Remembering Kathy Casey

By Terri Milner Tarquini

“I love what I do. It’s a great job and I consider myself fortunate.” ~ Kathy Casey

Kathy Casey was 12 years old when she first stepped on the ice and she knew one thing: One day, she wanted to coach. In the ensuing decades, she built a reputation on toughness and technique, a career built on providing information and support to countless athletes and coaches, and friendships built on love and loyalty.

And a legacy built on all the above.

“I loved Kathy very, very much,” said Frank Carroll, Olympic Coach of the Year and inductee in the U.S. Figure Skating Hall of Fame, PSA Coaches Hall of Fame, and World Figure Skating Hall of Fame. “She was a strict disciplinarian and she didn’t take any guff from anyone, which sometimes got her in a little trouble, but it also earned her quite a fan base. So many people admired and loved her.”

Casey, who died on September 16, 2019, was a true giant in the sport of figure skating…and as unpretentious as they come.

“When someone is great, they don’t ponder their own significance,” Carroll said. “They just keep going and keep contributing day after day and they keep doing their job. She contributed so much to our sport; she was so respected and so loved.”

Kathy with Robert Keyes in Great Falls, MT in 1961

From 1962, when she became the assistant coach at the Lakewood Winter Club in Tacoma, Washington, through 1990, when she accepted the position as Director of Skating for the Broadmoor Skating Club in Colorado Springs, Colorado, she gave tirelessly to the world of skating.

“She was such an inspiration to her students, as well as other coaches,” said Janet Champion, inductee of the PSA Coaches Hall of Fame. “Her knowledge and giving to all areas of the sport was unending. Skating was her life and she loved it.”

“Jumps are not easy, but they’re not as hard as they sometimes might look either.” ~ Kathy Casey

Champion met Casey in the early 1970s when they would run into each other at competitions and, along the way, a lifelong friendship took hold. Casey was who eventually suggested Champion to Carlo Fassi when he was looking for an assistant coach in Colorado Springs.

“She became my very best friend,” Champion said. “And if you were her friend, you knew what it was like to have a real friend. She always stuck up for you and she was just the most fun.”

A smile always at the ready, Casey had a nickname that was not very well-known.

Circa 1993

PHOTO BY PAUL HARVATH

“When she was coaching in Washington, she was known as ‘The Countess of Tacoma,’” Carroll said. “Only her dear friends knew she was called that.”

Casey, Carroll and Champion go way back to when they were all making their bones.

“Kathy, Janet and I would all meet at Pacific Coast when we were all very new coaches—before any of us had champions or any recognition,” Carroll said. “We would get together every year at a very raucous party thrown by John Nicks and the Ice Capades organization and were frequently asked to leave the restaurants we were at; we had roasts of each other and the other patrons didn’t understand our sense of humor. We were all very ambitious, young coaches. We were trying to beat each other, but we always supported each other and we just really enjoyed each other’s company. Those were fun, loving, competitive times.”

Casey’s career first caught fire when she coached 14-year-old Jill Sawyer to the gold medal at the 1978 World Junior Championships.

“Jill Sawyer was doing the triple Lutz before it was a thing that lady figure skaters were doing,” Champion said. “Kathy believed in always increasing her knowledge and information so she could keep her students and the sport moving forward.”

2002 Dallas PSA Conference

“I could talk for hours about Kathy,” said Scott Davis, Olympian and two-time U.S. national champion. “I have so many memories and stories. She had such a high impact on so many lives. The way she spoke—you could feel her passion. She was high-energy and it was infectious and motivating.”

Davis grew up in Great Falls, Montana, the same town as Casey, where he took lessons from her sister, Myrna. At age 12, he went to Tacoma for one of Casey’s skating camps, eventually moving there and then following her to Colorado Springs and the Broadmoor World Arena.

“Lessons with Kathy were intense,” Scott Davis said. “It was 20 minutes of non-stop information and ‘Do it again.’ She was always on the ice, never at the boards. We spent so much time looking at jump take-offs. We always said that we kind of learned together.”

2007 Los Angeles PSA Conference

A wildly popular Casey presentation at seminars and the PSA Conference was her “drawing” classes, in which she meticulously broke down what each jump takeoff should look like when looking at the tracings on the ice.

“She explained how you can tell what went wrong by looking at the print on the ice,” Champion said. “As far as I know, she was the first person to really do that.”

She also believed in breaking jumps down, paying meticulous attention to each movement of the body and how it affected the jump.

“You have to have the right mindset and technique and, from that, almost anything is possible.” ~ Kathy Casey

“I recall the very first lesson I ever had with her at the Broadmoor World Arena,” said Damon Allen, World Junior bronze medalist. “I had that ‘aha’ moment and, even though she laughed at how terrible my toe and loop techniques were, I totally understood the technique we worked on that I would use for years to come with my own skating, as well as with my students. Of course, that first lesson ended up leading to countless stand-still double toes and double loops.”

Casey felt it was imperative for the skaters to have a solid understanding of the jump itself, strong foundational skills, a dedicated work ethic, and mental and physical toughness—all of which she showcased herself.

“She was the consummate coach,” Champion said. “She researched and studied and she had such a way of getting the message across. The motivational speech she gave at so many events – she worked so hard on it and it was so good and so passionate.”

“Kathy’s smile and energy were infectious,” Damon said. “At the beginning of every session, we would put on our favorite jams and Kathy would always be out there rapping her toe picks to the beat.”

2002 Dallas PSA Conference

Casey had a captivating personality, mixed with a penchant for not mincing words.

“She had a load of one-liners that I tend to use on a regular basis,” Damon said. “Though they were slightly cutting, they got—and still get—the point across.”

Casey’s penchant for telling-it-like-it-is was well-known.

“Kathy had a competitive personality and she had that intensity and focus to help make us the best we could be,” Davis said. “We could not be late and, back when we had figures, we had to have our layout papers at every lesson. We’d be on clean ice and she’d be the judge. She wrote, ‘Huge, untraced, wobbly mess. You are 15 th out of 12.’ I’d think. ‘How can I be 15 th out of 12?” Davis laughed.

And what happened when students, as they sometimes are wont to do, don’t listen to their coach?

“I was about 16 when Kathy decided I needed to take some jazz dance classes to bring out more expression,” Davis said. “I was so embarrassed and just hid in the back of the room. Finally, I just decided I wasn’t going to go and I would just drive around in my car for an hour while I was supposed to be there. And it worked, until Kathy called the dance studio to see how I was doing and they told her I hadn’t been there in months.”

That didn’t go over well, according to Davis.

“She pulled me into her office and said, unless I shaped up, I was going to be sent back to Great Falls,” said Davis, a director and coach in Calgary. “You always knew where you stood with Kathy and what her expectations were and I didn’t doubt for a second I was going to be sent home if I didn’t get it together.”

Call it bluntness, sometimes with a dose of humor.

2018 EDI Awards Dinner

“We had entirely different coaching styles—I get very excited and she was much more direct,” Champion said. “I was coaching a little girl at the Broadmoor and she cried during every lesson she had with me—and I didn’t do a thing to make her cry! Her mother, who really wanted to be taking lessons with Kathy anyway, went in to complain to her that I was making her daughter cry. Kathy just said, ‘If she cries in Janet’s lessons, I can’t imagine what she’d do in my lessons.’”

Casey’s resume is a testament to all she gave to the sport: the 2005 U.S. Olympic Committee Sports Science Coach of the Year and a World and Olympic coach to skaters including Scott Davis, Rosalynn Sumners, Nicole Bobek, Scott Hamilton, and Rachael Flatt.

“I’m truly grateful that when the World Arena Ice Hall was built, Kathy steered a group of us to start teaching learn to skate,” said Allen, a coach and choreographer in Colorado Springs. “I started skating with the LTS program, so it only seemed fitting that I would give back and share my love of the sport with new young skaters. I am very grateful for how Kathy made us really learn how to coach and how to organize a lesson. We weren’t allowed to teach higher than preliminary until we had skaters that passed that level. Then we could coach the next level, and so on. We couldn’t just jump in and coach anyone we wanted; we had to learn the ropes, so to speak. It has formed me into the coach I am today and I am forever grateful.”

Presidents of the PSA 1967-1996

President of the PSA from 1989-1994, the association awarded her with the following honors: 1999 Honorary Member and Lifetime Achievement Award, PSA Hall of Fame class of 2008, the 2009 Sonja Henie Award, and the 2018 F. Ritter Shumway Award.

“This is a tough sport and we need to provide the athletes and the coaches with as much support and information as possible.” ~ Kathy Casey

“When she won the Sonja Henie Award, she accepted it in a full Sonja Henie skating outfit,” Champion laughed. “We were rooming together and, when she told me, I couldn’t believe it. I said, ‘You’re going to wear that short skirt?’ And she said, ‘What’s wrong with my legs?’ She did it and the crowd went wild.”

Through the years, she traveled far and wide with her "Kathy Casey seminars" to Canada, Sweden, Great Britain, Norway, Scotland, Switzerland, Australia, and all over the U.S. She also gave presentations for the International Skating Union and conducted developmental skating camps in Finland, Slovenia, and China.

“Kathy instilled in me a sense of adventure when traveling around the world to international competitions,” Allen said. “We would always rent a car for a day or just venture out in the cities that we traveled to. She would always say, ‘What’s the point in just sitting around the hotel when you could see the world instead?’”

In 2014, Casey was part of what Carroll believes was her last large-scale presentation at the PSA Conference in Palm Springs.

“I was asked to do an on-ice presentation and they told me I could do anything I wanted—so I told Kathy we were going to do it together,” Carroll said. “It was at the beginning of her not doing well and she was not very confident. I said, ‘Kathy, you and I have done so many presentations all over the place and they told me I can do anything I want and this is what I want to do and I want to do it with you.’” “On the ice, she took one of my students, worked with him for 20 minutes and got his triple Lutz on an outside edge,” Carroll continued. “She was absolutely brilliant. Everything she said was without hesitation and she was so knowledgeable and she presented so well. Afterward she was so proud of herself.”

Well-known for her colorful clothing style, Casey had recently become something of an internet sensation. While working as U.S. Figure Skating’s Director of Athlete Performance, Enhancement and Tracking, the organization started posting to Twitter her crazy skating- and holiday-themed sweaters she was wearing every day of December.

“We were at Nationals that year and we were on the escalator together,” Champion said. “As we got off, there was a little girl at the bottom that said, ‘There’s the sweater lady!’ Kathy laughed and laughed at that one.”

“She didn’t think about her legacy; she was just doing what she did,” Champion said. “She tried to help everyone and she definitely inspired anyone lucky enough to come in contact with her.”

In a sport where the life lessons stretch out into almost all areas of a skater’s life, Casey’s message lives on in ways more far-reaching than the confines of an ice arena.

Kathy on the ice with Frank Carroll

Courtesy Frank Carroll

“I traveled with Kathy to the wine country in Bordeaux; we saw everything in Paris in two days—and I mean everything—she was on a mission; to the Bavarian alps and Neuschwanstein Castle,” Allen said. “Well, we only made it to the front door of the castle because we didn’t leave quite enough time. So this Sunday I am taking my husband, my student and her mother to go all the way through the castle because Kathy would have wanted me to!”

For sure, a light in figure skating’s rich history has dimmed. Kathy was truly a coaching legend and her passing is a profound loss to the coaching community. 1987 Hawaii PSA Conference 2014 Palm Springs PSA Conference