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GREENSBORO -- Six months ago, Mary Beth Marley had never done a throw jump or a pairs lift. Now she and Rockne Brubaker are sitting in third place at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships.

It's a testament to the talent of Brubaker, a national champion at the Junior and Senior levels with previous partners, and Marley's potential.

But it's also indicative of the troubled state of pairs skating in the United States, which hasn't produced a team that can contend internationally for more than a decade.

"They show wonderful potential," said John Nicks, who coached Tai Babilonia and Randy Gardner to the 1979 world title, the last by an American pair, and now works with Marley and Brubaker. "The future is great for them in a period where American pairs seems not too defined."

Caitlin Yankowskas and John Coughlin won the short program with a steamy, seductive tango that made the Greensboro Coliseum feel like a dimly-lit, smoke-filled Argentine bar.

Their throw triple salchow was huge, and would measure up to any of the world's top couples. Their score of 64.30 points, however, would not, falling several points short of what the Germans did a day earlier at the European championships.

Olympians Amanda Evora and Mark Ladwig were second (62.87) while defending national champions Caydee Denney and Jeremy Barrett finished fourth after she fell on their side-by-side triple toe loops.

For all of the American might in singles -- 14 Olympic gold medals and 49 world titles -- success always has been much harder to come by in pairs.

No U.S. team has won Olympic gold, and Karol and Peter Kennedy are the only Americans besides Babilonia and Gardner to win worlds.

The Americans haven't been on the Olympic podium since Jill Watson and Peter Oppegard won bronze in 1988, and the only world medal in the last 12 years was Kyoko Ina and John Zimmerman's bronze in 2002 -- against a watered-down, post-Olympic field.

Granted, the U.S. still is looking for its first world or Olympic title in ice dance, too. But the Americans have become a force in the discipline where they were once irrelevant, winning silver medals at the last two Olympics and placing a team on the podium at five of the last six world championships.

The pairs, meanwhile, haven't even qualified a team at the last three Grand Prix finals.

"The U.S. is looking for a team to step up and be competitive in the world," Brubaker said. "The door's wide open."