Skater Stories: Annika Swalley
Meet a talented skater from Boston University who is creating art on and off the ice.
Sometimes you come across a skating program, whether it’s a competitive program, a show program, or just an exhibition skate, and you know instantly that it’s one you’ll rewatch over and over again. That was the case for me with a video posted earlier this year by Annika Swalley. So when she agreed to talk to me about her skating journey, and that program specifically, I was thrilled. And I hope you’ll find her story and her skating as compelling as I have.
Q: I guess we'll just start all the way at the beginning. When did you start skating and what made you want to do it?
A: I took my first Learn to Skate classes when I was five years old, and I actually was really scared to skate before then. I remember going over to a friend's house and they had an ice rink and I wouldn't get on the ice.
I had no interest. And then I took Learn to Skate when I was five because a friend had like an extra pair of skates and I was like, ‘sure, why not?’ And then I started, I took a break, started again when I was seven and then just didn't stop.
I watched … I forget what year of Olympics. Winter Olympics. I forget which year. But I just like fell in love with it.
I was obsessed with Bradie Tennell and I think it was probably the sparkly dresses and the fact that skaters were using props in a lot of things. I remember being really interested in showcase style skating and wanting to make props and costumes for the programs I was doing. And that was pretty much it.
I started at an FNC rink and did ISI until I was 10 and then started testing at another rink after that.
Q: You said that when you were five, the ice scared you. And to be honest, it scares me. It still scares me. But what's the feeling you get now when you step on the ice?
A: HONESTLY, it just, it's just like the place I need to be. When I skate, it's sort of just like things feel right. It's a place where I can challenge myself and it feels just very natural.
I remember like the first time I realized like, this is like really special to me as I was like 12 years old. I had a rough day at school. And my mom and I always talk about this. I got on the ice one day and I just remember I was by myself and everything just melted away and it was the sound of my blades on the ice.
And I feel like so many skaters can relate to that, the crunching of the ice and feeling the wind on your face. And it just feels very freeing and it's a space where I can really just express myself and move freely and, yeah, I mean, there's always struggles and sometimes I get on the ice and I'm a little anxious because I care about the sport and my performance in it, but at the same time, there's just so much love for it and freedom of expression that I find when I'm away from the ice.
Like, when I'm on vacation, I'm constantly thinking about being on the ice.
Q: You mentioned Bradie Tennell. I'm curious, were there any other skaters who inspired you growing up? Anyone that you tried to sort of model your style after?
A: BRADIE Tennell was the standout, but I think, honestly, just a lot of the skaters at my local rink growing up. We had a few girls who were like the older girls at the rink. And I was I was at a more recreational rink, but even then, I just remember seeing them jump and wanting to emulate that.
When I was 14, I started on Instagram and started seeing a lot more skaters. Alysa Liu was definitely a standout because I was just like in awe of her jumps. Amber Glenn, especially when I was 15, I fell in love with her style of skating, how bold she skated and the fact that she was an openly queer figure skater, and I felt very represented there.
And I just I loved how she skated, her strength. Yeah, those are definitely some. I have some people I definitely really look up to right now as well.
I mean, I'm 19 years old, so still feel like I'm looking up to a lot of skaters and I think a lot of people would like really pretty lines and stuff. Liz Yoshiko Schmidt is more of a contemporary skater, and I adore her lines. Like I'm obsessed.
Q: You're on the Excel track. So could you explain that for people who might not be that familiar with what that is?
A: EXCEL track, it's basically a different division of skating. There's well-balanced and Excel. Well-balanced is typically National Qualifying Series, so that's your track to go to regionals or sectionals and then nationals or National Development Team. Excel is its own division that sort of invites more people in.
In well-balanced, there's more age restrictions, so you wouldn't be able to compete in juvenile as a 19-year-old. You could in Excel, you're able to. So it's a little bit more inclusive for ages in different levels.
I compete junior Excel and I'm not going to be competing against people with triples. Like, it's not allowed. I'm able to compete against people who are in my boat where, you know, we skate after school, through high school. We're not able to do the homeschool route. It's just like a different sort of energy. And these these are still very committed athletes.
We have nationals as well. I've never done the National Excel series. I think I've participated in it once, but I find I mostly use competition as a progress tool nowadays rather than like looking to qualify.
It's just sort of a different facet of figure skating that provides more opportunities for different types of skaters and different ages.
Q: Speaking of competitions, just a couple months ago, you were on top of the podium at the Colonial Open. What did landing that result mean for you?
A: IT was honestly really important to me. Obviously, it's a local competition, so it's nothing crazy in terms of awards, but for me, it was important. I just finished my first year at BU and I wasn't rostered for any competitions. I'm on the competitive team, but I wasn't rostered because there were people who were older than me, who'd been on the team for longer and I've been working really hard and just like feeling kind of stuck, because I've been working really hard on everything and it just wasn't seeing the results outside of my own skating. I wasn't seeing the rosterings, the competition opportunities. So it just felt very affirming to be able to produce a score that I was happy with and to then win.
I mean, that's not what it's about for me, but it's exciting. And I was really happy because I have been doing like a technique override on my double lutz this summer, like actually trying to get my edge clean. And I was able to land it in combination, which was really nice.
It was a nice wrap up to my first year at school, and being able to get those results and hopefully go into the next season where I'll be rostered for collegiate.
Q: You mentioned there that you weren't rostered this year, but you were part of the team and hoping to compete in competitions this year. What is intercollegiate skating like?
A: I honestly love it. Again competition isn't my main focus with skating. So collegiate has provided me with the opportunity to continue skating in college and to keep training.
And I've just found the community to be really incredible. Not that I didn't have friends and stuff in high school and my skating community, but with collegiate I connect with these people so much. We're all all there because we love skating.
We're doing this on our own time, our own money a lot of the time. And just, it's people working for the same stuff. And I think that community has been really beautiful and really good for me.
Boston University is a very competitive school for intercollegiate. So if you're not skating clean or if you have a technical error, you're less likely to be rostered just because that's how that works. But I just found it really amazing.
Q: Now, how do you manage to balance your skating with your schoolwork? Because I know that BU is also a very demanding school.
A: Honestly, I'm not really sure, and I think the way that I schedule myself confuses a lot of people. I try to skate 10 hours a week, and then I try to do, I also do aerial silks. I'm doing synchro this year. I did theater on ice for the past three years. So it's ends up being around like 15 to 20 hours of practice and training a week, doing everything. I've also been doing some like drag performance stuff and getting involved with that.
So that's added and dance training and all that stuff. And then school, I've been doing 18 credits. And honestly, I'm somebody who really needs to be busy. It's hard for me to sit and do nothing. Summer is challenging for me because I'm less structured.
And honestly, it's just a lot of trying to take care of myself, prioritizing eating well, sleeping well, and listening to my body and my needs, which we're working on, we're getting there. We're certainly trying. But yeah, it's just a lot of… I have to do a lot of planning. My planner is my best friend. I make lists pretty obsessively and just sometimes just pushing through the fatigue and getting things done.
Q: I noticed that you're also an artist and a pretty talented one. I was impressed with your work. I'm curious, how does your art inform your skating and how does your skating inform your art?
A: FOR me, it's all intertwined. At my core, I've always been an artist. I'm studying graphic design, and pretty much anytime I'm skating, I'm thinking about the aesthetics. I'm thinking about constantly coming up with programs and thinking of the visual that could go along with it and thinking about how it could work in a show scenario and thinking about the costumes and everything.
And then when it comes to my visual artworks or like my physical artworks, I think movement plays a really big role in how I create. I've always been somebody who likes to work really big and work really loosely with like my brushstrokes and stuff. And I think it's because I create so physically on the ice, that physicality comes into my visual artwork a lot.
So that's why I like really have been enjoying the opportunity to work on murals specifically. It's all very interconnected in my brain. And I’m trying to live the most creative life I can and make my art in both skating and visual arts my full-time job eventually. That's the goal.
Q: That would be incredible. I wanted to ask specifically about the Super Graphic Ultra Modern Girl program, which honestly might have been one of my favorites from any skater at any level last season.
A: THANK you so much. That means a lot.
Q: How did that program come together?
A: I started choreographing it in October. I've only started choreographing this past year. I think that was like the second program I've ever choreographed.
The first one I skated to, my mom's a musician and she has her own rock band and I skated to one of her songs for graduating seniors night at my skating club last season. Then going into school, I was like, I just really want to choreograph this song. I love Chappell Roan. As a lesbian, I was like, ‘I feel so represented here. This is great.’
And I couldn't get the ‘walk that walk’ part out of my head. I was like ‘a step sequence would be so cool to this.’ BU has ice at 7 a.m. and that's where I go and choreograph because nobody's on the ice and I can do my weird stuff and move in weird ways and figure things out. I was moving and grooving on the ice and seeing what happened and I was like, ‘wow, this could be a good audition piece. Like, something's here.’
And then I just developed it over time. I was supposed to skate it in as a solo at the Boston Frog Pond Skating Spectacular first night show. And then I sprained my ankle, but that's all right. It happens. It's just sort of like a passion project.
I try to go to Pro Skaters every year, or at least until I graduate, it will be. Just to get the show opportunities. And it was just a really fun project and I worked with some of my friends. They were like, ‘yeah, you have to lip sync. You can't, no, no, you're lip syncing for this piece. Not an option.’ So yeah, that was sort of the process behind that.
Q: And what was it like being able to film with Jordan Cowan, who I just think just shoots incredible skating videos?
A: OH, my God. Amazing. So that was my second year of Pro Skaters, and it's just amazing to work with. I was the last skater out of like 40 who auditioned and he did not miss a single moment in the program. He got all the angles.
I had worked with him the year prior for Pro Skaters as well. And I'm constantly blown away by his work and he really did find like such a niche and made it everything. And I'm so impressed by that. I'm really impressed by artists and people who find such niche things and they make it like this huge, incredible thing. And I think there's so much room for that in our world and I admire his work so much.
Q: So going forward, what are your personal goals for your skating career?
A: MY main goal, I want to be a show skater. That's always sort of been a dream. I sort of got wrapped, sucked into the competitive world when I moved over to Skating Club of Boston and got like really obsessed with that and totally realized it was not for me. I had to reevaluate my relationship with competitive skating, but I am at heart a show skater, a showgirl.
After college, I'm hoping to do Disney on Ice or Holiday on Ice, basically do all of the big shows. I've been trying to do smaller contracts on my breaks for school, but it's proving very difficult. I was offered a contract with Ice Dreams Mexico and Dallas for winter break, but it like overlapped by a couple days with my finals, and that was very unfortunate.
But yeah, my main goal is to be able to do professional shows and eventually maybe potentially direct my own shows. Or choreograph. I'd love to start integrating live music more into live performances, especially because my parents are musicians. My dad's a sound engineer.
I just think there's so many opportunities to bring in even more artists, and to really make that thrive. Because in a world where visual arts are sort of being commandeered by AI, which is so unfortunate and heartbreaking, I think live performance and live art is going to become even more prevalent and relevant to our lives. It's such an experience and I want to be a part of that.
And yeah, I just want to keep skating. That's the main thing. I think the reason why I so wanted to be a professional in that sense, like with coaching and choreographing and show skating is just, I want to be able to skate and it gets really hard — I'm sure you understand this — to work a job and skate and train and try to make that work, especially with how expensive and inaccessible skating can be financially and so many other regards. It's just a hard sport to be a part of if you're not fully in it.
I just really want skating to be a part of my life for… ever, really. I look at like Anita [Hartshorn] and Frank [Sweiding] with Glacier Ice Productions. They've been skating for like 50 years and they're still doing like bounce spins, and it's like so incredible. And I think it's just really important to stay moving and be a part of those things.
I'd also love to do some work with AIT, American Ice Theater eventually. I submitted to their Quest for Creativity this past year and I plan on doing some work with them in the future, submitting to their contests and stuff. And yeah, just sort of bringing some new perspective to skating. I think that's what I want to do.
And live a life where my art can sort of intertwine and overlap.
Q: Obviously the entire skating world knows that Skating Club of Boston was seriously impacted by the Flight 5342 tragedy. And I'm curious what it was like for you and for everyone at the club in the aftermath of that.
A: IT was definitely a really challenging period. I think anybody who is in the skating community can say it was challenging. I know people who didn't know people who were very affected by it in a lot of ways.
I wasn't particularly close with anybody affected, but I shared the ice with these people. I skated with Jinna [Han] and Spencer [Lane]. We shared Ubers. Jinna always smiled and always welcomed me to the rank. It was very hard to lose those people.
Evgenia [Shishkova] and Vadim [Naumov], like they, they were always there. Like, I remember Evgenia’s little coach squat on the wall. It's the little things, even when you're not close with these people, it's their presence and their energy at the rink that's missing. And that's really hard to grapple with.
Seeing the effect was really hard. I remember the weekend I came back, because I was skating at SCOB on Sundays for TOI and I on the junior team this past season. And I remember walking into the rink and seeing all the flowers and the ‘No Media’ posters, ‘No Photographs’ and just the heaviness. It was an intense feeling and just very overwhelming. I had my parents come with me that day because I was like ‘I… I don't know how to handle this.’
I'm lucky to say before that, I hadn’t experienced grief, and to have it be such a monumental and horrific thing was just a lot to grapple with. I was at school when it happened. I was on the ice at like 7 a.m. working on my American Ice Theatre piece, and I remember seeing the posts and seeing the information slowly come in and not knowing what to do with myself. The families were really obviously affected, like I can't even imagine.
It also sort of reminded me how much people impact other people. And I think in the past I'd struggled with self-worth a lot and it just made me realize how much the absence of people really impacts people. As somebody who's struggled with mental health a lot, it made me realize how much just saying hi to people impacts people and your presence and being there.
Q: And on August 21 you'll be participating in the Always Champions Frozen 5K. What will taking part in that event mean for you?
A: HONESTLY, I'm just really excited that the club is doing something to preserve their memories and to memorialize all the skaters and families lost. Because they were really crucial parts of our community. Currently we've had Jinna and Spencer's chairs that they always sat in blocked off in the hallway at the rink and they have little memorials there, but it'll be really lovely to see something bigger done, something that they can make their mark on. They're not with us now, but their mark will be made. And it has been. And I think something physical to preserve that will be beautiful.
I also think the scholarship aspect and raising money to support other skaters is something they would have all been in support of. Like I said earlier, skating is a really inaccessible sport. And if we can continue to make efforts to make it more accessible, I think that would be wonderful.
It's just really important to me to be a part of that and be a part of the community. Going forward, I'm not sure if I'm keeping my membership at Skating Club of Boston just because I'm in college now and I don't skate there as much, but I still consider that rink home. The people there, even if I'm not as close with everybody because I'm in college now, it's still important for me to be there as part of that community and to be there for the people who have been affected more.
Q: If you're up for it, wanted to do a little quick lightning round here. Favorite move to perform on the ice.
A: My mind immediately goes to any edge elements, like spirals, Ina Bauers, that type of stuff, just because when you're under a spotlight, it's like you get the chills and you have the moment where you're putting everything out there and it's so fun. I love them.
Q: Favorite costume you've worn for a program.
A: Honestly I don't know if I have a favorite. I feel like they're all unique. The one that I'm working on right now might be an upcoming favorite. So I'm going to say my my costume for my upcoming junior long program. But it’ll be a secret for now.
Q: Fair enough. Favorite venue you've skated in.
A: The Ice Chalet, where Pro Skaters is hosted. It's such a unique space. Like, I love the carpets that they put down. They make it a smaller rink to simulate a show skating rink and just the energy there is great. It's such a creative environment.
Q: All-time favorite song you've skated to.
A: Oh, my God. That's such a great question. What have I skated to? I just did a program to “Poker Face” by Lady Gaga, and that was really awesome. Also my junior long last season was Fiona Apple “On the Bound” and “Fast as You Can.”
Now that I'm an adult, I'm picking my own music and choreographing it myself and I'm just having so much fun with the creative freedom of music. So probably “Poker Face” or Fiona Apple.
Q: All-time favorite figure skating movie.
A: Is it bad that I like, haven't seen any? Really? Yeah. I watched part of the TV show “Spinning Out.” Oh, wait, no, I saw “I, Tonya.” Never mind. Favorite only because I haven't seen any others.
Q: You haven't seen “Ice Princess?”
A: No!
Q: Oh, my God. You need to watch “Ice Princess.”
A: I got to get on that.
Q: Especially if you want to skate for Disney on Ice. It's a Disney movie.
A: Oh, no. I'm going to do my homework.
Q: There are six kinds of jumps in figure skating. Loop, toe loop, flip, Salchow, Lutz, and Axel. Which one is your most hated?
A: Lutz. Double Lutz or actually Double Axels? Both of those. I don't know who decided it was a good idea to put it on an outside edge. [Editor’s note, to prove I’ve done my research: that would be Alois Lutz and Axel Paulsen, respectively.]
I don't like it. I hate it. And then Double Axels, I can't do one yet, and I hate it because of that, because it's frustrating me right now.
Q: And last but not least, one piece of advice you would give to anyone starting out in skating.
A: I'd say just do your own thing. I feel like it's so easy to get wrapped up in the ‘shoulds,’ in quotations, ‘the shoulds’ of things. I feel like it's so easy to get wrapped up into ‘oh, I should be competing more. I should be training this much. I should be eating this way and dressing this way.’ And I just think it's so harmful to yourself. The second I stopped trying to be like the other people at my rink, I found much more freedom and happiness. I can't imagine continuing that.
I think there's something, when we're in communities sometimes, we try to assimilate. I think just not dampening who you are because of what the idea of what being a figure skater like should be. I think that's ridiculous. And I think there should be less ‘shoulds’ in figure skating, which sounds ironic, I know. It should be less ‘shoulds.’
Focus on your own path. Find your own communities and don't be afraid to go for the things you want. You will never you'll never know if you don't try. Apply to the shows, send in your resumes, do the competitions, meet the people, go to the seminars, even if you're scared. You don't know what's going to come from it, and that can be really exciting.
Q: I can just see from watching you skate, when you are skating the programs that you have designed, you just skate with such a joy on your face. And that is really exciting to watch.
A: Thank you. That's really important, because there was a time where I wasn't skating with joy, and I can watch the videos back. I'm like, ‘yeah, that's not me.’ And it's cool to be able to see that evolution in yourself and then also really cool that other people can see that.
You can support Annika and the Always Champions 5K here. Be sure to follow her on Instagram to keep up with her skating and her artwork.