Spencer skates (part 1)

I can only remember Spencer being on ice skates twice prior to 2021.

He attended a friend’s birthday party at a local rink when he was very young. Christine and I also took him out on the ice at Bryant Park once during a trip to New York City.

While Spencer was extraordinarily athletic and coordinated, he was totally uninterested in traditional sports. He would instead find his own ways to demonstrate his abilities, often in ways that spawned additional gray hairs on my head.

He eventually found some structured outlets for these impulses, such as indoor rock climbing, parkour, and aerial silks. But it wasn’t until the age of 13 that he discovered figure skating.

This probably still seems very young to the casual observer. But in the world of figure skating, it’s really not. Elite-level skating usually requires an early start—as young as a few years old. Figure skaters often reach their peak in their late teens. To put this in context, Alysa Liu, the recently crowned world champion in women’s singles, had already become U.S. champion at age 13.

The most famous "late starter" to achieve Olympic success, Johnny Weir, began skating at age 12. And that was a rarity.

Spencer began following international skating events in 2021, finding particular inspiration from people who looked like him, like Nathan Chen, Vincent Zhou, and Junhwan Cha.

COVID-19 was still affecting daily life at this time, so recreational skating options were limited. But when the outdoor skating rink in downtown Providence, R.I., opened for the season, Spencer began badgering Christine and me to take him at every possible opportunity.

On one of these occasions, Spencer discovered that the rink would be closing early due to a holiday tree lighting event that would include a skating showcase.

Spencer was more disappointed that his skating would be cut short than he was excited about the event, but he and Christine decided to stay and watch.

While the event featured former Olympians Nancy Kerrigan and Gracie Gold, Spencer was just as captivated by the younger skaters who performed in the show—a number of whom would later become friends.

Spencer was particularly inspired by a skater the same age as him named Patrick Blackwell, who performed a solo in the show. We later learned that Patrick’s mother, Annette, was a coach and had first put Patrick on the ice at age 2. So, even at 13, he was quite advanced.

In the weeks following the event, Spencer watched Patrick’s performance over and over on YouTube.

Seeing someone his age performing at this level shifted Spencer’s interest in figure skating into a new gear. Rental skates on public ice were no longer going to cut it, and he scoured the internet and made phone calls to figure out where “real figure skates” could be purchased. I also enrolled him in a local Learn to Skate USA program at Providence College hosted by the Pawtucket and Providence Figure Skating Club.

He began his Learn to Skate program on January 23, 2022, and with the smallest bit of instruction was able to accomplish all of the basic skills with ease. In Learn to Skate USA, skaters earn “badges” as they master basic skills. It often takes a series of sessions over a month or two to earn a single badge. At the end of Spencer’s first round of Learn to Skate sessions, they handed him a stack of badges and told him to go find a private coach.

Our search for a coach led us to a different club, Warwick Figure Skaters, where we connected with coach Kristine Wilkinson. We scheduled his first private lesson for the evening of April 7, 2022.

When Spencer and I walked into the rink in Warwick, R.I., for his first private lesson, we both immediately saw a familiar face. Patrick Blackwell was practicing on his own while his mom was coaching.

Patrick was wearing a U.S. Figure Skating jacket with the words “National Development Team” on the back. Spencer had no idea what that was.

But he knew he wanted that jacket.

Over the several years following that day, Spencer and Patrick grew to become close friends. Patrick has since traded in his National Development Team jacket for the real deal: a Team USA jacket. He represented the U.S. at multiple Junior Grand Prix events in 2024, earning a silver medal at JGP Czech Republic and one of two U.S. men’s placements at the ISU World Junior Championships in Hungary—held just one month after the crash of Flight 5342.

A common thread with Patrick and Spencer was that they were both prolific jumpers to whom the more artistic aspects of figure skating came less naturally. Spencer was excited to focus on this aspect of his skating in 2025 and had already begun working with one of this coaches, Anne Goldberg-Baldwin, on choreography before he left for Wichita.

Last Saturday, Warwick Figure Skaters held its annual skating show. As a guest soloist, Patrick performed a tribute to Spencer and Christine. Patrick and Annette consulted with Anne about Spencer’s music selections and early choreography work and collaborated with Adam Blake, who choreographed Spencer’s 2024 free skate program, to create this lovely embodiment of where Spencer was headed.