2014 Golf Memorial Classic Time for fun at the 2011 Dallas Conference
Carol Rossignol –
Retiring After 20 Years of Service to PSA By Kent McDill
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pparently, “retirement” has a different meaning for Canadians. Carol Rossignol announced her retirement from the Professional Skaters Association staff this summer. She left her post as Senior Director of Education and AccreditationEmeritus and immediately moved into her retirement phase, which includes continuing her coaching duties at Rochester Figure Skating Club in Rochester, Minnesota. “It doesn’t feel like I have retired,” Rossignol said. “I have retired from my position at PSA, so in a sense I am only semi-retired as I am still coaching at the Rochester FSC. I am mostly coaching L2S classes with a few private lessons for now. “Retirement means I no longer have deadlines to meet, meetings to attend, reports to submit, telephone/emails to respond to, and educational courses, seminars, and events to develop and deliver,” she said. “But I will miss
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seeing all of the coaches and interacting with them.” Her initial role with the PSA was as ratings coordinator, “then the person who was doing education left, and I was then doing both ratings and education,” she said. She served as Director of Education and Accreditation for the PSA from 2000-2014, became Senior Director of Education and Accreditation from 2014 to 2019, then got bumped up to Senior Director of Education and AccreditationEmeritus in 2019. Considering her long tenure within the PSA, one might expect her to point to some of the differences that have taken place outside of the changes in communication procedures thanks to modern technology. But she does not believe there has been much of an alteration in the mission of the organization. “I think it has changed every time there is a different president, who has different goals of what they feel their mandate is,” she said. “I have worked under many different presidents and two executive directors. “But the mission statement has always stayed the same,” she said. “Education is the mission. I think that is the one thing that is constant.” Along the way, she was presented with the Shulman Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2008, followed by the F. Ritter Shumway award in 2021 for her “unending dedication and significant contribution to the world of figure skating”. She remembers the PSA Conference in 2008 when she received the Lifetime Achievement award, mainly because she was quite busy when it was announced. “I was sitting in the back of the conference room, still eating my lunch, and I remember Gerry Lane looking over at me and I wondered why he was looking my way, and the next thing I know they were announcing the award,” she said with a laugh. “That was a shock.”
The U.S.-Canada relationship Rossignol is originally from Canada and was born in Newdale, Manitoba, Canada. Rossignol has a very fond memory of all of the PSA Conferences she has attended, including the joint conferences that were held between Skate Canada and the PSA. “I first got involved with the PSA in 1985 when I came down for one of their conferences in Las Vegas,” Rossignol
