Shaking off her nerves with a quick exhale, Ava Zubik glides onto the rink, the audience welcoming her with a thunderous applause. She gracefully settles into her starting pose, veins flooding with the familiar rush of adrenaline as the spotlight illuminates the ice beneath her. The music buzzes to life, and Zubik’s muscle memory guides her through her program.

Zubik, a Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School senior and senior-level women’s freestyle figure skater, began figure skating when her grandmother bought her group lessons at Rink on the Beach in Pompano when she was four years old. Swiftly excelling at the classes, Zubik determined that it would be in her best interest to switch to lessons with a private coach. From there, she built her foundational skating skills while enrolled in dance and gymnastics classes.

However, once Zubik changed coaches and was introduced to a routine that promoted a stricter skating schedule, she knew she wanted to take figure skating more seriously. She dropped her other sports classes to solely focus on improving her skating skills.

“Everyone around me, with the new environment, were all super serious,” Zubik said. “I was having fun. I was doing really well. And that’s when I knew that’s [figure skating] what I wanted to do.”

Zubik began her competitive skating career when she was 4 years old, performing to “Do Re Mi” while flexing her newly acquired spiral skills. One of the most critical moments in Zubik’s figure skating career was landing her double Axel after COVID-19, when she was still adjusting to returning to the rink post-quarantine.

“I landed my double Axel, which is kind of the stepping stone, like that’s the breaking point for a lot of girls,” Zubik said.

After this transcending achievement, Zubik experienced one of the greatest challenges of her figure skating career: saying goodbye to the coaches who had trained her since she was 9 years old and acclimating to new ones with an entirely different teaching style.

“They had brought, previously, this Olympic choreographer, and at first it was really good,” Zubik said. “But adjusting to a different coaching team is always really hard, and I thrive under female guidance so having two male coaches was a big change. We didn’t bond super well and we didn’t really get along. So that year was really hard for me.”

Although she felt that her jumps and spins had advanced with her new coaches, Zubik recognized adverse effects on her artistry, an important component in figure skating competitions. Despite these difficulties, Zubik learned several valuable life-lessons through the sport.

One of Zubik’s greatest accomplishments was winning the 2021 Susan Johnson Award, named after Olympic Judge Susan Johnson, for being the singles skater with the highest Component Score for the Initial Round Intermediate Free Skate (Ladies and Men) 2021 Atlanta Open Competition.

“I won… for having the highest component score,” Zubik said. “That’s the artistry part of figure skating… I got first place in the free skate, and then again, because sometimes at certain competitions, depending on how many girls there are, there’ll be two groups, and then the highest girls from each group will go to a final round, and I won finals too. So, that boosted my confidence.”

Zubik’s daily schedule consists of going to school, driving to the ice rink, practicing for two- three hours–depending on whether or not it is competition season–followed by a 30 minute or hour long private lesson. After the rink, she takes a class that aids her in whatever her current skating goal is.

For instance, when she was competing, Zubik would take a strength and conditioning class to improve her endurance. On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, she typically skates at Palm Beach Skate Zone, while on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, she skates at Panthers Ice Den, primarily because she coaches their Learn to Skate classes.

During competition season, Zubik runs her figure skating program–a series of jumps and spins a skater performs at a competition–a month before the competition. Then, a week before the big day, Zubik actively recovers and rehearses her program, visualizing each jump and spin in accordance with the music.

“It becomes muscle memory instead of having to actually think about what I’m doing,” Zubik said. “Then [on competition day], I’ll run it, mark it off the ice while I’m warming up, and that also helps kick in the muscle memory…While I’m warming up and getting my skates on, my brain is gone. It’s like you black out.”

Her programs consist of elements such as a triple toe loop, the double Axel, the Biellmann spin and other complex moves.

Zubik is currently working on her triple jumps and triple lutz. However, as she is now transitioning from competitive skating to show skating, she has been dedicating much time to improving her artistic skills. Along with practicing moves on the ice, Zubik takes yoga and silks classes to prepare her for her dream of performing for Disney On Ice.

Zubik is deeply passionate about figure skating and hopes to embed it in her future.

“[Skating] brings me a sense of joy that I’ve never felt anywhere else,” Zubik said. “I’ve always said that there’s nothing that I’ve ever found that stimulates the work and difficulty of running a full program…I want to continue coaching, for sure, while I’m in college, and I want to pursue Disney on Ice for a couple of years.”

Figure skating has helped shape Zubik into the person she is today. She has met some of her closest friends–who have supported her endlessly through the hardships that accompany the sport–and created some of her best memories at the ice rink. Although there have been challenges, she balances being a competitive figure skater with her social life well, all while tackling six Advanced Placement classes. This is what she loves doing, and as it is her final year at the rink before graduating, Zubik intends to make it count.