do over the summer, in the end it “wasn’t a really big deal” for her since she is used to skating all the time.

The Beckers hope that the end result of all their hard work will be a trip to the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing and success in other major tournaments along the way. This path, though, requires a lot of work. Like Gigi, Luca said that this hard work took away from other summer activities, but the time and effort were worth it.

“I’ve had to give away a lot, like I have no time for what a normal kid would be doing like vacation or camp; I only skate,” Luca said. “Sometimes I do ask myself is it worth it, but I think it is.”