Alysa Liu has a lot of dreams. So far, they're coming true.
Laura Lipetsky remembers the day, nine years ago, when 5-year-old
Alysa Liu visited the Oakland Ice Center for the first time.
Her dad, Arthur, brought her to the rink for a Saturday public session. Fearless, she half walked, half skated around the ice, falling and getting up, chatting with other skaters and staying on until the Zamboni driver came out to resurface.
Right away, the coach had a feeling Alysa would be something special. A top-10 competitor at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships, Lipetsky had trained under Frank Carroll and shared the ice with Michelle Kwan. She recognized joyful natural talent when she saw it.
"Alysa just loved to skate, right from the beginning," Lipetsky said. "It drew me to her. It made me want to give her 100 percent of myself. She has heart, she truly loves it, and that's what sets her apart."
For Arthur Liu, the realization came a few years later. His outgoing oldest child did everything with gusto. The world was her playground, and at first, ice was only a part of it.
"It was all fun, and I just thought, 'Let's see what happens, if she is really good at it,'" he said. "But then she won the intermediate ladies championship in 2016. She had a triple Salchow and double Axel at age 9. Within the next few months, she got all of her triples, and she went into novice with triple-triples. That's when I said, 'Wow, we have something serious here.'"
In 2017, Liu was fourth in novice. At age 12, she won the 2018 junior title.
Last season, at age 13, she hit three triple Axels at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships in Detroit to become the youngest skater ever to win the U.S. title.
"I just wanted to beat my best score and do a clean program, and I did," she said.
Since then, things have turned more serious for the Richmond, California, prodigy, with big wins, broken records and media appearances ranging from "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon," to joining Tara Lipinski for Mattel's "Be Anything" tour celebrating the 60th anniversary of Barbie.
To all that, add two-a-day training sessions, ballet, off-ice training and her 10th-grade studies via online California Connections Academy.
"I do still get to do what normal teens do," Liu said. "I don't get to go to normal school. I don't get to eat junk a lot, maybe once in a while. I also don't get to have sleepovers every single day like some people do, but it's not too bad. Mainly it's because I have to train and travel so much."
Everything happening for Alysa, her dad stresses, is because she wants it to happen.
"I want her to be happy; her happiness is very important to me and to the whole family," Arthur said. "She's skating for herself, she's not skating for me. She really needs to love the sport, otherwise, it wouldn't work. She thrives on skating."
Read the full story in the December issue of SKATING Magazine.
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