Turns out Coach Pam showed up to my competition in Virginia drunk. I didn’t understand this at the time, but my parents have explained it now. We quit my coach before finding a new one, and Coach Pam was so angry she got in a fistfight with someone at the rink. I told my mom I had no desire to go back to that rink. We were homeless, and with no coach, I would be forced to quit. The next week, we were on a flight to the Olympic Training Center in Colorado. I got a spot with the head coach at the rink and tried out. He told me things I had never heard before, and I desperately tried them all at once… which only made things worse. He told my parents I should quit skating because Coach Pam had ruined all my jumps. That problem earlier was my left side, and the more it continued to drift, the more I under-rotated. In non-skating terms, he told us I was completely ruined and might as well quit then unless I wanted to try something different like pairs. That would require us completely relocating to find a partner, though. I trained at the Olympic Training Center with the other coaches for a week before we flew back home, defeated. That’s when we got a call from Coach Debby… the silent one that sat in the back corner.