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Ice, ice baby: Dallas Figure Skating Club enjoying success
BY Chris O’Dell, codell@acnpapers.com
It wasn’t long ago that 13-year-old Ashley Shin’s figure skating future was in jeopardy.
The Dallas Figure Skating Club representative suffered a major setback after a fall left the skater with a severe back injury, threatening to end her entire skating career.
“I thought that was the end of her skating life,” said Soo Shin, Ashley’s mother.
“After I saw some of the big kids skating and how graceful they looked, I wanted to be like them,” Ashley said. “They jumped so high and they looked like they were flying out there.”
Skating to her “Carmen” free skate, Shin earned 68.05 points to take gold medal honors by winning first place in the intermediate ladies division at her first U.S. Junior Championships.
It was a feat that Shin’s coach, Olga Ganicheva, said few expected after such a major setback in which Shin suffered two stress fractures.
“Most skaters don’t come back at all from an injury like that,” Ganicheva said.
Ganicheva and her husband, Aleksey Letov, coach Shin and nearly 30 more skaters from the Metroplex.
And Shin isn’t the only local skater that has enjoyed success under the tutelage of Ganicheva and Letov. Frisco’s Ashlee Raymond recently competed in the juvenile girls event at the U.S. Junior Championships and finished in third place with a score of 45.46 points.
Raymond performed her routine to “Sing, Sing, Sing”, a famous jazz number by Benny Goodman and executed several double jump combos during her time on the ice.
The bronze-medal performance was something that Raymond had worked for ever since she began skating nearly five-and-a-half years ago.
“At first I was just skating for fun,” Raymond said. “Then it just progressed and I knew I wanted to compete. So getting third place was just a bonus.”
The 11-year-old Raymond, a student at Griffin Middle School in Frisco, said she plans to move up to intermediate soon and wants to continue her competitive skating career for as long as she can.
Also from Frisco is Dallas FSC’s Dimitry Artemov, who took sixth-place in intermediate pairs.
Plano’s Amber Glenn also had her hard work pay off recently.
Glenn won the novice ladies silver medal at the Midwestern Sectional Championships in Fort Collins, Co., and joined Hilary Asher as the team’s representatives from Plano.
Ganicheva said all the success that the team has seen is no fluke.
“They get up at 4:30 every morning and are here by 6:00,” she said. “They also go to school full time then come back and skate in the afternoons.
“They do that six days a week. So skating is basically their life.”
Ganicheva and Letov know first-hand the demands of competitive figure skating.
The couple began skating at five years of age and eventually became international champions before moving to America to help young skaters accomplish those same achievements.
“We came to America because we did shows for 10 years and eventually decided to settle down,” Ganicheva said. “Coaching other skaters was a passion for both of us.”
The duo from Moscow, Russia have transformed Stonebriar’s rink into one of the most successful facilities in the state.
“We’ve been building this for 10 years now,” Ganicheva said.
Ganicheva is quick to credit the skaters and their parents for the recent success of the Dallas Figure Skating Club though. She said without proper cooperation on all sides, success might not be possible.
“They listen to us because the parents support us,” she said. “If the parents didn’t support us, there’s nothing we can do.”
Other local skaters include Jarred Meyer of Coppell, Zharia Costiniano of McKinney, Allison Smith of Flower Mound, Morgan Flood from Dallas and Shin’s little sister, Riley, from Flower Mound.
With the increasing success the team members are enjoying, each skater is also setting high aspirations for their future competition careers.
“I want to be in the Olympics one day,” Flood said.
Ganicheva and Letov have made that possible with the beginning of a successful skating tradition in Frisco and other surrounding cities.
“They are like our soldiers,” Ganicheva said. “You don’t see so many kids like this in America anymore. They don’t watch TV and they don’t get to go play. They are always on the ice.”
Glenn and Smith will be heading to San Jose in January for the U.S. Figure Skating Championships.
Meanwhile, Costiniano won the silver medal at the Phillippine National Championships and will represent the Phillippines at both Worlds and Four Continent Championships in 2012.
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