Print

Email story

Comment

Letter to the editor

Rolling toward a championship

A Safety Harbor skater hopes her hard work will lead to success in Australia.

By LARITA JACOBS, Times Correspondent
Published October 31, 2007

Ashley Hinton, 18, practices for the figure skating part of the World Roller Skating Championships to be held in Gold Coast, Australia. Hinton, who works and is a full-time student in biomedical sciences at the University of South Florida, practices skating 15 to 20 hours a week.
	[Carrie Pratt | Times]

ADVERTISEMENT [Carrie Pratt | Times] Ashley Hinton changes from loop skates, left, to figure skates during practice. She works and practices at United Skates, and is a member of the United States team.

There is no good time to get chicken pox - especially when you are 4,500 miles from home and competing to be a world champion on roller skates.

Feverish, achy and itchy, Ashley Hinton of Safety Harbor placed sixth in figure skating at the world roller skating championships in Spain in 2006.

"It was very, very uncomfortable," she said. "I had blisters on my back, throat, ears, even my feet."

That was last year.

This year, Ashley, 18, has worked hard and once again earned a place on TEAM USA at the Figure Skating World Championships. The University of South Florida freshman leaves today for Gold Coast, Australia, near Brisbane.

"I'm going in as an underdog and, of course, I want to win," she says with a smile.

Skating is a family affair. Ashley's mother, Debbie, was a two-time national roller skating champion and makes Ashley's skating outfits. Her father, Paul, has had a long career coaching national and world champions and is Ashley's primary coach.

"Dad and I are a great team, always have been," she says. "It's sometimes hard to make the father/daughter switch. During a lesson he's Coach, not Dad."

Though Ashley has more than 25 medals in national and international competition, they have not come at the expense of her education. Graduating sixth of about 150 students in Countryside High's class of 2007, Ashley is now in USF's Honors College and aims to become a plastic surgeon. Helping people injured in accidents is her motivation, perseverance is her motto.

Perseverance is important when you keep her schedule: the hour-long commute to USF's Tampa campus to pursue 17 credit hours of classes, 20 hours a week at a part-time job, 15 to 20 hours of practice time, fundraisers to make competition possible, homework, and, occasionally, sleeping.

"We tried to tell Ashley to take it easy for her first semester, maybe (take) 12 semester hours instead of 17," her father said. "But that's not Ashley."

The biggest challenge, Paul Hinton said, is the "huge commitment" of practice hours needed to compete on the international level. In other countries, the sport has a higher profile. In Italy, for example, roller skaters are celebrities who appear on Italian soap operas.

Hard work is not new to Ashley. Donning her first pair of skates at 9 months, she began competing at age 3. Practices at 4 a.m. are routine.

"I really don't remember learning to skate," she said. "All I've ever known is being on skates."

In Australia, Ashley will skate in a figures competition. That consists of skating a set pattern with exacting precision. There are 20 possible figures patterns, but skaters won't know which four they'll have to skate until they arrive.

Two things make the Australian competition special for Ashley. First, she is competing in the same tournament, held in the same venue, where her mother was a world judge in 1999. Ashley is pleased they get to share that. Second, Ashley sees this as her last year of competition. She wants to focus on her college studies and move closer to campus.

So she has a game plan for Australia.

"As my last year, I want to go out the way I want to," she said. "I want to go out with a bang. ... And I also want to hold a koala!"

[Last modified October 30, 2007, 20:27:23]