Brunswick figure skater Caroline Santaguida (right) stands with her former coaches Vadim Naumov and Evgenia Shishkova, who died in a plane crash on Jan. 30. Photo courtesy of Natalie Santaguida

“Did you know any of the skaters onboard?”

The question, posed by another passenger on the cruise ship, didn’t make sense to Natalie Santaguida. She had seen the first news reports early that morning about a fatal plane crash above the Potomac, but she lost internet access before the news broke that several of the victims were members of the figure skating community. Her community.

It was 11 p.m. on Thursday night when someone showed her the list of names, including the two that brought the world crashing down around her: Evgenia Shishkova and Vadim Naumov, the longtime coaches and mentors of Santaguida’s daughter Caroline.

“I dropped my phone, and I walked away crying,” Santaguida told the Press Herald. “And I’ve been pretty much a mess since then.”

The intense relationships between elite skaters and their coaches are borne of countless hours spent together in the unrelenting pursuit of perfection. For much of her life, Caroline Santaguida spent 12 or more hours each day at a Boston-area rink, fitting schoolwork in between training sessions with Shishkova and Naumov, former world champions in pairs skating.

They had high standards, said Natalie Santaguida, who moved into a rented Boston apartment with her daughter so Caroline could train full time while the rest of the family remained in Brunswick. The price elite skating demands — essentially giving up your childhood — is not always easy to pay. But even as the Russian couple pushed Caroline to maximize her potential, Santaguida said, their support helped her weather the challenging moments along the way. After a fall or mistake in a big competition, there might initially be “massive disappointment,” she said. “But then there was also the biggest hug. There was a lot of love there.”

Off the ice, they were part of a group of skating families that grew so close over the years they were really more like one big family. Santaguida described the coaches as “like second parents” to Caroline. Her twin boys grew close with the couple’s son Maxim, 23, whom Caroline grew to see as another older brother. When they weren’t traveling together to Detroit or Atlanta or Salt Lake City for Caroline’s competitions, they were spending time at the Santaguida’s home in Maine. Though Caroline stopped training with Shishkova and Naumov when she decided to attend public school for her senior year and then attend university in Wales, Santaguida said they would be quick to travel for one of her competitions at the senior level — the top rung of competitive skating — if Caroline asked for their support.

The news of the crash, which killed 64 people aboard American Eagle Flight 5342 and three soldiers on the Army helicopter it collided with, left her family and the rest of the skaters’ circle devastated, Santaguida said. But even as they grieve, they’re working to make sure that Max Naumov, a former U.S. Junior Champion skater, knows that he still has a family to help him.

“They were there for my daughter in some of the roughest parts of her life, and I will be forever grateful,” Santaguida said. “And I will do the same for their son.”

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