Emma Dahl, a Buckskill Winter Club figure skating instructor and East Hampton native, began skating at the Rinx in Hauppauge as a 4-year-old, she said at the club’s lodge the other day — about a decade before Kathryn and Doug DeGroot put a National Hockey League-size rink over four Har-Tru tennis courts, trusting that if they built it South Forkers seeking winter exercise would come, as did Dahl, following five years of high-performance training at the University of Delaware.
“I skated at the Rinx from 4 to 6 — I was at the John Marshall Elementary School then — and when I was 7,” she said, “I persuaded my family to pick up and move to Delaware so I could train with two Olympic bronze medalists, Ron Ludington and Barbara Roles, at the University of Delaware’s renowned training facility. Skaters from all over the world came there.”
A typical day, she said, would include two hourlong ballet sessions, three hourlong workouts on the ice — one with choreographers and ice dance instructors, and one jumping, spinning, and doing edge work with technical coaches — stretching, some time with friends, dinner, and homework that her parents, who, with tutors, schooled her, prescribed.
At the age of 12, after an injury halted her training, her parents and she decided it was time to take a break from her exhausting schedule, “and so I came home to live a normal life again,” a life that would include skating and teaching at Buckskill, which had opened the winter before her return here.
She played soccer and lacrosse at the East Hampton Middle School, and swam, but figure skating remained her first athletic love. “I would come and skate here just for fun. . . . I’ve been teaching at Buckskill since I was 16. Obviously, I like it tremendously. I’ve taught hundreds of kids, here and in Europe, in Sweden, in Finland. . . . It’s very rewarding to pass on to others what I’ve learned.”
Pursuing an acting career that began with classes at the Manhattan Film Institute and selling real estate for Joe Kazickas’s Rosehip Partners, “a small, but mighty firm,” has cut down on her teaching time at Buckskill, limiting it to weekends and holidays, “but it’s very hard for me to say no to a child who wants a lesson with me.”
Dahl said that she provides youngsters with the foundation they need “to level up — whether it’s speed skating, hockey, or figure skating . . . the edge work you do in figure skating can help with hockey. . . . As to how far they can go, it depends on how hard they work. The main thing is that they’re happy. For anyone who does this job it’s all about the children and seeing their smiles as they escape from school stuff and take 30 minutes to have fun and smile and really learn something. It’s rejuvenating for the soul. I love that I can share what I love with the next generation.”
Figure skating, she added, was “a very difficult sport that requires a lot of training, just like gymnastics or ballet. . . . Figure skating is ballet on ice in many ways, though, as opposed to ballet, there’s a lot more speed and momentum. All the figure skating professionals are grounded in ballet.”
Asked if she had ever wanted to become a ballet dancer, Dahl smiled: “No, I wanted to fly.”
