By Maura Sullivan Hill, Team FSO Contributing Writer
Photos by Robin Ritoss
Defending U.S. Pairs Champions Ellie Kam and Danny O’Shea are coming off their most successful fall campaign yet as they head into the 2025 U.S. Figure Skating Championships in Wichita.
They kicked off their season with gold at the 2024 John Nicks Pairs Challenge International, then earned bronze at their second Challenger Series event, Nebelhorn Trophy. With a silver at Skate America and a bronze at NHK Trophy, they earned a spot in the Grand Prix Final for the first time, where they took fifth place.
“At the beginning of the season, one of our main goals was to skate well enough to establish that we are amongst the top teams in the world,” O’Shea said in a Zoom interview in early January. “That comes down to us performing and then changing people’s opinions, right? And I think that the consistency of the season led to competing at the Grand Prix Final. We’re well on the way to establishing that for ourselves. So that’s the continued goal. We still have to finish the second half of the season, right? A lot more competing to do, some important ones to come, but we’re happy with the overall trajectory that is aligning with our goals for the season.”
Kam added that qualifying for the Final wasn’t necessarily an explicit goal, but came out of them skating well in all the events leading up to it. “The better we skate, the more we have good outcomes,” Kam said. “And the most good outcomes led to qualifying for the Grand Prix Final. The better we skate, the more opportunities we have [to compete].”
Their next event will be Nationals, where they hope to defend their title and earn a spot on the World Team that will compete on home ice in Boston in March. To reach those goals, the plan is to keep things simple and consistent.
“We plan out our whole season with our coach. We’re very intentional with the pacing and the goals that we set for the season, so that it can be consistent,” O’Shea said. “Now we have, hopefully, for the rest of the season, one competition a month, which is nice, because we get more downtime to come home and build back up between things and keep focused on the same goals of pushing to establish ourselves as one of the top teams in the world and performing a little better each time. This season has been a ton about growth for us as a team, and we feel like it’s working. So we’re not going to try and reinvent the wheel for the second half of the season, but stick with it and keep taking those baby steps.”
The last time the World Championships was in Boston in 2016, O’Shea competed with his previous partner, Tarah Kayne. The 33-year-old has been skating pairs at the senior level since 2012.
“It’s amazing that at this point in my life and my career, I can be very clear in saying I’ve had the most success so far this season that I’ve ever had,” he said. “And it’s exciting and I want to keep it going, and I think that I owe a lot of that to the mentality of making sure that we are side-by-side in this process and we can rely on each other completely.”
And that trust comes with time, both Kam and O’Shea said. They are in their third season as a team, and when they first teamed up in 2022, the more experienced O’Shea was the natural leader. Kam had previously skated pairs at the junior level with Ian Meyh. But now, things are more equal. While Kam, 20, may have less pairs experience than her partner, O’Shea says he has to work hard to keep up with her.
And the plan is for all that work to lead to a return trip to a World Championships in Boston for O’Shea, with Kam looking forward to the enthusiastic Boston crowds she has heard about from her partner.
As they aim for that World Team spot, O’Shea pointed out how special it is that they could compete in the U.S. three times this season.
“Skate America was the first time, and it went well for us. You feel the support staff at every competition, but at home in America, there’s another layer to it,” he said. “And then to be going to Nationals and trying to earn that World spot to have the opportunity to compete for a third time at home for the season, it’s exciting and a special season.”
Kam said that Skate America felt like a “mini Nationals, which was a little scary to be at that kind of point so early in the season. But the amount of support that we got was really amazing, being the home team there and skating well. It was a really good experience.”
The team has been on the road a lot this season, between competing and making time to perform in shows in Sun Valley, Idaho, and Nashville, Tennessee, where they took part in the Scott Hamilton and Friends benefit show that supports Hamilton’s cancer research nonprofit.
They also spent time in Canada at the Ice Academy of Montreal, where coach Marie-France Dubreuil choreographed their long program. Kam and O’Shea wanted to go to an ice dance coach for a more difficult program that pushed them out of their comfort zone.
Their free skate is set to an instrumental piece that transitions into “Stand by Me,” performed by Florence and the Machine. The duo first went to Montreal in the off-season to create the program, and then went back after the Grand Prix Final to polish the program.
“That’s something that has really made a huge difference for us this season — going to Montreal and getting the long program from Marie-France has really pushed us to another level in our own skating,” said O’Shea, who added, with a chuckle, that doing stroking class alongside all the Montreal ice dance teams was “humbling.”
The team said that Dubreuil suggested adding “Stand by Me” to the program, along with a theme of personal growth.
“At the beginning of ‘Stand by Me,’ the chorus goes, ‘I’ll be okay if you stand by me.’ And by the end of the song, she’s singing, ‘You’ll be all right if you stand by me,’” O’Shea said. “It’s this process of personal growth and something that is subtle. You don’t necessarily notice it if you’re not paying super close attention to it, but it’s definitely there, throughout our program, you can see the growth that happens in the energy of the performance. And that was one of the things that Marie-France really wanted to bring to the program.”
For their short program, choreographed by their coach Drew Meekins, the pair skates to “Rain, in Your Black Eyes” by Ezio Bosso. Both skaters joked that Meekins’ competitive nature was stoked upon seeing the difficult free skate Dubreuil had crafted, and he was inspired to give them a challenging short program as well.
The pair shared that the early feedback they got on the programs wasn’t effusive, but that they wanted to stay the path, which, ultimately, worked out for them.
“I think we really had to believe in these programs at first, because they were hard. And also, because they were hard, we weren’t really executing them as cleanly as we usually do,” Kam said. “These two [programs] really pushed us from the start. We had to just trust in the process for a bit that they were hard, but hard in a good way and not too far outside of our box.”
And now that the programs are feeling more comfortable, Kam and O’Shea are ready to get to Wichita for Nationals.
“We’re excited to go there and see all the fans,” O’Shea said. “It’s just been an amazing season of getting to know so many different fans, between shows and competitions. [We’re] thinking a little bit more about how much the fans all do for us in this sport, and we couldn’t exist without them. We definitely want to encourage everybody to come up and say hi and reach out in any way they want.”
Kam added that they are planning to share more of their journey on social media – find them on Instagram @ellikam.w and @dannyoshea213.
“To just share a little bit more about our training and about our life outside competition that they don’t always get to see, so that hopefully we can really grow that fan base for ourselves,” Kam said. “And then Nationals, always really hoping for that big Nationals crowd. There’s nothing like a big home crowd.”
