Oaks Park hosts Northwest regional artistic skating title sweep

Oaks Park skaters spread wins across the Primary, Juvenile, Elementary, Freshman and Senior women’s artistic brackets as the 2026 Northwest Regional Championships wrapped at the Portland rink from June 20-22. Savanna Phillips of Oaks Skating Club opened the home-club run with the Primary C Girls figures title, Violet Terpstra added Juvenile C Girls, and Wednesday Miller and Zoey Waller went 1-2 in Juvenile A Girls to underline how deep the host program ran through the younger divisions.

The title list kept building from there. Lucca Pendleton held Elementary C Girls for Oaks, while Luella Walkup of Skagit Skate Artistic Skating Club stopped the host sweep by taking Elementary B Girls. In the older brackets, Celeste Vervais of Oaks and Ivanna Otero of El Centro Artistic Skating shared the Fresh/Soph C Women podium, Amelie Hoenisch gave Oaks another win in Freshman A Women, and Arya Youngren of Skagit Skate completed one of the meet’s standout weekends by winning Junior Women figures before adding the Senior Women international figures title. Carrie Youngren of Skagit Skate closed the page with the Classic Gold Women Figures win.

The meet exposed what Northwest artistic skating does best: it turns regional training into repeatable title contention across age groups. Oaks Park Skating Club describes itself as one of America’s largest and most successful roller skating clubs, and the results backed that up with wins scattered from Primary through Senior. Skagit Skate also showed the region is not a one-club story, with Arya Youngren and Carrie Youngren carrying one of the stronger out-of-town showings and Luella Walkup joining the podium mix.

That depth matters because the regional was only one step in the USARS qualification pathway. The 2025/2026 calendar placed the North West regional alongside Eastern, North Central, North East, South Central, Southern and South West championships in late June, with national championships set for Lincoln, Nebraska, from July 17 through August 2. For skaters who advanced, Portland was less a finish line than a filter, where precision in circles, change figures, brackets, rockers and double threes separated the next wave from the field.

The venue amplified the occasion. Oaks Park says its roller rink is the oldest in the country, with a 100-by-200-foot Wisconsin rotunda maple floor, open year-round and set about 10 minutes from downtown Portland at the east end of the Sellwood Bridge. The rink still houses a 1926 Wurlitzer pipe organ relocated there in 1955, and select sessions keep a live organist in the rotation, a reminder that Northwest artistic skating now grows inside one of the sport’s most unusual and enduring stages.