WHERE ARE THEY NOW? “I brought it on the ice with
me one day,” Meissner said. “I came up with probably half and Chris helped me with the rest of it. We get each other’s style really well. We can get a program to- gether in a session.” Meissner still lives at home
Skating, coaching, school,
Kimmie Meissner performs her free skate at the 2007 U.S. Championships in Spokane, Wash. Meissner, the World champion in 2006, won the title.
t’s not all that long since Kimmie Meissner was a fi xture in U.S. competitive skating — winning titles at the novice (2003), junior (2004) and senior levels (2007), going to the Olympics (2006) and winning a World title (2006) — but long enough that she has developed a bit of perspec- tive on the sport. “Last summer, I thought, ‘I
Meissner takes part in a Cool Kids Campaign event.
love skating. Why am I not doing this?’” said Meissner, 22, who had done a few shows but had largely been on a self-imposed hiatus from skating since 2009. “I started training for Nick LaRoche’s show out in Los Angeles (An Evening on Ice to support his U.S. Athletic Foundation). T at was the fi rst show of my season last year. T at’s kind of what started me back into it.
“I felt healthy,” she added. “I felt I was so happy to be doing this. It was so good to see every- body again. I love performing. I love being in front of an audience. I’m not shy. I love being back out there.”
Meissner helped cofound the Cool Kids Campaign and remains active in the organization.
8 AUG./SEPT. 2012
T e pleasure of performing for an audience reminded Meiss- ner of what got her into skating in the fi rst place. T e youngest of four children and the only girl, she discovered fi gure skating thanks to her hockey-playing broth- ers. During a blizzard in 1996, their backyard froze over and her middle brother, Adam, put her in his hockey skates and placed her on the ice. She recently found
charity keep Meissner busy by LOIS ELFMAN
photos of that day and said she’s a bit amazed that she went from that innocent family afternoon to being World champion. “It’s so much fun to think
about how people start doing a sport they end up doing really well in,” she said. “Some people have pretty interesting stories.” T e last couple of years she
competed, Meissner felt unre- lenting pressure and little of the joy that had been part of most of her skating life. Driven and com- petitive, she wanted to do her best every time she was on the ice and she was incredibly hard on herself. T en injuries hit and after heal- ing she was content to stay away. When she returned in 2011 the negativity was gone, replaced by a sense of freedom. “I just wanted to hear the
music and move to the music. Do what I do best,” Meissner said. Given her impressive ré- sumé, once she let it be known she wanted to perform, her cal- endar quickly fi lled up with club shows, Disson Skating shows and small tours such as Holiday Festi- val on Ice in Canada. Her parents joked that they hardly saw her for months. When she was home in Bel Air, Md., she was training. She mostly practices at Ice
World in Abingdon, Md., where Chris Conte assists her with coaching and choreography. She loves Adele’s music and decided to see if she could create a program to “Rolling in the Deep.”
with her parents but may get her own place or move in with one of her older brothers in the fall when she resumes college at Towson University. She was previously a student at the University of Dela- ware (continuing to attend college there even after she stopped train- ing at the UD rink) studying exer- cise science, but took off this past year while she focused on skating. Exercise science has an intense curriculum, and she documented her struggles with chemistry on Twitter (@kimmie- meissner). She passed both chem classes, but there were defi nitely tears involved. T ankfully, her professors either didn’t read her tweets or simply never said any- thing about them. “It would be really funny if
they did,” she said with a laugh. “I’d have said, ‘I want to be honest with you, I really hate your class. It’s not you, it’s the material.’” When she resumes school,
she’ll take courses such as kine- siology — unless she decides to change majors.
“I might change my mind about what I want to do,” Meiss- ner said. “Right now, it’s exercise science/physical therapy, but I have days when I think I want to be an English major and I want to write — a complete 180. I love writing, poetry mainly. Maybe I’d feel diff erently about it if that was my major and I had to take classes for it.”
Although she enjoyed the
break from skating, Meissner ad- mitted that the transition to being a full-time student wasn’t easy. She felt alienated from the college life- style. T e discipline skating had taught her made her feel diff erent from her classmates. Although she embraced the learning part, she said she never quite fi t in with ev- eryone else. “I’m a little bit older than my classmates and I guess our inter- ests are a bit diff erent,” she noted. “I love to go out and have fun with my friends, but there’s still a
PHOTO BY PAUL HARVATH
PHOTOS COURTESY OF COOL KIDS CAMPAIGN
COOL I
DEFINITELY
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