Off Season News

We're deep into the off-season now and the last couple of weeks seem to have been particularly fruitful in news.

What actually prompted me to make a comment about all this was news of Frank Carroll's latest student, Jonathan Cassar, who has one of the most gorgeous spreadeagles known to man. This news comes just a couple of weeks after it was announced that Denis Ten, of Kazakhstan, is also going to Carroll. What with Mirai and the other, lower level US girls he coaches, this means that Mr Carroll is going to be a very busy man - and I can't help but wonder if we can take this as near-confirmation that Evan isn't returning to competition, at least for the upcoming season. It could happen, of course, and there's been no official announcement yet, but I just can't see Frank Carroll spreading himself so thin.

In further news, Joubert has also split from his coach, and is apparently heading overseas to train his new programs. It's rumoured that he's going to Toronto to work with Orser, but as far as I'm aware, nothing has actually been announced about just who he's going to. I'd definitely be interested to see how Brian would do under him. He's got a completely different style to Adam Rippon, who Orser also trains...it's be interesting to see if those two would rub off on each other any, if they were training together. Whoever he ends up with, and for however long (apparently he's just going overseas for the summer), I think this is definitely a story to be watching out for.

Probably the bizarrest news of them all is the rumours and stories that Fedor Andreev, who has been trying to compete singles for Azerbaijan all last season, is trying out to skate ice dance with Jana Khokhlova. I'm pretty sure that Fedor has never done dance before, so that seems like kind of a massive jump down for Jana, but we'll see what comes of it.

IceNetwork has an article detailing Ashley Wagner's plans for the next season, and she says she's already working on her new programs and some new combinations, as well as working on that flutz. She says that Priscilla is thinking of something 'slinky and jazzy', which I actually think would suit Ashley very well.

And finally, the agenda for the ISU Congress have been posted online and it looks like a lot of things could be changing next year. I'm not going to get into every last detail, but for the most part, I'm open to change and I'm interested to see exactly which proposals go through!

I'm sure there's more news around and, of course, much more to come, but that's what's interested me the most this week!