In their second season together, Caydee Denney and John Coughlin are working to add finesse and feeling to their bag of big technical tricks, and they’re learning to exhale along the way.
by LYNN RUTHERFORD/photos by WENDY NELSON, BLUE FOX PHOTOGRAPHY I
t’s the 2012 Four Continents Figure Skating Cham- pionships, and three people — two in skates, silent and with their eyes closed — stand in a corner of one of the many corridors of the Colorado Springs World Arena.
“Inhale ... exhale,” an intense but upbeat brunette woman tells Caydee Denney and John Coughlin. “Nar- row your focus. ... activate your core ... stay connected to your partner.”
Te woman, Kathy Johnson, is not Denney and
Coughlin’s primary coach; that job belongs to Dalilah Sappenfield, who paired the two athletes, both U.S. champions with previous partners, in May 2011. But Sap- penfield thinks Johnson could be the extra ingredient that raises her team to the World podium.
“Kathy helps them tell what their characters are feel- ing during each part of the music,” she said. “She defines the stories within the programs.” Her skaters tell the tale in plainer terms. “Last season, there were several huge competitions
where we were at the top, or near the top, with our tech- nical score [TES],” Coughlin, 26, said. “To finish at the top overall, we need to make sure our components’ score [PCS] matches that, so we’ve been attacking it aggressive- ly.”
“We competed with the top teams technically at
Worlds,” Denney, 19, said. “What held us back were our components. We’re really trying to improve, and I think we are.”
IN SEARCH OF COMPONENTS Denney, Coughlin and Sappenfield heard the
judges’ message loud and clear: You’re great technical skat- ers. Now show us what else you’ve got. “After World Team Trophy [in April], we had a
meeting with Dalilah and said, ‘Tis is what we did well our first season together — where do we need to grow?’” Coughlin said. “I think we both feel music very well in- side; now, it’s making sure our movements communicate what we are feeling.”
22 NOVEMBER 2012 Tey had conquered side-by-side triple toe loops,
developed risky and exciting lifts and perfected a raf- ter-soaring triple twist. But “components” — those hard-to-define combinations of performance quality and skating skill, or what was called under the 6.0 system “the second mark” — were a bit more elusive. Enter Johnson, who as a youngster trained with
modern dance pioneer Martha Graham and studied at Te Juilliard School before performing in dance com- panies in New York and Munich and, later, earning a master’s degree in dance from Temple University. “Caydee and John have incredible potential,”
Johnson said. “It’s a matter of putting it all togeth- er, of them knowing and really identifying who they want to be on the ice.” Johnson’s list of pupils reads like a Who’s Who of U.S. skating: Meryl Davis and Charlie White, Jer- emy Abbott, Ryan Bradley and Maia Shibutani and Alex Shibutani, to name just a few. In April 2012, she became the primary coach of Canada’s two-time World champion Patrick Chan. Johnson teaches her classes the language of
movement: how to gain control over the cen- ter of their bodies and move from their cores, which frees their upper bodies to be more ex- pressive, with greater ease and flow. “Te skating vocabulary is fairly limit-
ed. You have your elements, and everyone, especially under IJS [international judging system] rules, is pretty much doing the same thing,” she said. “John and Caydee are work- ing on the in-betweens. Tey are very good at the elements, but it’s also what they do into, and out of, their elements. Working on those nuances is difficult, what with the big lifts and twists pairs have to do. “Tere aren’t a million things to think
about; it’s two or three very specific things. If you don’t give your mind the right things to focus on, it’s going to start going in all different directions
U.S. FIGURE SKATING PHOTO
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