'Always remember why I do this'
If there's a lesson that Katherine Medland Spence took home during a breakout season, it's to embrace the joy the sport she loves brings to her.
There’s a certain amount of joy that Katherine Medland Spence no doubt sees when she gazes upon the youngsters she teaches at her home Nepean Skating Club in Ottawa, or the Richmond Training Centre north of Toronto, which has become her frozen reservoir of hope and rebirth on the ice.
Some of those aspiring skaters are as young as six years old, still very carefree about their time on the ice and the lessons directed their way by the young woman they think of as “Coach Katherine.” And perhaps, it might be said, a little bit of that wonder has rubbed off on their mentor, who admits she still hasn’t entirely come to grips with the magic that came into her own personal skating world in the past eight months.
Gold medal in her international debut at Warsaw Cup, first-ever medal at the Canadian national championships (bronze) in Laval, Que., which propelled her to a major opportunity at the Four Continents Championships … yeah, it’s still all very surreal to her, she admits.
“I still look back and I go through pictures, or I look at my skates (on video), and I go, whoa, okay … but it still hasn’t really sunk in. And every once in a while I go, ‘Oh, that happened, right?’” the 24-year-old says. “For me, the biggest part of last season was just getting my joy back, enjoying training again, and that was my focus. And so it was so great to have all this extra on top of it, but because that wasn’t the focus and wasn’t what we were aiming for; it just hasn’t really sunk in yet.
“Eventually, I would say it will, but probably not anytime soon.”
All of the above was the most delicious part of a renaissance season for Medland Spence, whose rise from an injury plagued 2023-24 season to a podium spot in Laval was one of the better stories authored by a Canadian skater in the recently completed campaign. It was largely the result of a plan that coaches Ken and Danielle Rose presented to her when she first moved her full-time training base to RTC in the early months of 2024, and she is steadfast in sticking to it resolutely.
(an aside: after she’d mentioned it on several occasions in Laval, she quipped “I’m sounding like a broken record, right?” But given the sweet music it produced for her, you can see her attraction to it).
In other words, expect more the same mindset from Medland Spence and her team in the coming season, but it’s a plan that’ll evolve along the way.
“We’re keeping the basis of it, but we are definitely tweaking it. And we learned last year that tweaking it as we go is the best way to do it,” she explained. “Just kind of listening to me and what I need and what we need to be doing in terms of competitions. If things like plans change or anything like that, we always have to be ready to roll with things. And so kind of keeping that same mentality going, but with the same kind of general base plan.”
One other touch of familiarity will come with her long program. She is keeping the one she used last season, which is skated to Cody Fry’s “Photograph/Clair de Lune.” It’s a program that Medland Spence believes still has a lot of room for further growth, and that’s something she aims to explore in the new season, primarily on the components side of things.
“I think there’s a lot (of room to grow), especially in terms of the performance side. This past year, our goal was to get the technical content done and out there in competition, and we succeeded at that,” she said. “There’s obviously still room for improvement on that side as well, but we’re really focusing on the performance side of it and connecting a little bit more.
“And it’s not that the entire program is staying exactly the same. We will be making some changes to it, but yeah, there’s definitely room for improvement, and also just room for more improvement and consistency.”
Yet to be finalized are any kind of technical leaps Medland Spence and her camp might want to add. Last year’s rendition of the program included seven triple jumps, but the question is whether that collection will be upgraded.
“We’re looking at that right now. We’re just trying to sort that out and figure out what is the best option for me to get stuff done. We haven’t fully decided yet,” said Medland Spence. “I think we could have a Plan A and a Plan B right now, but we just want to kind of get things up and running to start with, and then see how it goes from there.”
After spending the past two seasons skating a short program that truly resonated with the country music fan inside her — it prominently featured a Louie Ashley version of the John Denver classic “Take Me Home, Country Roads” — it’s now time for Medland Spence to break out something different in that area. The new short is very early in its building stages, so she prefers to keep all of it under wraps for now (which, let’s face it, most skaters do at this time of the year. But it never hurts to ask about it, right?).
While Warsaw Cup (a gold medal in her international debut) and nationals were the obvious highlights of the season, Medland Spence can look at Four Continents — where her scores took a significant dip and she wound up 14th against a much higher calibre of competition — as perhaps the most valuable experience of the entire campaign, even if the end result wasn’t as good.
From the 10-hour plus flight across the Pacific Ocean to South Korea and the chance to skate alongside some of the planet’s top women’s skaters, many lessons were learned and filed away for future use down the road.
“Overall, it was great experience. My skates obviously weren’t entirely what we were hoping for, but I mean being not 100 per cent for the long program dealing with the stomach bug (a virus that ripped through many Canadian team members in Seoul), I did as best as I could for the situation,” she said. “I’m super happy I was able to do that and continue to trust my training and just in general, the experience of going out there, and having the practices, having the day in between the short and long program … it was the first time I've ever experienced that. So such a great learning experience.
“That just kind of goes along with focusing on the process and taking things away and seeing what I can learn and not just what the outcome is.”
The skating fan inside her also enjoyed the opportunity to share the ice with two of the eventual medalists from the World Championships in Boston, Alysa Liu of the United States (gold) and China’s Mone Chiba (bronze). Although in not exactly a foreshadowing of what was to come about a month later, neither landed on the podium in Seoul.
“It was really great to experience that, because I've seen skaters at that level for years. I’m a skating fan, so obviously I watched these skaters, and I know Wakaba (Higuchi) and all of the Japanese skaters were there, and then the American skaters as well,” said Medland Spence. “And just to see them and to be on that level with them, and at the same competition with them was really eye opening. Like, oh, okay, maybe I do deserve to be here.
“Again, I never really thought about Four Continents — it wasn’t something we were aiming for in the year. So to have gotten it, it was like, ‘oh, wow. Okay, let’s try to get as much as I can from this experience.’ It was just a very, very cool and just great experience to be able to take things in as a skater, but also as a skating fan.”
And yeah, there were a lot of lessons to take back home across the ocean, although perhaps none bigger than this one.
“To always just remember why I do this, and it’s because I love it. All my practices were enjoyable. It was fun. Like, practices were great. They were fun (there’s that joy again). We kept things light,” said Medland Spence. “And I think that was the best part of it; I get the opportunity to go across the world to Korea to compete, and I might as well enjoy it as much as I can and just really focus on staying present and not getting too caught up with everything going on around me.”
It might be suggested (and we did) that this particular experience, and everything golden that went on in Warsaw, has fuelled Medland Spence’s desire to keep throwing on that Canadian jacket internationally even more times in the season ahead. But she prefers to take all of that in a different way, one that dovetails into the attitude that has carried her into this position.
“It just feels my desire to keep going with my training again. I can’t control whether I get international opportunities or where I get assigned, so it’s kind of like, I just want to keep going and pushing to see what I can do and what I can accomplish,” she said. “And Korea, it wasn’t like Poland; that was two basically clean skates, and then Korea wasn’t that, but it was a different kind of circumstances. And again, I still took a ton away from that competition, and I was super satisfied.
“So I think it’s just kind of taking the lessons I’ve learned from these internationals and just taking it forward with me to any competition I go to, whether that’s a Skate Ontario competition, whether that’s a Skate Canada competition, or whether that’s an international.”
Though it won’t be officially announced until early July, Medland Spence’s third-place finish in Laval will land her a spot on Skate Canada’s national team for the 2025-26 season. And with that comes opportunities. The national team camp at the end of the summer in Mississauga, Ont., for starters, with international assignments likely to follow on the Challenger Series, at the very least (Warsaw is one of those).
Our conversation didn’t touch on this, but Medland Spence might even get to make her Grand Prix Series debut this fall. Skate Canada has three women’s spots to fill for its international event in late October in Saskatoon, Sask., and one would think Medland Spence’s bronze medal in Laval puts her in consideration for one of those berths. We’ll know soon enough.
Regardless of what happens there, she knows (as does Skate Canada) the importance of getting out to compete in the summer. At the very least, she plans to enter one of the Skate Ontario summer sectional competitions.
It’s especially vital, with a new short program to get in front of a judging panel, along with a refined free program, that can benefit from an early look.
“That’s the thing, just to get it out there. You want to get the new short out and then get the long up and running again, and get some feedback early in the season,” she said. “So if I do get assigned to something, or even if I don’t, we just have that feedback early, before we head into the next training block.”
Like most every senior women’s skater across the country, Medland Spence watched Boston Worlds with a certain level of interest. Maddie Schizas was skating for all of them in a way at TD Garden, where a top-10 finish would have opened up the possibility of two Canadian women having the chance to skate at the 2026 Milan-Cortina Olympics. But alas, Schizas fell one spot short of that in 11th and it will be only one of them headed to Italy in February.
But Medland Spence, like the coach she also is, had a different perspective as she watched the goings-on in Boston.
“(A top 10 finish) was definitely in the back of my mind. But for me, I was hoping for Maddie to go out there and have a good skate for herself. And I was really hoping she didn’t feel like additional pressure of having to get (in the top 10), so much pressure to get that second spot,” she said. “Because for me, we’re progressing with the new season the same way if (Canada) had one spot or if we had two spots.
“You’re not guaranteed anything in the sport ever, and you very much have to put the work in. And so for me, I’m just doing that. I’m putting the work in and just seeing what I can achieve.”
The fact that her name might be mentioned in the same conversation as the words “Olympics” and “Worlds” … hey, that’s something else she might need a little bit more time to accept as normal.
“It’s very surreal. I kind of laugh. People will tell me things and we’ll have conversations or people will know my name, and I kind of think, how do you know who I am?” she said. “And then I remember this past year, and I go … oh, right. So it’s definitely surreal and I’m not sure I’ll ever get used to it, but it’s just something you learn to adapt to and kind of go with.”
What keeps her grounded, though, is “the process” … you know, that “broken record” we talked about earlier. In her mind, it’s also a way to accept the biggest reality of the sport, as cliche as it might sound.
“That’s not for me to think about, winning in competitions or anything like that,” she said when asked about whether she dreams of striking gold at 2026 nationals, which will be held across the river from her hometown, at the Slush Puppie Centre in Gatineau, Que. “It’s hard because your fate is partially decided by the judging panel. So I can go out there and do the best I can, and for me, that’s what I focus on, because that’s what I can control, and I can’t control where the judges put me or how other people skate. I focus on what I can do and improving myself and what I can learn from competitions.
“I think that is such important messaging for all skaters, not just high level skaters, but for any level. It’s a super important, very healthy way to do sport, especially in a sport like this.”
It’s surely a message that she shares with her young students, in both Nepean and at RTC, who also bring her joy and also the opportunity to share her love for the sport of figure skating itself.
“For me, it’s a way to give back to the sport, because I’ve gotten so much from the sport, and I’ve learned so much, especially from Ken and Danielle, and to be able to pour that back into the sport is amazing,” she explains. “And it’s just another side of the sport that I love. There’s the skating side that, yes, it’s me doing it, but the coaching side and being able to be there for skaters and support skaters from that side, it’s really amazing and fulfilling.
“My Nepean kids, because I’ve known them for so long, they’re just amazing. And they don’t see me as Katherine Medland Spence, national bronze medalist. They see me as Coach Katherine. And for me, that’s great. It definitely keeps you humble. I can just be Coach Katherine, and it’s not about me, it’s about them. And I really like that kind of dynamic, being able to flip between being an athlete, where it has to be about me, but then as a coach, where I’m there for the athlete and it's about them.”
Grand Prix picture almost set
With the announcement this week by U.S. Figure Skating that Skate America will be held in the Olympic town of Lake Placid, New York (one of my favourite places on earth), the 2025 Grand Prix of Figure Skating picture is pretty much set. Only Cup of China is without a confirmed locale.
You’ll also notice that the order of events has been shifted somewhat drastically and that the Series this fall gets started a week sooner, as will a lot of things this season with the Winter Olympics looming in early February.
Here’s the slate as it now stands:
Oct. 17-19: Grand Prix de France, Angers
Oct. 24-26: Cup of China, TBA
Oct. 31-Nov. 2: Skate Canada International, Saskatoon, Sask.
Nov. 7-9: NHK Trophy, Osaka, Japan
Nov. 14-16: Skate America, Lake Placid, N.Y.
Nov. 21-23: Finlandia Trophy, Helsinki
Dec. 4-7: Grand Prix Final, Nagoya, Japan
Given the accelerated pace of this season, expect the International Skating Union to release the assignments for these events in late May or early June.
Challenger Series schedule
Earlier this week, the ISU unveiled the full schedule for the 2025 Challenger series. It gets its usual summer start at Cranberry Cup in Norwood, Mass., with the Golden Spin of Zagreb wrapping it all up in December in Croatia.
Here’s the full schedule. Clip and save as you wish:
Aug. 7-10: Cranberry Cup, Norwood, Mass.
Sept. 2-3: John Nicks Pairs Challenge, New York City
Sept. 5-7: Kinoshita Group Cup, Osaka, Japan
Sept. 11-14: Lombardia Trophy, Bergamo, Italy
Sept. 25-27: Nebelhorn Trophy, Oberstdorf, Germany
Sept. 25-27: Nepela Memorial, Bratislava, Slovakia
Oct. 1-4: Denis Ten Memorial, Astana, Kazakhstan
Oct. 8-11: Trialeti Trophy, Tbilisi, Georgia
Nov. 19-23: Warsaw Cup, Warsaw, Poland
Nov. 24-30: Tallinn Trophy, Tallinn, Estonia
Dec. 3-6: Golden Spin of Zagreb, Croatia
(competitions in bold include pair skating events)