Photo Credit: Melanie Heaney/U.S. Figure Skating
By Elvin Walker
A year ago, Jeffrey Chen was making his senior debut at the 2023 U.S. Figure Skating Championships in San Jose, California, just a short drive from his hometown of Fremont. At home in Michigan, Yahli Pedersen was a solo ice dancer who was hoping to find a partner – the first of her career, to join forces and forge a path of her own to the national stage.
When Chen’s partnership dissolved, he needed only to glance across the ice at Pedersen, who trained at the same rink in Canton, Michigan, for a new pairing to materialize.
“I always knew that I would eventually find somebody who had the same dreams and goals as me. It was just a matter of time,” Pedersen said confidently. “I guess when Jeffrey and I started skating together, we knew that it was going to work.”
The duo first teamed up last April and decided that 21-year-old Chen would return to the junior level in order to give the partnership some time to develop. Having never competed at any level before, 16-year-old Pedersen needed time to adjust to the complexities of skating as a team, which is much more intricate than skating in solo dance.
As Pedersen and Chen began to work together, it was immediately evident that the partnership was on the right track. With each passing day, Pedersen was picking things up at a furious pace, and she and Chen were beginning to develop a friendship that is rooted in a culture of support and ambition.
“Because we both have been working at Michigan Ice Dance Academy (MIDA), we were already trained to push ourselves. We have a similar technique, so we were able to progress pretty quickly,” Chen said. “Because there is a difference in experience, right now I am being very attentive to how Yahli feels, which has made me feel like we are more of a team.”
Pedersen added, “I always feel very safe to turn to him or to our coaches.”
Pedersen and Chen work with coaches Greg Zuerlein, Charlie White and Tanith White, who make up the MIDA team in Canton, an arrangement that suits this partnership well.
“They are always communicating with us and with each other so that we are always on the same page,” Chen explained. “The fact that communication is so clear allows us to focus on things that we need to work on and areas that we can improve. Greg makes the schedule, but other than that, all three of them work on all aspects of our training.”
That level of trust in the partnership and coaching team combined with a lot of hard work paved the way for Pedersen and Chen to make their competitive debut just three months after pairing up. The duo finished in fifth place at the 2023 Dallas Classic overall but were already showing signs of the successes that were to come by finishing in second place in the free dance. Less than a month later, they won the title at the 2023 Lake Placid Ice Dance Championships.
“We obviously were, and still are, learning how to compete with each other,” Pedersen said. “I’m learning about myself and about Jeffrey. I am not sure if he competes the same way as he did in the past, but I do know that we approach each competition together, so our focus is making sure that we are on the same page.”
As a result of their stellar summer season, Pedersen and Chen were invited to compete at the ISU Junior Grand Prix of Figure Skating Series – first in Istanbul, Turkey, where they finished with the silver medal. They followed that up with another second-place finish two weeks later in Budapest, Hungary, earning a ticket to the Junior Grand Prix Final in Beijing, China in December.
“It was amazing, and I am obviously grateful that we were given the opportunity to compete internationally,” Pedersen said. “From the outside, maybe it looked like we came out of nowhere, but I worked hard, and Jeffrey worked hard to make sure that we are as strong as possible.”
The duo finished in sixth place in Beijing.
“I think that we are still trying to figure out what kind of performers and competitors we are, and that will continue to be a work in progress,” Chen shared. “We treated our practices as if they were competitions, especially in the weeks leading up to them. It really helps when the music comes on – it kind of infuses me with energy. We give it everything we’ve got all the time. It doesn’t matter who is watching or what’s happening that day. We ‘re just giving it our all so that at competition, it’s no different.”
Last month at the 2024 Prevagen U.S. Figure Skating Championships in Columbus, Ohio, Pedersen and Chen finished with the silver medal in the junior ice dance event. As a result, the duo was selected to compete at the ISU World Junior Figure Skating Championships 2024 in Taipei, Taiwan.
“One of the main things we really have been trying to focus on is to not just hone in on this season but instead kind of look towards long term,” Chen explained. “Of course, we want to do our best in every competition, but we want to also set ourselves up for future seasons. Right now, we are incredibly grateful to be where we are because a lot of the teams that we're competing against have obviously been working together for a long time. To have people around us really believing in us and giving us opportunities to keep growing and showing that we are a serious team is very special.”
But in the short term, Pedersen and Chen have their eyes on more hardware.
“At the Final, we set the goal to medal at the World Junior Championships,” Pedersen shared. “We are working right now to make that achievable.”
Outside of skating, both Pedersen and Chen are committed to academic excellence. After attending some in-person classes last year, Pedersen is in the process of shifting to a virtual platform as a high school junior.
“I am also planning to start taking classes at a community college,” she shared. “They are college level courses, but they will also count for high school.”
Chen is a sophomore at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor majoring in computer science.
“I am currently taking eight credits and plan to take 12 over the summer,” he said. “I’ll do another four or eight in the fall and then eight in the winter. My aim is to complete 30 credits a year so that I can graduate not in 10 years.”
Chen will age out of the junior ranks after this season, so he and Pedersen plan to move up to compete to the senior level for the 2024-25 season.
“Right now, our focus is on Junior Worlds,” Chen said. “We don’t want to leave anything unfinished – we want to be as prepared as we can to do the best that we can and then we can move on to the next thing.”
Pedersen and Chen take the ice Friday at the ISU World Junior Figure Skating Championships 2024. Follow the live results here and watch online on the ISU YouTube page.
