Local figure skater captures regional championship

At the age of 10, Maya Carter of Lynchburg demonstrated an uncanny ability to overcome adversity this past weekend.

Competing in the pre-juvenile division, Carter captured her second U.S. Figure Skating South Atlantic Regional competition in three years, Sunday at the Cabin John Ice Rink in Rockville, Md.

“It was by far her best skate the entire season,” Maya’s mother Lynn Carter said. “It was flawless.”

Maya’s performance came just three weeks after she pulled the quadriceps muscles in each leg, preventing her from practicing her jumps for a week, and a day after re-injuring a tailbone injury sustained in a fall on the ice three months ago.

“She’s very tenacious and determined,” Carter said. “She slept on an ice pack Saturday night and I was not sure what was going to happen Sunday morning. She loaded up on the Ibuprofen and some Biofreeze, which is like Flexall. It was still hurting pretty bad, but the adrenaline takes over and kicks in.”

Five of the seven judges ranked Carter first out of the 16 finalists, with one placing her second and the other third.

“It was the best skate I’ve ever had in my life,” Maya said. “It was really hard. My mom didn’t think I’d be able to skate, but I did.

“I didn’t think I was going to do that good because of my tailbone (but) my mom just said ‘Go for it’ and I just said ‘OK.’”

She made her mother and coach Serguei Kouznetsov — the 1992 Russian national singles champion who also trains Sammie Veloso of Bedford — proud while entertaining the crowd.

“After my first spin, I heard everybody clapping and they started clapping again about my footwork,” Maya said.

“My mom was crying and my coach was really happy, too, when I came off the ice.”

Though it takes plenty of hard work — as well as time and money, traveling to northern Virginia every other weekend to train with Kouznetsov in Reston when she’s not practicing at Liberty University’s LaHaye Ice Center — Maya said there’s no better feeling than performing a perfect routine.

“It’s a unique and fun sport,” she said. “After you do a program, you can’t stop smiling because you did so good.”

There were 45 skaters in Carter’s division for Saturday’s preliminaries, when she made the final cut despite skating at 8 p.m., a half-hour before her normal bedtime.

“She was winding down more than getting ready to skate,” Lynn Carter said. “She was tired and hurt, but I told her ‘These girls aren’t going to give you anything. You have to decide how much you want this.’”

With Sunday’s triumph in the season-ending competition, Carter finished undefeated, winning four other events — the May Day Open in Laurel, Md., the Chesapeake Open near Baltimore in June, the Liberty Open near Philadelphia in July and the Dogwood Open in Raleigh, N.C., in August.

“That was my first season I’ve gotten first through the whole year,” Maya said. “I’m very excited.”

She plans to move up to the juvenile class after testing later this month. She will then focus on fine-tuning her double axel, the spin move she first injured her tailbone while attempting.

“It’s going to be really hard,” Maya said. “If I want to get better, I have to keep training and training.”

That will mean even more expenses for Lynn, a single-parent working mom.

“It’s about a $25,000-a-year sport with the entry fees and the coaching and the ice time and the travel expenses and the hotels,” she said, noting Maya’s skates alone cost about $1,000. “I don’t look back at my bills to see how much I’ve spent.”

Fortunately, she no longer has to pay to stay in hotels when she takes Maya to Reston to train.

“My cousin, Frank Franz, and his wife bought a house in Fairfax in October and invited us to stay with them on weekends,” Lynn said.

“If it were not for them, I don’t know if she’d still be skating.”

Through the rink in Reston, Maya has received a $1,000 grant each of the past two years from the J.D. Lash Memorial Foundation, set up in name of a hockey coach who died in 2003.