Gliding to Great Heights
People have all different reasons to thank their siblings, but Lauren Lampinen has her younger brother to thank for helping her discover her love of ice skating. Even though Lauren’s father owns a business across the street from an ice-skating rink, no one in the family had ever skated. If it weren’t for the happenstance of hiring of a nanny with a love for the sport, Lauren might have never discovered her special talent for figure skating. “When my brother was younger, he had a nanny who had been an ice-skating coach,” she says. “She would take me to the ice-skating rink and started coaching me.”
Seven years later, Lauren has won hundreds of medals in figure skating. She is currently ranked third in the state and 13th in the South Atlantic region for U.S. Figure Skating at the intermediate level. She does all this while earning straight A’s at Wilson Middle School and taking advanced math classes. “Lauren is an extremely impressive young lady,” said Wilson Middle School principal Deedra Copeland. “She is liked by all her peers and the teachers love her.”
Lauren trains 12 hours a week during the school year and spent her entire summer in Orlando training from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. She is currently working on her triple-jump, so she can incorporate it into her choreography for this year’s round of competitions. “My goal is to see how far I can go with ice-skating,” she says. “When I’m on the ice, it is very calming. I forget about everything else and focus on skating.”
